Google Ads: Keyword Search Campaigns – what’s working now? (episode 091)
by April Buencamino-dyAlex is head of marketing for PushON a full-service eCommerce agency specialising in Magento, SEO, and Paid Media, so he gets to work across a range of eCommerce brands every day. And he has over 10 years of experience driving eCommerce sales with Google Ads.
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Getting Started In Google Ads
Alex started working with an agency straight out of university doing SEO, PPC, and paid social. He enjoyed working with data and seeing results, which meant he favored PPC among all he was doing.
Being interested in fashion as well, he ended up working with a fashion company overseeing their digital strategy. After doing that, he focused on PPC when he joined PushON, and he now heads their marketing department.
What’s Working With Keyword Ads
For Alex, automation has helped put efficiency in this high funnel technique and generate ROAS out of Search.
Google is making PPC automated so brand owners and marketers can focus more on improving landing pages, which will help increase conversion rate and improve your quality score.
Useful Automations
Alex mentions automations that focus on maximizing conversion value and maximizing conversions then setting a target cost per acquisition to it.
What’s important is everything should tie in with your business goals and objectives.
About Keyword Match Types
One of the things that have changed in keyword match types is that it’s become more intent-focused: it pays more attention to the intent of the user and it understands the searches people are making better.
The other thing is that it has moved away from using a broad match modifier, which is adding a plus sign at the start to signify that the keyword needs to be part of the search query. It has been replaced by phrase match, which is a way to let Google know how closely they should match your keyword with a user’s search query.
More Keyword Search Advice
- First, add negative keywords to your exact match.
- Second, depending on the size of the account, look at your reports on a regular basis and find out which campaign is performing best.
- Third, what’s rolled out now is responsive search ads and with automation, this gives Google the opportunity to select which ads to show to your audience. Have multiple headlines and descriptions and pin particular ones at the top.
Insider Tips
If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with Google Ads – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
Alex’s first tip is to start simple because Google will help you along the way by bringing in different levels of automation. These will allow you to focus on the more important things.
His other tip is to make sure you have your goal tracking or your conversion all set up.
Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve Google Ads performance?
Coming from his previous tip, Alex says make sure you have everything set up from a goal perspective.
He also mentions looking at what your competitors are doing and be aware of what’s good, and that will get you to the next level.
If someone listening wants to learn more about Google Ads is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?
Alex recommends listening to The Paid Search Podcast which covers what you need to know about Google Ads.
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in Google Ads?
The focus is going to be on automations and Alex says one of the things we need to prepare for is the rise of CPCs.
The cost of every click has gone up, and to counteract this, there’s a need to understand your competitors and to look at your quality scores because they can bring down the CPC.
Interview Links
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