4 Ways to Freshen Up Your Google Ads Account

Google Ads changes are coming all the time. To keep your account running smoothly and see better performance, maintenance and modification is crucial. But where should you prioritize your time? What’s going to produce results? Here’s 4 things you can do to clean the cobwebs off your Google Ads account and get it running better.

Test Responsive Search Ads

Since they launched in July 2018 we have not been big fans of responsive search ads in Google. We have found that they underperform well written expanded text ads across the board.This is starting to change.Over the last six months, we have been testing responsive search ads for a number of clients, and their performance has been much improved. In fact, they are frequently out-performing our best expanded text ads.We still don’t like some things about responsive search ads. The loss of control of what shows and Google hiding some of the performance data are not great, but if you haven’t tested responsive search ads recently, now is a good time to give them another try to see how they perform for you.

Add More Negative Keywords

Even if you’re not using broad match or broad match modified keywords, your ads are going to be showing for keywords you’re not bidding on. In the past few years Google has expanded “close variants” first for exact match in 2017 and once again to phrase match and broad match modified in July 2019.Adding negative keywords is one of the most important activities to improve your Ads account performance, and you should do it regularly. But with the recent expansion in close variant keywords, it’s all the more important to do so.If you haven’t taken the time to add negative keywords recently, now’s a perfect time to do it.

Create a Branded Search Campaign

If you pay attention to business and entrepreneur news and Twitter, you may have heard about the drama surrounding branded search on Google recently. Some business owners are angry that Google allows competitors to serve ads when people search for their company.This means that these companies need to pay money for ads for their own brand keywords in order to show above their competitors’ ads.We won’t comment on whether we think this is fair or not, but it is reality we have. We need to work within the rules that exist, not the rules we want. Which means if you want to protect your brand and increase your conversions for a very low cost, you need to create a branded search campaign. We go into other reasons why branded search campaigns are valuable here.

 Branded search delivering 730% better return on ad spend.

In addition to being both extremely cheap and high performance, a branded search campaign is also simple to set up. A few keywords at most and generally only one ad group.

Review Your Quality Scores

Your quality score is a combination of your ads’ click through rates, how relevant your ad is to the search query, and the landing page experience. On each component you can rank from below average to above average and you receive a score between 1/10 and 10/10.Low quality scores (6 and below) mean you pay more for the same click than if you had a higher quality score. It also means that your ad is less likely to show up at all. That’s definitely a problem!Go through your keyword quality scores and see where you have low quality scores. Look at which components have below average scores and try to fix them. We have a guide on improving your quality score that can help with this process.More people are using Google Ads, and it is harder than ever before to maintain a strong return on your investment. Go through your account and do these 4 things, and you’re sure to see better performance.