Use these tips to take your Google Ads campaign to the next level

When you launch a Google Ads campaign, there are a lot of factors to consider. Your company may be focused on writing stellar copy for text ads, choosing high intent keywords, and designing eye-catching ads. You may be overlooking the most important factors of all: your Google Ads settings. 

Many of the ad settings are relatively straightforward and user-friendly, but to make the most of your Google Ads campaign, you’ll need to stray from the manual settings and venture into the advanced settings. These higher-level settings offer customizations and adjustments you can make manually to ensure your campaign is a success. 

Let’s look at what Google Ad settings are and which five advanced settings you need to tweak now to get the most of your ad campaign and take your digital marketing to new heights. 

What are Google Ads settings?

Google Ads, formally known as Google AdWords, can be used to promote and grow your business. It’s a way to advertise and promote your products and services when your target audience enters keywords related to your brand into a search engine.

When you create a Google Ads account for your brand, you can develop a search campaign that will give you access to your ad settings. Your ad settings will be unique to each account if you own multiple accounts. 

Photo by Firmbee.com

You’ll have access to some basic Google Ads settings that you can use to set up your ad campaign, such as: 

• Campaign Goal: Where you set your campaign goal to help you better manage your Google Ads campaign. 
• Campaign Type: Possible the most important basic setting, you can only choose this once. This will limit your ad choices later on. 
• Display Network: You’ll have options like search, display, video, and shopping. Start with the Search network and branch out to other networks to capture customers in the different stages of the marketing funnel. 
• Campaign Name: Name your campaigns using a naming structure to ensure you stay organized as your Google Ads account and ad group grows. 

Choosing the proper generic settings for your ad campaigns will help to enhance your Google Ads performance and maximize ROI. You can also integrate other Google services, like Google Analytics, to determine whether or not your ad campaign is performing well. 

But you can actually go beyond the default settings and use the advanced settings to take your campaign to the next level. 

Let’s look at the 5 Google Ad settings you need to use right now. 

5 advanced Google Ad settings you should be using

If you are an experienced advertiser, you’ve come a long way since your first campaign.  Chances are you’ve done lots of work to improve keyword targeting, your bid strategy, Quality Score, and your overall approach to a Google Ads campaign. 

You’ve probably used Google Analytics to launch a remarketing campaign. Now, you need to go a step further to make the most of your search campaign and ensure your ads show up on your ideal customers’ Google search. And investigate the most advanced settings on Google Ads. 

Adjusting the advanced Google Ad settings is a great way to get the most out of your money and drive success for your ad campaign. Here are five advanced campaign settings you should be using. 

1. Ad scheduling

This setting allows you to set a specific date to launch a new campaign and turn it off at the desired time. It helps campaign managers to automate ad scheduling and prevent unnecessarily long campaigns that could hurt your marketing efforts. 

Ad scheduling also allows you to choose specific days of the week or times of the day for your campaigns, offering more functionality. This is especially beneficial once you use Google Analytics to make a customer persona so you can better understand how they behave during a Google search. 

Unlike the default settings, ad scheduling will help your bid strategy by allowing you to use your daily budget during times when your customers are most active online. 

2. Demographic bidding

Demographic bidding lets you segregate your audience based on their age, gender, or other criteria you may not have explored in your Google Ads demographic reports. 

This advanced setting is an exciting way to allocate your daily budget within a display campaign if you want additional efficiencies. You can target underperforming or even over-performing demographic segmentations whose metrics tell you they need work. 

Once you have your data, modify your bids accordingly to offer ad personalization that will capture the attention of that specific group. 

3. Negative keywords

The great thing about Google is that it lets you remove negative keywords from your ad campaign, which may bring unwanted traffic that is highly unlikely to convert. 

When you avoid specific keywords, you make way for web traffic to click and find your offerings relevant. This helps to improve your click-through rate or CTR and directs your ads to only the most relevant searches. Here are some common negative keywords you’ll want to consider as you adjust your advanced settings: 

• Free
• Cheap
• Inexpensive 
• Refund
• Condition 

Of course, you’ll want to do some research and target the negative keywords that matter to your unique business. For example, if you sell brand-name products, you can use the names of competitors’ brands as negative keywords to cut down on unqualified traffic.

4. Geo-targeting

Targeting the correct geographic areas is essential for your campaign’s success. Even if you get all of your other settings right, none of it will matter if you target the wrong locations or don’t target an area at all. 

The default setting for Google Ads is the United States, which is fine if you’d like to target the whole country. You can select enter a location and proceed to Advanced search to really pinpoint your target area. You can even exclude locations, use radius targeting, and add locations in bulk to make personalized ads super relevant for locals. 

Remember, you can click directly on the map to really hone in on your target area. This is a great way to ensure your ads are displayed to the right people and reduce the risk of spending extra marketing funds on customers who are not able to buy your products or services due to their physical location. 

5. Improve your Ad Quality score

Ad Quality scores are nothing new, but many business owners fail to realize that there is more to them than what meets the eye. If you’re looking to improve your Ad Quality Score, you’ll need to do more than enhance the visible one. 

There are actually three types of quality scores that play a role in your overall rating: 

• Keyword-Level Quality Score: Issued to your keywords by google, this metric is visible on the Google Ads interface. It’s rated on a scale of 1-10, with ten being excellent. 
• Account-Level Quality Score: While Google won’t confirm its existence, it’s well known that the visible QS has several levels or layers. This score results from the cumulative history performance of all ads and keywords in an account. 
• Ad-Level Quality Score: Each ad in any given ad group will have a different CTR. Since the click-through rate will help determine your overall quality score, having one with a low CTR may hurt your QS.

Improving your ad-level quality score is a great way to boost your overall QS. Give your account a natural boost by including Dynamic Keyword Insertion or DKI ads for your search network campaign. 

DKI ads will show a user’s specific swear query within the ad, so long as it doesn’t exceed the predetermined character limits. These can be tricky but will be more likely to receive a click than a non-DKI ad since the ad is more relevant to a user’s search terms. 

Keep an eye on ads that aren’t leading to a conversion despite a high CTR to avoid high CPC, which damages your ROI. Consider pausing poor-performing ads but remember editing an existing one will clear its history. You can optimize your landing pages to increase your Google Ads conversions and take advantage of extensions like sitelinks to help give your CTR and overall QS a boost. 

Photo by Christin Hume

Use Metigy’s Google Ad tool to build campaigns with confidence 

Google Ad campaigns are a great way to get your brand’s advertisements in front of the right people. And because you only pay for the clicks you get, they’re a cost-effective way to amp up your digital marketing strategy. 

Choosing the correct settings for your Google Ads campaign will improve your Google Ads performance, maximize your ROI, and allow you to connect with your ideal customers as they search for solutions. 

Advertising can be daunting, especially with so many advanced settings on Google Ads. Fortunately, Metigy offers a simple way to create, track, and adjust your Google Ads. They also provide insights that allow you to create campaigns and strategies that will grow your business.