Who should you Target with Google Adwords?

7 tips to optimize your Google Adwords campaigns

Google Adwords gives you a lot of control to allow you to display your ads only when they are relevant and have a greater conversion potential. However, it takes a good level of experience to be able to use the tool and get the maximum result of his campaign. In this article, we give you 7 tips that will help you optimize your Google Adwords campaigns to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.

1- Use demographic targeting

It is possible to target people by age, gender or parental status, and not only on the content network, but on the search network. Depending on your product or service, this potentially allows you to better target your potential buyers. The main idea behind this type of optimization is not to completely cut some demographic profiles, but to use the bid adjustment to pay as little as possible to get the most impact.

This technique is particularly useful when one of its demographic factors has a major impact on the conversion rate. However, we must be careful not to rely solely on our judgment, because unfortunately, the human is full of prejudices. For example, only 31% of people searching for mobile video games are men between 18 to 34 years old. It is important to understand that a considerable proportion of buyers in some niches is not the user of the product itself, but many people who buy the product for the end user of the product.

How to set up demographic targeting in Google Adwords?

Demographic targeting can be found in the "Audiences" tab.

1- Go to the Audiences tab and then click on Demographics

2- You can change between ages, gender data using the sub-tabs.

3- Use bid adjustments according to the following rule:

(Demographic segment conversion rate / ad group conversion rate) -1 x 100

For example, the 25-34 year old conversion rate is 2.30% while the ad group average is 1.94%. It is therefore advisable to put a bid adjustment for the 25-34 year old segment of 18%.

You bet 18% more than your usual bid when the person doing the research is in the 25-34 age group. This makes sense since the average value of a visitor in the 25-34 segment is 18% higher. It is crucial to validate the statistical confidence interval to ensure that you have enough data to make a logical decision.

2- Define precise targets

This sounds obvious, but there is nothing worse than trying to optimize a Google Adwords campaign without having a specific goal in mind. Also, keep in mind that normally, the goal of a campaign is to maximize profit and not to achieve a secondary goal such as to reduce the CPA (cost per acquisition), increase the CTR (click rate) or reduce the CPC (cost per click). These data are often secondary metrics for achieving the goal of maximizing campaign profits. It should also be remembered that this data normally influences communicating vessels, so we must aim for the ideal balance between its targets. There is no point in reducing the cost per click by 50% if it reduces the total number of conversions by 90%.

3- Segment data by device type

Often, when a campaign does not deliver the desired results, we discover that it is not the entire campaign, but some segments that do not meet expectations. It is important to understand why some campaigns or ad groups do not respond the way you want. A place to find solutions is the type of device. Mobile, tablet, and computer traffic do not normally react in the same way to a landing page or an ad. We can find things as 80% of campaign traffic comes from mobile phone while the landing page is not optimized for this traffic... The idea is to see if a type of traffic reacts differently from others and especially to understand the why. It would be irresponsible to simply cut the mobile traffic in the previous example, the best solution would be rather to create a mobile-optimized landing page and thus recover the 80% of traffic that does not meet expectations. Turning the weak points of your Google Adwords campaign into strengths is a pretty powerful optimization strategy.

4 - Capitalize on your best keywords

There is a moment to look for quality traffic sources by doing tests and there is a moment to cut in the fat. Once you have enough accumulated data, a good way to optimize your budget (especially in case your budget does not allow you to be visible at all times) is to list your keywords who have converted in the last 6 months (or in the last year according to the volume) and increase your bids on these keywords. On the other hand, compile all keywords that have not converted for 6 months or 1 year and pause them. You are wasting money on these keywords anyway. It is important to validate that your average position on these keywords is good so as not to eliminate keywords that you have not realistically made tests.

5- Use the negative keywords

This is the place where we have seen the most budget wasting in my entire career. Negative keywords are where you need to look first to optimize a Google Adwords campaign. Nothing is worse than wasting your precious budget on keywords that have no chance to convert. You should add negative keywords every week (especially if you use a lot of Broad Match keywords) and at the very least every month. The almost magical result on the medium-long term is that, little by little, your campaign will be super targeted and you will have more budget for qualified keywords!

6 - Do not use the "research partner network" without data to prove its uselessness

It would also be possible to name this paragraph: "Do what a web article says to me without statistical validation". Indeed, we often read in the tutorials to exclude Google's "network of partners" from its Adwords campaigns. Yet, when asked why, the answer is often vague. We often hear that the network of research partners converted less, but we can guarantee you that this is not the case for all campaigns. We have campaigns where the conversion rate of the partner network is 4 times higher (yes you read correctly) than that of Google. With a lower cost-per-click, our cost per conversion for this campaign is 5 times lower on the "network of search partners" than on Google. So do not blindly follow the advice (including ours). Rely on solid data that has a sufficient confidence interval.

7- Always use multiple ad variations

A common mistake is to have only one ad per ad group. You must always have at least two active ads in all your ad groups. Why? To find out which one gets the best click rate and the best conversion rate. Also, you do not want to trust Google to do it for you so it's important to use the "Rotate indefinitely" function because the confidence interval that Google uses to validate its data is way too low, so that some ads are excluded before having a real chance of being compared to your champion.

Finally

Remember that to optimize a Google Adwords campaign, it is the accumulation of small things that will allow you to achieve a high goal. Do not fall into the error of micromanagement and properly measure the possible impact of changes that are made. We must not be able to make big changes, especially if the campaign does not reach the objectives set. On the other hand, the higher the budget, the greater the impact of a small change. We must always understand the relationship between our goal and our action and have in mind why we make a change in the account.