Is your cost per conversion too high? Are you disappointed with your Google Search Ad Campaign's return on ad spend?

Well here are the top 3 ways I like to optimize the campaigns I manage to lower the cost per conversion and increase return on ad spend week over week and month over month:

1. Bid Adjustments & Exclusions

It's important to review performance across all dimensions and make percentage bid adjustments or exclusions. For example, if you notice a certain keyword, location, demographic or audience segment is just driving up cost with little to no conversions, you can add a negative bid adjustment or exclude it all together.

Here are the main dimensions you'll want to review performance for and make bid adjusetments and exclusions based on past performance:

• Demographics; Age, Gender, Household Income

• Audiences; Put as many as you can in 'Observation Mode'

• Locations; Set up as granular as possible (i.e. Instead of USA, target each state individually so you can make bid adjustments on a state by state basis)

• Ad Schedule; Set up as granular as possible. Just like with Locations, the more granular you set it up the more granular your bid adjustments can be.

• Devices; Your campaign most won't convert the same across all devices. Identify the devices that are wasting ad spend and make a negative bid adjustment that makes sense.

• Keywords; This is only when you're using Manual CPC Bid Strategy, but even with Maximize Clicks if you notice a keyword isn't performing very well you should simply pause the keyword and add it as a negative.

2. Search Terms Report

I'll typically start all campaigns off using high-intent broadmatch keywords. It's important to review the campaign's search term report, especially during the beginning of the campaign, to ensure your ads aren't being triggered by irrelevant search terms. I simply add them as negative keywords as I come across them, which becomes less often over time.

So why do I use broad match if it leads to a higher number of irrelevant clicks at the start of a campaign?

Because automated bid strategies like Maximize Conversions tend to perform better with broad match keywords. It's not always the case but you don't know unless you test. Targeting high-intent broadmatch keywords is also a great way to find really great search terms that I didn't think to target at first.

3. Review Ads & Landing Pages

It's important to test different ad copy and landing pages. While this may seem like 2 different things, I group them together here because your landing page is part of the ad. Important aspects to test with your landing page are:

• Offers

• Headlines

• Call to actions

• Forms; Multi-step Forms

• Message Match; How well does the content align with the ad and the search term it's being advertised under. There needs to be high relevancy.

That's the gist of it! That's what it takes to optimize your Google Ad campaign and increase your return on ad spend over time (i.e. make more money!).

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