How to become an expert at managing Google Ads campaigns

Because an awesome Google Ads manager gets your business in front of the right customers. Adzooma shows you what you need.

Written by Amber Dawson

Google Ads Campaign Management Is A Great Way To Get Your Business In Front Of The Right People.

With Google campaign management, you can target specific audiences through the right keywords and match types , With Google campaign management, you can target specific audiences through the right

But, you can’t just set and forget. To get the best results from your campaigns, you need to manage Google Ads effectively, and this means always keeping an eye on your campaigns and optimising them. You don’t want to waste budget without noticing, and you wouldn’t want to miss out on getting higher quality leads.

That’s where PPC managers spend their time: figuring out what is and isn’t working, adjusting budgets, and looking out for new opportunities.

To cater for everyone in this boat, from newbies to seasoned pros, who all have too little time, there are plenty of Google Ads management tools out there. They’ll all claim to help you, but whether they do or not varies. Everyone wants to make their lives easier. But it’s working out how you want to manage Google Ads and what you need from it before you settle on the right one for you.

How To Manage Google Ads Effectively: Where Google Ads Managers Spend Their Time

If you’re looking at Google Ads tools but are yet to embark on the wild journey that is PPC marketing, we should start by looking at what Google Ads campaign management actually looks like on a daily basis.

Managing Google Ads day to day encompasses quite a lot of work. There’s a great deal of reporting, data analysis and general admin to get through before you can start focusing on optimisation.

Only 10% of advertisers consistently do optimisation work in their account every week over a 90-day period.

If you’re looking to pay a PPC management agency to handle your account thinking that they’ll be dedicated to your campaigns, then you could be mistaken. They’ll likely do a good job for you, but you’ll be one of many accounts and just one of the things they have on their huge to-do list.

Similarly, if you’re in the position of running Google Ads for clients and you’re finding you barely have time to catch your breath, then a Google Ads management tool could be your saviour.

How To Manage Google Ads: Agencies vs Tools

If you’ve decided to look for help with managing your Google Ads, you have two choices: go with an agency or use a PPC management tool.

There’s a vast array of agencies out there who will look after your ad campaigns. You can even get them to handle your whole marketing strategy if you’d like. But obviously, these services don’t come cheap.

And you’ll have to do a lot of legwork to find the best ones. After all, if you’re paying for it, you want to be sure the account managers know their stuff. It’s a good idea to take a look at their own ads for starters to see if they practice what they preach.

You’ll probably find though, that they’re using a tool themselves in order to be able to manage your account alongside so many others. So then, why wouldn’t you do it yourself?

If you have the time and the know-how, learning Google Ads management software could be worth it in the long run. It means you get total control and can see the changes that are being made, rather than regularly chasing your account manager.

PPC agencies are great for a hands-off solution. They’re also probably right for you if you’re a large company, but for SMEs they can be an expense that you just can’t afford.

Similarly, the online advertising world is always in a state of flux; what works today might not work tomorrow. If you’ve spent the time understanding Google campaign management then you can adjust to the trends and make sure your ads are ahead of the curve.

Whereas if you’re with an agency, how do you know if they’re using the latest Google Ads tips and tricks? You don’t really. You have to trust that the results they’re delivering for you are the best you can get. By doing your research, hopefully you can be reassured that they’re constantly testing and optimising your campaigns.

But there are plenty of positives of using a Google Ads campaign management tool as well. Let’s have a look as to why you’d want to use one.

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Why Use A Google Campaign Management Tool?

If you want to create a Google Ads manager account within a tool, these are the main benefits you’ll get:

Time is a massive deal to anyone, but especially when you’re spending it doing repetitive tasks. A machine frees you up to focus on the bigger picture, to look at your campaigns in detail and make changes that will boost your results.

If you’re managing your ads single-handedly, or have multiple accounts, then the tedious tasks can quickly take over. You only have so many hours in a day and you need to make the most of them – otherwise you’ll find yourself awake at 3am going cross-eyed in front of your keyword planner.

Adzooma’s platform offers suggestions for new keywords to bid on as well as pausing current underperforming ones.This can be particularly helpful in competitive industries where the most popular keywords are super expensive. If a click is costing you over £50, you want to be damn sure they’re worth it.

In these situations, often bidding on long-tail keywords is more cost effective. Keywords like “trainers” will have a high search volume but high CPC. In comparison, if you’re offering custom-made, pink jewelled Nikes, then put that in your keyword list. It probably won’t get searched as often, but when it does, you’ll be right there. And with a search this specific, it’s highly likely they’ll be looking to buy as opposed to just browsing.

Compared to Adzooma: The Adzooma platform offers Facebook Ads functionality and an intuitive UI with helpful information to guide you through its recommendations.

Finally, Google Ads managers will stretch your budget as far as it can. If you’re too busy running the day-to-day of your company, and don’t get time to check your campaigns, you could be overspending without noticing.

Think of the horror of coming back one morning to find your month’s budget has run dry. With a Google Ads campaign management tool, you’ve got someone keeping an eye on things. The best management tools even allow you to set up rules that notify you when big things change.

For instance, with Adzooma, you could ask the software to send you a message when a campaign spends over a set amount, or if an ad gets less than 10 clicks, you can ask it to be turned off.

These things may seem small, but it means your focus can safely be elsewhere without needing to worry. Great Google Ads managers let you do this – it’s just about finding the right one for you.

Optimising Your Google Ads

If we’re thinking in terms of Google Ads best practices, the most valuable way to spend your time when it comes to Google Ads management is optimisation.

When your time gets spent optimising campaigns, there’s much to get through. Here are just some of the ways to make sure your ads are performing as well as they can.

Google Ads tip #1: Reviewing

You can quickly save time and money by axing what is underperforming. If a keyword is costing a fortune but getting no clicks, get rid.

Google Ads tip #2: Keyword Expansion

With there being many searches never having been made before, keeping on top of your long-tail keywords is imperative to success. You want to ensure that your keywords are as specific and as relevant as possible.

Google Ads tip #3: Negative Keywords

Eliminate wasted spend by telling Google what you don’t want to appear for in searches. This avoids people who want to find fresh new specs clicking on your ad for drinking glasses, for example.

Google Ads tip #4: Ad Text

It’s all well and good getting your ad in front of the right audience, but if it’s shouting about the wrong things no one is going to be interested. You want to be sure your copy answers any questions that your potential customer has and is pushing the benefits of choosing you. Testing different ad text is a great way to do this.

Google Ads tip #5: Bid Optimisation

Your bid strategy needs to change as CPC prices change and trends fluctuate. Otherwise, you’ll be left behind.

Google Ads tip #6: The Opportunity Engine

Adzooma’s Opportunity Engine does all the tough optimisation work for you. You don’t have to look through data, reports and hidden features in the Google interface. Instead, everything is neatly presented in a choice of two views: grid or list. You can edit and review the suggestions recommended for your individual campaigns and implement them in just a few clicks.

However you choose to make changes to your ads, optimisation is the key.

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Managing Google Ads: It’s All About A Winning Mentality

With great success comes great failures. The nature of Google Ads management means that you can’t take failure to heart. If you do, you won’t get far.

The ever-changing nature of Google Ads means that you need to be able to learn from your mistakes and not see them as ‘mistakes’. After all, you’ll only find what works by figuring out what doesn’t. You’re not going to strike gold first time, and if you accept that early on, you’ll go far.

Google Ads campaign management is all about being reactive: take onboard the changes and latest trends and adapt to them. If you want your campaigns to be those at the top of the SERP, you need to have a strategy to get there.

Your ads are selling things, which makes you a salesperson. So, adopt a salespersons’ attitude. They don’t sell every single time they approach a potential new customer, but it doesn’t stop them doing it time and time again.

You will make ads that flop. You will make ads that achieve just mediocre results. And both of these things are okay. Google Ads management is hard work. If it wasn’t, everyone would be succeeding.

After all, there’s only ever going to be one top spot. You can guarantee the ad in it has 20 other draft versions behind it that failed. They’ve only got the winner by testing countless ones before. You just haven’t seen the rubbish ads because… they haven’t been seen by many people.

Google Ads Best Practice: Your Google Ads Toolkit

You could be the best builder in the world, but you’re not going to get far without your tools. The same is true for Google Ads managers – you need to have some tricks in your pocket to get the best results.

Google Ads tools are a great way to supplement your skillset. What you need depends on what level you start at, but when it comes to saving time, even the experts shouldn’t say no.

Google Ads Editor

The Google Ads Editor is a staple in your arsenal. It allows you to make bulk changes quickly and easily across your campaigns. Better yet, it’s free.

This is great for filtering things down so you can then make changes to specific areas of campaigns. It’s a marketer’s go-to when they want to start crafting campaigns.

Keyword Planner

This tool is essential when providing budgets and forecast planning. You can get monthly search volumes, estimated cost per clicks, competition ratings and more.

Keywords are the bread and butter of your ad campaigns. You need to get them right or the right people won’t find you. A tool like this helps you focus on what’s important and ensures you’re targeting the right things.

Answer The Public

Answer The Public can show you the most searched for queries for a particular search term. This is really handy for expanding your negative keyword list and for identifying new keyword opportunities.

Facebook Ads Library

The Facebook Ads Library is a great way to scope out your competitors’ ads. You can learn a lot from looking at what your rivals are doing well and not so well, and take advantage of this information to improve your own campaigns.

Adzooma

The Adzooma platform offers a whole host of features designed to save you time and money and to help you best optimise your ads. It covers everything from new opportunities, automation, reporting, and Google Campaign management and is packaged in an easy-to-use platform. Better yet, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

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Improve your Google Ads performance in minutes

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Improve your Google Ads performance in minutes

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How To Improve Google Ads Campaigns: Winning Tactics

To decide which Google Ads management tool would best help you, you need to think about what you want to spend your time doing. The smartest decision would be to use a tool which takes away any tedious tasks and gives you your time back, so you can focus on more exciting elements that will really make a difference.

Here are some areas your campaigns would benefit from focusing on for future use:

1. Testing

Let’s talk about testing. It’s such an overlooked aspect of the process when you’re considering how to run Google Ads for clients or yourself.

You have no idea where the ceiling of your campaign success is if you don’t test. If you don’t try things that may initially seem out of the box, then you never know if they could work.

It’s great to find a campaign which outperforms the rest, but how do you know if that’s the best you could do?

The answer: get testing.

First, decide how and what you’re doing to test. You can run tests inside Google Ads to understand if the changes you’re making would add value. You want to run your tests inside a manager tool so you can stay organised. This makes it easy to see the results and work out what changes you could permanently implement.

Set up a campaign draft to test changes inside an existing campaign. This is a great place to start, but you can’t alter everything in here. Click attribution models and automation strategies are also worth testing, but you’ll need to use other methods for that.

You want to focus your experiments on aspects that will have the most impact. You can’t test everything, so don’t waste your time on small incremental changes. Look at changing your bidding strategy or add an ad extension. Change the focus of your ad text and marry up your ad and landing page CTAs.

Research what others have had success with and try to adopt their techniques for your industry.

Another key thing to remember when testing is to just test one variable at a time. It’s all well and good making loads of changes at once and seeing an increase in traffic, but then what’s caused it? By testing things one at a time, you’ll be able to clearly see what’s affecting your results and work out the best combination of factors.

Similarly, pick just one metric to measure the results. Otherwise, things get confusing fast. Be sure to exercise some self-control well and don’t be tempted to make changes in the middle of a test. You’ll skew the results and won’t be able to have reliable data to back up your evidence.

Once you’ve collected enough data to be confident in your results, you can use these insights to make your winning campaign.

2. Google Ads Remarketing

It’s a lot easier to persuade someone if they’re familiar with what you’re offering. Remarketing is a great way to capture any fish (or rather customers) that may have slipped through the net the first time.

Google Ads remarketing is easy to build into your existing campaigns. Remarketing is set up through adding pieces of code to your site so that visitors get added to a remarketing audience list through their cookies.

So, if they leave without becoming a customer, you can retarget them at a later date with ads designed specifically for them.

Google Ads remarketing should fit into your strategy as a whole. The cost varies depending on how well you do this, but they are generally a cost-effective way of getting new leads.

The main benefit of remarketing your Google Ads to people who have already seen them is that it offers a highly targeted audience. Remarketing ads also have a much higher click-through rate and conversion rates in comparison to traditional search ads. So, they’re really worth looking at once your campaigns are up and running.

3. Conversion Tracking

Here’s a secret: the key to being able to effectively optimise your Google Ads is in the tracking. Now, you might be thinking “that’s not much of a secret”, but the question is, what are you tracking?

If you’re just attributing things to the very last click then you’re not looking at the whole picture. The trick is looking at the full conversion path funnel.

If you’re just attributing things to the very last click then you’re not looking at the whole picture. The trick is looking at the full conversion path funnel.

By looking at your customer’s entire journey and taking it with them, you can easily identify any problems that may be making them leave. Just looking at the last click attribution is like only listening to the end of the story. They wouldn’t get to the end if it wasn’t for the beginning, so start there.

There’s a wide range of attribution models:

Last click: gives all the credit to the last clicked ad and corresponding keywords

First click: gives all the credit to the ad and corresponding keyword that was first clicked

Linear: equally distributes credit across all clicks

Time decay: gives more credit to clicks that happened closer in time to the conversion

Position-based: gives 40% of credit to both the first and last clicked ads and then spreads out the remaining 20%

Data-driven: distributes credit based on past data for the action

Don’t be afraid to try different attribution models and see how it changes the landscape of data you’re working with. You may find it reveals valuable insights, or you may find it doesn’t help whatsoever. But only by trying will you know.

4. Reporting

You can easily spend all your time on creating reports for clients and colleagues. This is not the best use of your time when it can be automated for you.

Half of the time the reports can be filled with data that is not relevant and which confuses the bigger picture. Instead, you should focus on the key metrics which matter. This means you can use it to improve your performance and see the value in creating these documents.

If your report is too data-heavy then your clients won’t understand it anyway and so its a waste of everyone’s time. In the Adzooma platform, you can customise your reports quickly and easily. Build them by dragging and dropping the data you need into place in the form of pie charts, line graphs, tables and more. You can also add your own logo, save them as templates, download them as PDFs, then send them to clients, investors, or whoever you’re trying to impress.

Finding The Right Google Ads Campaign Manager For You

There’s a lot to do when it comes to managing Google Ads campaigns. As mentioned above, there is a huge range of things to manage so it can be difficult to know where to focus your time.

Optimisation is where you want to spend a lot of your energy because it’s where you’ll feel like you’re making improvements. But if you have a lot of campaigns running, it tends to get pushed to the bottom of your to-do list.

You could outsource your Google Ads management, but you’ll find that optimisations fall to the bottom of their lists too. Agencies are great if you can afford it, but they’ll be making their lives easier with the same Google Ads management tools you could get your hands on.

They keep things simple by targeting the fundamental aspects of PPC. Klientboost also offers display and retargeting ads, intelligent competitor research, custom reporting, and complete ownership of all your ads and landing pages.

Good Google Ads managers are intuitive to use anyway, so you can pick things up easily.

Adzooma gives you a wide variety of features to reduce the amount of time you have to dedicate to reporting, management and hunting through data. It also presents you with top quality insights and suggests improvements to your campaigns based on your specific data.

For instance, you can easily see what to tackle first with the management feature in Adzooma. It gives you an overview of how things are going across multiple accounts at a glance. Nothing will slip under your radar as you’ll have an eye on everything that’s going on.

Similarly, you can quickly set up new automation rules so you’re notified when certain things happen. For example, you could set up a rule that alerts you when a budget gets reached or turn an underperforming ad off if it gets less than 10 clicks or 10 impressions. It’s up to you to set the terms – it’s all about using software to help you manage Google Ads that little bit more efficiently.

Adzooma also looks at how to reduce wasted spend. It will suggest negative keywords, to pause ads that are underperforming or make changes to the amounts you’re bidding.

A good Google Ads management tool saves you time, money and offers improvements. Whether that’s something like Adzooma or an alternative, make sure you’re making the most of Google Ads for your business. You won’t look back once you’ve found the right tool for you.

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