Google Ad Grants: optimize for quality

Don’t worry about maxing out your Grantspro budget straight away. That will come with time as you build more campaigns. Remember all you have to do to maintain your Grantspro eligibility from a spending point of view is spend $9,900 in two of the past six months. Focus now on quality.

Go through each of your ad groups in turn and review the search terms report showing all-time data. If a search term has more than 200 impressions, better than 1% clickthrough rate (CTR) and is converting, add it as an exact match keyword. You can apply filters to the search term report and sort the columns in descending order to make your job easier.

Here’s how you can configure the filters to show you new potential keywords:

As you’re reviewing the search terms report, we also recommend looking out for potential negative keywords. Either add them directly from the search terms report or keep a text file list of negative keywords that you can then add in bulk to your campaigns or negative keyword list later.

You should also review the traffic quality of the keywords. If an individual keyword has a conversion rate well below the account average (benchmarks will vary for each account), consider deleting it or moving it to its own ad group with more targeted ads and landing pages. If it’s relatively low volume, you can safely delete it. If it’s high volume, dig into the search terms report for that individual keyword to see if you could replace it with a few exact match keywords to exclude the less relevant traffic.

You can also optimize your keyword lists by adding traffic quality metrics from Google Analytics to your reports to show bounce rate, pages per session and average session duration. If the traffic quality is poor, consider deleting the keyword. You can always make up for the lost volume with a better keyword elsewhere.

Each of your ad groups should have three ads. When each ad has had at least 200 impressions or it’s been active for 30 days, you can start to optimize. Decide what the best and worst performing ads are in terms of conversion rate, CTR and traffic quality. Delete the worst ad. Create a copy of the best ad and tweak it slightly to create a new variation. You may change the call to action, the headline or ad text. Try to change only one thing so that you can compare the performance against the best ad.

If you do this regularly, your success metrics will start to move in the right direction: traffic quality will improve, you’ll get more conversions, CTR will increase, which in turn might give you a higher Quality Score, better ad positions and a lower cost per click.

The idea is to find out what works and do more of it. Weed out what doesn’t work and eradicate it from your account.

• Google Ad Grants: Use Ad Extensions
• Google Ad Grants: Dynamic Keyword Insertion
• Google Ad Grants: Remove Duplicate Keywords
• Google Ad Grants: Link Your Google Analytics Account to AdWords
• Google Ad Grants: Create a Shared Budget for All Campaigns
• Google Ad Grants: Improve CTR with Automated Rules