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Google Ads Hacks That Can Double Your ROI

Dijitally

Google Ads

November 11, 2022

6 min read

Want to double the ROI of your Google Ads and level up your strategy? Find out how through these seven hacks.

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Google Ads Hacks That Can Double Your ROI

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It’s fair to suggest that Google Ads are as easy as they are hard in the sense that they can be hard to master but once you have a firm grasp on them, producing meaningful business results can be easy.

But with algorithm changes, new ideations of ads being created, and an ever-changing platform, it’s important to stay in touch with how to get the most out of your campaigns.

While this is helpful, it certainly doesn’t mean that ensuring your Google Ads strategy, and campaigns in general, become a cakewalk. In fact, it’s the opposite.

It’s still expensive and incredibly competitive, and unless you have a goal of becoming Google Ads-certified, then using the platform can be intimidating.

But as we mentioned, Google Ads can be easy as they are hard and that’s what we plan on showing you in this blog article - how to ensure your campaigns are profitable using the seven hacks below.

The last hack we think you’ll be particularly interested in.

To begin with, these are powerful changes that almost anyone can make to their Google Ads account. They won’t take you days on days or reading thousands of blogs to master, but they could very well double your profitability almost instantly.

Get Your Tracking Right

Account structure and tracking is possibly the most important thing when setting up a new Google Ads account or auditing an existing one.

Without wanting to sound harsh, if your Google Ads account isn’t set up correctly from a tracking conversions perspective, then there’s really no point in launching campaigns at all because you’ll essentially be optimising thin air.

Our research tells us that 42.3% of Google Ads have no conversion tracking set up whatsoever.

That’s a huge number given the number of businesses using Google Ads to advertise.

Furthermore, among the accounts that actually had some tracking setup, approximately 29% had it set up correctly.

And while that doesn’t seem like a big number, again, given the number of accounts on the platform it’s absolutely huge.

While it might seem like an obvious “hack”, given the numbers we’ve shared above, then it needs to be called out that it’s important to get tracking set up correctly.

Otherwise, you might as well be throwing money in the bin. But if you correctly set up your account and tracking, then not only will you not be throwing money away but you could be easily doubling it.

Despite the numbers we’ve shared above, it’s mind-blowing how this can be the case given how easy Google’s instructions are to set up conversions.

The above link literally explains how to track every conversion from phone calls to app downloads.

Whether you read the above link or engaged an expert Google Ads agency to assist, it needs to be a priority task when creating and executing a Google Ads strategy.

Stop Spending Money on Keywords That Don’t Convert

In this, Google Ads is very easy to spend money on incorrectly set up campaigns or targeting the wrong keywords or wrong type of keywords.

If you’re not careful, you can easily waste a significant amount of budget on keywords that are not only not producing conversions but aren’t producing clicks.

To work this out, we’d recommend creating a filter or filters to show the keywords in your account that have never, or not recently, generated a conversion.

In addition to these filters, set a specific time frame and you can quickly determine how many conversions you’ve yet to receive in this timeframe.

If you’ve never done this before, and you have enough conversion data, you’ll probably observe at least a few keywords that you've spent a significant amount of ad budget on but have produced no conversions.

Make a list of these keywords, pause them, and move on to ensure your successful keywords can be more successful.

Adding Negative Keywords

This one is an important one. As mentioned, your Google Ads campaign can chew up your budget pretty quickly if you don't correctly set up various elements.

One of these is adding negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

You would add them like any other keyword, but with a negative symbol in front of the keyword, like this “digital marketing executive”.

You will need to think about which negative keywords to choose from to ensure you are removing the right ones from impacting the performance & profitability of your campaigns.

Implementing this hack can go a long way to doubling the profitability of your campaign as it reduces wasted ad budget and focuses on keywords that will only improve performance.

There’s Always a Time & Location

If you want to stretch your ad budget, then you can do so by being strategic with where and when you show your Google Ads.

The great news is that the platform makes it very easy to see this information where you can go as broad as time or geographic or as granular as a day of the week or hour of the day.

For businesses out there that have time-sensitive products or services, this can be extremely useful in driving performance.

Furthermore, B2B marketers may find themselves acquiring leads or sales only on weekdays and thus they switch off ads for the weekend allowing the budget to be focused when it matters most.

Review The Display Network

When launching your Search campaigns, you might notice that one of the ad placements is the Google Display Network.

This allows your ads to be displayed on other websites but have taken the time to look at what types of websites these are?

We’d strongly recommend that you do as we think it’s certainly worth a look because you might discover your ads on a website that isn’t relevant to your product or service.

From a brand perspective, this is a problem. But it can go deeper than that and venture into click fraud problems.

But how do you fix this? We’d recommend duplicating the campaign, erasing all the display placements that Google has provided you, and creating your own list of relevant or most visited websites.

Once you have your list of relevant websites, launch the campaign and then compare the two to see how they perform which effectively measures the performance of those display websites.

What you will certainly discover is that you’ve been wasting money on advertising on irrelevant websites that have driven little-to-no business.

It’s important to remember that the Display Network is still a valuable tool when managed carefully by including that list of relevant websites.

Our research tells us that 42.3% of Google Ads have no conversion tracking set up whatsoever.

Using the Right Landing Pages

From a quality score perspective, using the right landing pages in your Google Ads strategy is incredibly important.

Now, to begin with, you might not actually know which is the best page to use to drive business; especially if you’re a service-based business.

You might think it’s the enquiry form page, but if your business is new to Google Ads, there might be an argument to utilise a category page that clicks through to an enquiry form.

But you won’t know for sure unless you create multiple ads targeting different landing pages. This is part of the optimisation process.

Once you determine which landing page is performing the best, then you can switch off the other ad and focus on the winning ad.

This hack is important because a low-quality score can affect your cost per click which will quickly chew up your ad budget while not acquiring conversions.

The Super Hack

Probably one of the most effective hacks when trying to double your profit is taking your best-performing keywords and creating an ad group specifically for each.

Now, you would need to be able to have a reasonable amount of budget per day available to use, but it is incredibly effective.

Why? Well, before you implement this change (if you can), most of your ad spend and profitability are probably being spent on a small group of keywords.

These are your most valuable keywords and ideally, you want to give them as much attention, and budget, to ensure you can maximise their performance.

By adding each keyword into its own ad group, you can get granular with your split testing and create ads specifically for those keywords.

Now, it’s fair to say that you wouldn’t be able to do this for your entire keyword, but this is where you can focus on a handful of performing ads and easily double your ROI, if not more.

If you’re finding that your Google Ads strategy isn’t driving the ROI you’d ideally like, and you’ve yet to implement the above hacks, then we think it might be time to do so.

Summing up...

Choose your keywords wisely

Phrase & exact match keywords are king & queen here

Monitor your budget

Incorrectly implemented campaigns to chew up your budget really quickly

Setup conversions correctly

Give your campaigns the best possible start and ensure your conversions are setup correctly