Improving your Google Ads performance to meet your marketing objectives is the top concern of all marketing directors’ minds. It’s no secret that if you are not constantly looking for ways to improve your marketing for business, you will hit the wall and start losing revenue by adding more units of production to an underperforming system that’s not producing a surplus. The good news is that Google Ads constantly improves its marketing information management system by offering ways to help advertisers scale their advertising efforts. Here are our top 5 Google Ad Features of 2021 you can start using to optimize your paid search management efforts.
Optimizing Paid Management Performance With Responsive Ads
#1. Responsive Search Ads: Testing Unique Selling Propositions and Pinning Headlines
In the past year, Google made some pretty epic changes to Google Ads that are moving more towards Machine Learning to increase advertisers’ performance and enable Google to increase their revenue. It’s officially ended regular text ads and now, by default, forces responsive ads as the standard ad format. Seasoned paid search pros can start taking advantage of this standard ad format in a testing mentality to get the best headline in front of prospects. However, some paid search management professionals have a negative perspective about using Google’s machine learning and will refuse to implement it, which could be foiling your ad performance.
If you are unfamiliar with Google’s Responsive Ads, you will provide more headlines and descriptions for your advert. Using responsive ads acts a supervised machine learning and enables Google to determine the best performing ad by split testing. As a result, Google finds the best users searching for your product or services. Using responsive ads, Google pushes advertisers to build on one of the most fundamental aspects of marketing, and that is “testing”!
You will not always know what works when you are dealing with significant numbers from behind an iron curtain. However, the power of testing will help you avoid directional issues and keep you from wasting vast amounts of money on a bias. So what might seem like a change designed to hurt the way a cpc professional executes their work helps in the bigger picture of getting those CTRs up, getting Quality Scores up, and thus getting those Ad Ranks up so you can acquire the necessary traffic for conversion. Adding a testing culture to your marketing makes for a perfect opportunity to test an array of unique selling points that can make or break your business in the context of converting your traffic into revenue.
It will take Google’s Machine Learning algorithms some time to serve the suitable ads to your target customer; however, you would be building vital data to get to your best target customer through all that testing. Some CPC pros will argue that automated anything does not always work out for them and will find ways to avoid using machine learning or additional features. On the contrary, an essential Google Ads feature you can use to ensure you maximize your CPC metrics is called “Pining Headlines.” This feature is an agile way to get around waiting for Google to figure out how to serve the correct headlines. Using pinned headlines is especially important if you know what works already and you need to adjust to Google’s degradation of standard text ads. At the same time, this is not a great feature for brand new CPC accounts in the testing phase of their search engine marketing strategy trying to hit marketing objectives in acquiring traffic. Instead, we recommend building out your responsive headlines that mirror unique selling propositions, and then when you learn what works, using headline pining to enforce performance.
#2. Phrase Match Keywords: Get Your Volume Up Without Risking Budget
Also, in 2021, we saw Google remove modified broad match operators to enable advertisers to scale traffic acquisition without sacrificing quality matches for focus keywords. For the longest time, modified broad matches worked to the advantage of CPC strategy to go broad without spending broad money. However, from Google’s standpoint, they were not making the most money they could, and CPC bidders were not getting the most traffic possible, so Google changed things up for both parties.
Most advertisers are concerned about not acquiring quality traffic at scale, just using exact match keywords alone. Phrase match terms come into perspective by turning up the volume of traffic. Phrase match terms behave like modified broad match terms, but there’s no guarantee that your keywords will appear in the order you want by default. You must control the traffic, control your budget, and control the quality by using negative keyword phrase matches.
#3. Phrase Match Negatives: Get Your Keywords In Order, Avoid Budget Waste
That brings us to the next feature of Google Ads that you can use to help you turn up your traffic volume without wasting your budget on bad traffic. With Google stripping away guarantees about the order of your keywords in phrase match, negative keywords become a blistering proposition for advert professionals to control what comes through. So essentially, you want to preempt your traffic before turning your campaigns live.
Negative keywords will become more critical than ever. Here’s a perfect example: let’s say you have a moving company that helps people move from New York City to Toronto, Canada. When you go to bid using phrase match, because Google no longer guarantees the order of the terms, you are going to get searches for people in Canada looking to move to New York as well.
Not getting your keywords in the correct order can spell bad news for controlling your budget and quality lead volume. Here’s where the negative keyword feature is back at the forefront of CPC tactics to eliminate budget waste and unqualified leads. Negative phrase match keywords is a feature that all paid search marketing specialists from now on.
#4. Increasing Your Budget To Get More Leads Using Target CPA For Smaller Companies
This next feature is also a big one for small businesses, organizations, and start-ups looking to break into their markets using Google Ads. One of the most significant flaws is thinking you must start with high-volume campaigns to grow your sales or leads. If you started with Google Ads and are disappointed with the return-on-ad-spend because you are indeed using the wrong go-to-market strategy, discover Google’s Target CPA (cost per acquisition) bidding feature! This bidding feature is an essential feature for building a good marketing model to grow your business. Getting a $2:$1 or $3:$1 (250% ROAS or 350% ROAS) return-on-ad-spend is crucial to make Google Ads work for your business. But most decision-makers are unaware of how to make this feature work for them.
Smaller businesses that try to compete with larger, more established companies will pay more money for their clicks due to:
- Buying Traffic Outside Their Unique Marketing Position
- Lowering Their Quality Score With Irrelevant Traffic
- Lowering Ad Rank
- Losing Impressions
As a result, this will cause advertisers to increase their bids to pay more money and blow up the target CPA.
The best way to use Target CPA and increase your leads is to raise your budgets on lower volume campaigns. You can focus on the correct unique selling proposition headlines in your responsive ads by shooting for lower volume campaigns. Finding the correct unique selling position will do a cluster of things for your adverts such as:
- Increase CTR
- Increase Impressions
- Increase Visibility
- Increase Conversions
Most of the more extensive volume campaigns you might try buying will have you succumb to increasing your budget and bids and thus change the target CPA. It’s important to remember that when planning out your marketing campaigns to stay small and agile for the very reason you started your business. Doing this will keep you from increasing bids and increasing your budget to meet the four kips mentioned above.
#5. Growth Hacking For Impressions By Paying To Show Up In Google Map Pack
The last cool tip for Google Ads of 2021 is to look at the location feature and optimize Google Maps to get your impression count up. When building your ads, you can enable location features to get above the competition without doing bad things such as faking reviews or over-optimizing reviews to boost your map listing position organically. The location feature also enables you to achieve these marketing accolades as well:
- Appear above the competition nationally or locally
- Illustrates strong brand presence in search vertical
- Builds on Impression Share in search results
Getting immediate brand visibility is vital for small businesses only concerned with local and wanting more instant results. Adding more to your visibility will build user confidence and boost conversion.
Don’t Overlook Micro Google Ad Features, Jump On Them To Improve Performance and Develop Agile Strategy
There you have it, Our Top 5 Features In Google Ads for the remainder of the 2021 year that you can start using in your paid search initiatives to get more performance out of your CPC efforts. Again, keep in mind the core principles of marketing, and realize that testing is the way to move forward! In the future, you will immediately be able to recognize or look for features needed to deal with new challenges and avoid falling victim to harmful industry dogma about Google Ads and avoid watching your marketing objectives hit the wall!
