Guide to effective Google Ads optimisation

After reading this post, you should have a clear understanding of:

This chapter will teach you:

• How you should structure your campaign
• Your budget allocation
• What to look for in ongoing Google Ads optimisation
• How to resolve different scenarios and in what order
• What we mean by “isolating” high-performing efforts, and how to do it
• How to keep an eye on your leads

Note:

If you want to take your lead generation to the next level, we recommend that you keep a document noting what changes you made, when, and why. That way, you will gradually build a form of documentation of your efforts and what they delivered.

Let us get started!

Campaign structure

Whether you are experienced with Google Ads or not, there is a simple underlying logic you should follow in your campaign structure: you must set up a starting point based on your hypotheses, while making it easy to isolate the parts of the campaigns that perform and then restructure the campaigns accordingly.

We recommend starting with few campaigns, many ad sets/groups, and 2–3 ads per set/group.

The point is that you create a few larger groupings, where each grouping is split into many smaller segments of your selected keywords, so you can pinpoint which keywords perform. Finally, you test which message resonates best with the target audience using the 2–3 ads.

Budget allocation

How you should allocate your budget can be explained very briefly.

Our recommendation is to allocate your budget so that you spend 70% of it in the second half of the period. So, if you have DKK 200,000 to spend and you run lead generation over a 12-month period, you should spend DKK 60,000 in the first six months and DKK 140,000 in the last six months.

There are two reasons for this:

1. In the optimisation process in the next chapter, you will gradually expand your campaigns based on the findings you make.
2. In addition, over time you will get an idea of which audiences, keywords, and ads perform, and then roughly speaking it becomes a matter of ensuring the performing campaigns have sufficient budget. Therefore, you need to reserve some budget to be able to make that move.

You cannot set a fixed budget for the entire year, because then you will not have the budget to scale up when you find the efforts that perform.

Initially, the allocation between your campaigns can be random or equal. Over time, you will need to reallocate budgets from one effort to another based on what your data tells you.

Note: The calculator is exclusively for Google Ads search ads, and it works best for B2B companies.

What should you look for when optimising Google Ads?

It is important that once the campaigns are running, you spend your time only on what stands out to you. You can always tinker in an ad account and find 1–3% more by tweaking small things here and there.

These small adjustments should be weighed against the output, and if you spend a lot of time finding minor improvements, the input and output do not add up your time would be better spent on the bigger picture.

Our take is that if you have some experience with Google Ads optimisation, you can easily build a better case than a specialist with five years of experience if you focus on the overall picture and prioritise accordingly.

When you log in to your ad platform, we recommend reviewing things in the following order.

1. Has anything generated leads?

If yes, start by “zooming in” on that effort to see whether there is a way to scale that output.
You start here because it is the first indication you have that something in the campaign has potential everything that has not performed yet is just untested hypotheses.

The first thing you look for is whether you can isolate what has performed:

• Is it a specific ad that has generated leads?
• Is it a specific audience or keyword that stands out in particular?
• What is the conversion rate? Has the campaign received a lot of traffic and few conversions, or is the rate reasonable?
• Is there a landing page that works better than others?

Scenario 1: An ad is performing particularly well

If there is an ad that has performed particularly well, I would consider pausing one of the other ads in the ad group/set so that the performing ad is shown more frequently, based on the hypothesis that this will increase output.

Scenario 2: An audience is performing

If the case is that an audience or a keyword is performing, you should initially increase bids for that audience or keyword i.e. simply allocate more budget to it.

This is the smallest action you can take, and what you are testing is the hypothesis that if you get more traffic from this keyword, you will get correspondingly more leads. When you allocate more budget to something, Google gives it more exposure.

If that proves to be the case and you get more out of it, continue increasing your bids until the trend levels off. In addition, we would consider increasing the conversion rate on the landing page associated with the keyword—either by testing other landing pages or by optimising the existing ones based on our recommendations in the website optimisation checklist.

Scenario 3: Leads are coming in, but the conversion rate is low

If the campaign has received a huge amount of traffic but very few leads, we would look at split-testing other landing pages or, alternatively, optimising the website.

2. There is traffic but no leads

This is the most common initial outcome when starting lead generation. The truth is that everything up to the point where the campaigns are running is based on hypotheses and experience from other industries but not de facto observations from your specific industry. So you often need to tinker a bit before leads start coming in.

If you are in that situation, consider the following:

• Have you tested different landing pages? Or are you simply sending all traffic to your homepage or contact page? You may want to consider testing other pages, and if you do not have landing pages that align with what you have written in your ads, we would consider having them created.
• Have you selected the relevant traffic sources? Are the audience or the keywords even relevant? Indicators that you are pulling irrelevant traffic include:
  • A high bounce rate (+75%) can tell you that your audience finds you irrelevant. This may be because the audience is wrong, but it may also be due to your landing page’s relevance and appeal.
  • Either very high or very low ‘time on site’ (under 1 min. or over 4 min.) can indicate that the audience is either not interested or cannot find what they are looking for.
  • Is the audience engaging with your ads? If your ads have a low CTR, it may be a sign that you are irrelevant to the audience.
• Are your landing pages optimised? Have you written your copy in a way that provides value to readers, so they can see what they get from you and your products/services? Do you have visual aids to describe your products/services? Are there clear CTAs? And much more.

And perhaps most importantly: What do you offer your visitors to do on the website? Do you offer different conversion options that appeal to the different stages of your customers’ decision-making process (call me back, chat, e-book, brochure, etc.)?

If you generate MQLs through gated content, have you considered whether the content is good enough? If it is just a data sheet, then the answer is already no. It should be something they would almost be willing to pay a symbolic amount for, which you then choose to give away for free.

You should consider different entry points for your visitors. It may also be that they “simply” need to watch a video on the website, after which you can run a retargeting campaign to the people who choose to do so. This creates synergies between the website and your other marketing channels.

3. There are many impressions but no traffic or leads

If you are in this situation, it can be a strong indicator that, in one way or another, you are not relevant to your audience or the keywords you have chosen.

We recommend that you look at the following:

Is there enough difference between your ads? To conclusively determine whether you are irrelevant to the audience or the keywords, you need to expose your audience to markedly different ad formats and messages.

In Google Ads, make sure you have split-tested different messages. See what else appears in the search results, and make sure you stand out sufficiently while also reassuring recipients that you can do the same as the competitor.

Both examples below are good ads, but they promise different things for the same keyword.

4. There are no impressions or traffic

If you are in this situation, start by checking that you do not have technical issues such as:

• Ads that have been disapproved
• A payment card that has been declined
• Or something similar

Next, we recommend significantly increasing the budget or bids. That way, you can test whether the issue is that you are not bidding high enough.

If that is not the case, it is most likely because you have been too thorough with your audience segmentation. In other words, the audience is too narrow and/or there are not enough monthly searches for your keywords.

5. There are many leads, but the budget is limited

May we start by saying – CONGRATULATIONS – you have struck gold, and it is the best problem in the world to have. As we see it, you have two things to do preferably in priority order:

1. INCREASE YOUR BUDGET! Surely you can convince a CFO that the money is well spent if it means the company gets more leads?
2. Yes, the second step is to clean up the ad account and lower bids on the audiences/keywords that are not performing as well, pause ads, and possibly stop the least effective campaigns so you can allocate the budget to the campaigns that perform best. It is not ideal, but it may be the best option in this situation.

6. There are few leads, but they are expensive

Once the “lead boil” has been lanced, this scenario will most likely occur.

This is because it will most often not be everything in your campaigns that performs. But because you have (rightly) spread your budget across multiple campaigns, you will find that a few things deliver all the results, while the remaining efforts deliver nothing.

If you are in this scenario, you need to isolate the things that actually perform.

The way you isolate a performing element is by exploring your campaigns and seeing whether anything stands out something that deviates significantly, for better or worse.

It could be:

• Campaigns that stand out in particular
• Keywords or audiences that perform significantly differently
• Ads that deliver more or less return
• Or landing pages that drive completely different user behaviour than others

Read this:

In the example below, you can see that DKK 43,000 has been spent, and 11.5 leads have come in (the half lead is due to an attribution model you can read about those here).

DKK 43,000 in cost divided by 11.5 leads = a CPA of DKK 3,760 per lead for the campaign overall.

But if you dig a little deeper, you can see that there are some keyword groupings (ad sets) that perform far better than others, and that the DKK 3,760 CPA is merely an average.

We have keywords that generate leads at DKK 1,400 each, but there is also a keyword that generates leads at DKK 264 each.

In this scenario, 17% of ad spend delivered 50% of the results.

What should you do:

1. In such a situation, we recommend reallocating some of the budget from the efforts that deliver less to the ad sets that are delivering the majority of the results here, and then monitoring whether it scales the output. In other words, if those two ad sets had received twice as much budget, would we have gotten twice as many leads?

It is often not linear; it may increase more or less but it is definitely worth testing, and in 99% of cases we see results increase. Quite simply because you have found the corner that performs.

2. Check whether some ads are better than others. It may well be that the keywords or audience perform better, but what if it could be EVEN better if you channelled the best content in their direction?
   Therefore, review the ads for the performing elements, pause poor ads, and potentially create new ones to see whether performance can be improved further.
3. Be selective about the landing pages traffic is sent to. Do not commit one of the most common deadly sins a marketer can make and only optimise in the ad tools.
   Also remember to check whether some landing pages perform better than others. Test them on your performing keywords or audiences. You may also try optimising the landing pages.
   
4. Use your new knowledge from performing campaigns to improve the performance of other campaigns. You have now written new ads and optimised and tested landing pages—run through your other campaigns and see whether they need new ads, or whether they should be switched to send traffic to your performing landing pages.

7. You are getting leads, but they are not qualified

Oh no—there is a breakthrough, but it turned out to be just a boil and not a golden egg. However, it is FAR too early to give up. There are some fundamental exercises that can get you out of this situation.

• Review what your leads are saying and make sure it resonates with your business.

Are your leads using wording about you and your product that does not align at all? Are they comparing you to products or competitors you are not comparable with at all? Do they think your pricing is high? Or something else entirely.
Explore what your leads’ associations with you are; it will often tell you what is needed to qualify them in the future.

Take “price”, for example.
If you find that your leads are unrealistic in terms of budget, or they think you are expensive, you should consider adding a price point on the landing page based on the logic in section 4.2.5.
Again, you do not need to state a fixed price, but you can provide an example where you have configured a solution, listing what is included and the price it is available from.

There are many ways to provide a price point. You can even include it in the ads and completely avoid people clicking the ad if they cannot meet it.
Our experience has always been that we get fewer enquiries, but the ones we get are better qualified. When we added price examples to morningtrain.dk, we actually experienced receiving MORE enquiries, and many leads referred to the price examples.

Our hypothesis is that the price examples made our products more tangible for companies, and that many companies previously may not have contacted us because they assumed our product was more expensive than it is.
So while the unqualified leads were discouraged from reaching out, the qualified leads were reassured about whether they could “afford” it.

• Is there a mismatch between what you promise in the ads vs. your website?

Unfortunately, we often see the website remain outdated while the ads have the latest graphics and new copy. So while you have made an effort to be appealing on the ad platforms, you have not ensured that the website delivers the same “promise” as the ads.

For example, if the ads strongly emphasise a “no-obligation review”, but you cannot find that anywhere on the website, it creates a barrier and the impression that it may not have been entirely true.
So make sure your website and ads speak the “same language”, and if there are graphic elements, that they use the same visual identity.

• Could you do more to qualify your leads before they get in touch?

You could consider making more information available to your potential leads so they are better informed before they reach out.
For example, you could add an FAQ to the landing page, or allow them to download an e-book about your solution.

• You may have missed the mark with your keywords.

It may be that you were too quick in selecting your audience or conducting your keyword analysis, but it may also be that you and your company need to use different words when describing what you do and who can benefit from you. Perhaps you need to speak much more directly to the company’s pains and their potential gains—or perhaps something else entirely.

The best example I have is about keywords. We at Morningtrain, as an agency, have practically made a living from the keyword “web agency”.

But in 2021, they found that the keyword was generating many irrelevant leads. We dug into it a bit, and we saw that “web agency” was not generating relevant leads, while the term “digital agency” had surged ahead.

We looked into the two keywords using the methodology from section 2.3, and here we could see that the search intent for a web agency was that people were looking for an agency with a maximum of 20–30 employees that could build websites in a price range of around DKK 20,000–50,000.

Whereas “digital agency” was a search for a large agency (50+ employees) that could help more broadly than just a new website, including visual identity and brand—expecting prices closer to DKK 200,000–500,000.

As a company, they had simply outgrown the relevance of a keyword. They no longer matched what people were looking for in a web agency, but were now instead a digital agency.

Therefore, they rolled out the change across ALL our platforms and also began referring to ourselves as a digital agency on the website and on LinkedIn instead.

That was quite a journey, but we hope you are wiser for it. Off you go you need to get out there and create results in your Google Ads account.

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Simon Lübiç Hedegård

Tracking Lead & partner

[email protected]

+45 92 44 93 83

Thomas Østerkjerhuus

CEO & Partner

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