Every marketer wants to make the most of their ad spend. Naturally, we all want to increase conversions and keep spending low. This paradox of growing your client base whilst spending less on ads can sound impractical. Impossible even.

Fortunately, there’s a performance indicator that hits the middle ground – return on investment (ROI).

If you, like many other Google Ads marketers, are looking for ways to improve your return on investment from Google Ads, you’re in luck. In this post, we will share our top 5 tips to raise your ROI.

Use Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are search phrases you could add to your ad campaign to filter out irrelevant traffic. When you create a list of negative keywords, Google will no longer trigger your ad when users search for these terms, which ensures your ad shows up only for highly relevant, targeted searches.

By doing this you can reduce wasted ad spend on irrelevant clicks and traffic that won’t ever convert. Negative keywords are also a great way to boost the CTR (click-through rate) of your ads, which will improve your ROI.

Be sure to update your negative keyword list proactively by keeping track of keywords that bring irrelevant traffic. Some negative keywords you can begin to include in your list include:

• Jobs (unless your ads are for recruitment)
• Free
• Closeout
• Tips/Tricks/Hacks (unless you are advertising a video or a blog post)
• Wholesalers

Turn Off Automatic Audience Targeting Expansion

It’s important to pay attention to some automatic features Google enables when setting up an Ads display campaign.

When you set up a Google display campaign targeting a predefined audience, Google offers you the option (chosen by default) to automatically expand the reach beyond the list provided to them.

Although this strategy can prove successful, this default feature won’t offer any value unless you are using a huge audience list.

If you are setting up new campaigns or working from smaller lists and allow Google to expand its reach by default you will likely spend 2x or 3x more without boosting your revenue.

Understand the Importance of Quality Score

The ROI of your PPC campaign can depend, to a great deal, on your quality score.

Why?

If you offer a low-quality experience, Google doesn’t want to display your ads. By raising your cost per click, they are essentially asking you to do either pause your ads (as they don’t make any financial sense) or improve your user experience.

Here are the aspects that Google looks at to determine your quality score:

• Click-through rate – If your ads show up for the keywords you bid for, and only a few people click, it looks like your ads are irrelevant.
• The relevance of a keyword to its ad group
• The performance of your landing page – Google relies on analytics to assess how users respond to your landing page. If they find your landing pages don’t convert most of the traffic from their ads, you are likely to receive a poor score.
• The relevance of your ad text to users’ searches – If people are not clicking on your ads, Google has a reason to believe that your ads are not relevant. Or perhaps they click and bounce off of your page because there’s a mismatch between what you offered and what they saw on the page.

Google will consider these aspects to rate your ads on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is best and 1 is a catastrophe.

Even after you’ve updated your user experience, your quality score won’t improve overnight. Google is judging by your past poor performance. For an updated score, they must be sure you have really improved the user experience.

If you find your campaign is performing poorly, it’s best to resolve this situation the soonest.

So how does quality score relate to ROI for your Google Ads?

If your quality score is 7 or greater, you will get a discount compared to others. This discount can reduce your cost by as much as 50%. Your ads would get better placement.

On the other hand, if your score is 6, the cost will rise slightly. If the score is 2 or 1, getting a good ROI on your Google Ads is next to impossible. You may end up paying as high as 400% more compared to those who have a decent quality score.

Target Audience by Income Level

When setting up your PPC ads, the first question you should be asking yourself is – who can afford my products/services?

When you know who to target, half your battle is won already.

So how does income filtering helps improve your Google Ads ROI?

When you take the time to identify who is buying, the effects will trickle down not only to your ROI. When your sales team spends less time providing quotations (be it in person or over the phone), it reduces your overheads as well as the strain on your human resources.

Likewise, when your sales team spends most of their time on quality leads (instead of chasing bad leads), they will be able to make the most of their time and you can divert your sales budget to better, more experienced salespersons, which will again translate to better lead-closure rate.

Use Google Ads Extensions

You can supercharge your ROI by using Google Ads extensions to your advantage. With extensions, your ads will show with added features that make them more ap0ealing to your audience. Some of the best extensions include:

• Location – This extension shows your address to your audience.
• Calls – Add a call button so viewers can click on it to reach you instantly.
• Reviews – Displays customer reviews to establish social proof.
• Callouts – Show pop-up notifications for promotional offers.
• Site links – Add a link to your landing page.

Conclusion

Google Ads is an excellent tool that every business should leverage to boost sales and revenue. However, sometimes, making the most of your Google Ads campaign might not be straightforward. These five techniques can help you see a better ROI on your Google Ads campaign.

Schedule a free consultation with our PPC specialists to see how we can reduce wasted ad spend and improve your ROI in no time.