1. Use Customer Match

Google’s Smart Bidding algorithms now use Customer Match for many campaign types to help aid performance. All campaigns are being included by the end of 2022, so they should be used wherever possible!

Customer Match allows you to upload (GDPR compliant) Customer Data in the form of emails, phone numbers, first & last names, country, as well as ZIP data (however, we find email works just fine).  The uploaded customer data will be matched with Google user profiles to help understand your customer type.  It also can be used as an audience signal for finding future potential customers.

Ensure you update the Customer Lists regularly to include newer customers.  This can be done via a CSV upload or the Google Ads API.  Customer lists can be segmented in many ways if you have a large set of customers – for example, high-value purchasers, people who purchase every Christmas etc. so get creative with the audiences, and you’ll be sure to find some interesting segments within the data!

 

2. Track Primary and Secondary conversions

Conversion actions come in two types: primary and secondary.  Within primary, these should be the conversions you want to quickly report on and optimise towards.  An example of a primary conversion would be a Purchase or a Lead Form submission.

Secondary conversions are slightly different- you can still report on them, but they won’t be used in the optimisation process for Smart Bidding.  They’re useful for obtaining more information about the actions taken on the website.  An example of a secondary conversion could be an “Add to Basket” or “Spending more than 3 minutes on the website”.  While the primary conversions are most important, secondary conversions can show value to your campaign if a primary conversion hasn’t been recorded yet- for example, a keyword with multiple Add to Basket conversions would likely be worth keeping as it is generating traffic that is completing a valuable action on your website.

 

3. Test Performance Max

Performance Max has been the buzzword of 2022, and Google is certainly pushing for adoption. We’ve tested it, and the majority of accounts that we run now have an element of PMax because it’s working very well in places.  However, we’ve seen times when it hasn’t worked in some formats, for example, when targeting too few products in an asset group.

 

4. Try Broad Keywords

If we’d given this advice pre-2020, we wouldn’t be worth our salt as a PPC agency! This is because Broad Match (the default keyword) was never used within PPC circles, quite simply because it wasn’t very good at all.  The matching to completely irrelevant Google searches meant that it was seen as a little Google money-making scheme for inexperienced people running PPC – yes, my first PPC campaign was Broad Match central!

But things have changed.  Google’s machine learning has advanced to the point that it now understands the context of the words better.  This means that it can be a very good way of finding new conversions from niche, long tail searches.

 

5. Create GREAT Image Assets

Always a huge must for social advertising but now (nearly) on a level pegging for Google too.  With the advent of Performance Max, as well as other campaigns that work across the Google Network, the requirement for better image assets has become much more important.  We’ve seen countless times a campaign started to work so much better with more specific and engaging images.  Plus, it can really help to scale your campaigns – make display work on Google Ads and you’ve got a one way ticket to many, many more conversions.

 

6. Test, test, and test again!

PPC is the ultimate arena for testing in the world of Digital Marketing.  Why so good?  Well, the quality of traffic is second to none- we decide the words that people will type into a search box, to then click an ad (crafted by us) that lands on a specific landing page (again decided by and often built by us).  This allows us to test which words work best, which ad copy performs best, and finally which messaging on the landing page has the most engagement, and ultimately most conversions.  The ability to set up campaign experiments within Google Ads makes this all the more easy and allows for fair test conditions.  Cool hey?!

There’s also soo much to test! Be it new keywords, ad copy, landing pages, targeting settings, bids…you name it, we test it.

 

Conclusion

Google Ads, while being one of the first types of paid media, continues to evolve.  Nothing has stayed the same in Google Ads for very long, and some changes are made for the better (more primary conversion data for Performance Max campaigns) and some not (give us more search terms!!), we can safely say that Google is continuing to innovate it’s platform and learning along the way.  These top tips will most likely be old news in 2023 so come back and check for our next top tips update then! 🙂