Choosing the right settings options for your ad campaigns will avoid a lot of headaches that are caused by the disorganized way of spending and a less targeted advertising. Right settings help you avoid many mistakes and save substantial amount of money that could be invested further on marketing. Here are five setting strategies that you must not ignore while advertising on Google Ads:
1. Ad Schedule
This settings option is infinitely useful if you are not willing to squander on your ad campaign budget. By using Ad Schedule, you can make your ads appear on certain specified hours of the day or days of the week, as you prefer. It also allows you to set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids in specific days and times.
By default, your ads will be shown “All day” with Google Ads(AdWords) and you will get lots of irrelevant clicks and thus end up losing a good deal of money. Scheduling your ad is imperative if you have significant amount of data on your campaign and you know exactly at what day and time you would get more potential customers.
If you schedule your ads to the day and time of your choice, then it will save a huge sum from being wasted for no purpose because now you are getting clicks from the peak hours of your business. Spending for these prospects will automatically increase your conversion than spending elsewhere.
When you choose one of your ad campaigns from Ad Schedule, you will see a chart that shows the number of times your ads showed up and the click they got. This along with other data such as CTR and CPC will allow you to plan a better schedule and thereby make your ad campaigns more profitable. Setting a starting and end date for your campaigns will automatically stop your campaigns. This will save you from paying for your campaigns that are still alive due to your ignorance or simply because you forgot to end your campaign.
2. Bidding and Budget
This is probably the most important of all setting options available in Google Ads(AdWords). Because bids can either make or break your ad campaigns. Setting bids and fixing a budget is the key to successfully managing your ad campaign budget and making the most out of it, especially if your budget is limited.
Your budget is the average amount you are willing pay as a daily payment for a single campaign. If you want to see your average daily budget across all your campaigns, go to “Budget” column under the “Campaigns” tab.
Your maximum cost-per-click bid is the maximum amount you’ll pay for a click on your ad in an ad group. Fixing a comfortable budget and bid limit is so important before you start your ad campaigns right away.
As there are chances for traffic to fluctuate and this might result in exceeding your monthly budget, Google ensures that it will only charge you by the amount you get when your average daily budget is multiplied with 30.4 (i.e. the average days in a month). The excess amount will be credited to your account. This is called overdelivery credit.
There are two important ways to set your bids:
Maximize Clicks vs. Manual CPC Bidding
As the name suggests, maximize clicks is a bid strategy you can use if you want to maximize clicks and drive traffic to your website. This is simple and automated. You just have to fix a daily budget and Google will automatically manage your bids.
Whereas Manual CPC bidding allows you to manage your maximum CPC bids yourself. This is most useful if you have found that certain keywords or ad placements are more profitable to you. Using Manual CPC bidding, you can allocate a good amount of your advertising budget to these keywords and placements.
Remember, Google will not tell you exactly how to run your campaign in a cost-effective and profitable way. They’re clever, so you need to do research, take advice from experts, or at times, you may even have to figure out what works best to your campaigns on the basis of the data gathered from various analytics tools.
Being able to measure your campaigns will immensely help you take more sensible decisions on your spend.
Creating a bid strategy is crucial if you want to control your expense on your PPC (pay-per-click) and also to realize your aspiration for an incredibly high conversion rate and ROI without causing serious damages to your wallet.
3. Ad Extensions
Extensions are settings to provide more actionable information with your ad that will serve as gateways for attracting a profitable action from the prospect.
They simply provide more information about you and give your customers enough details to act. Extensions can be added in a variety of formats such as a call button, location information, links to a particular page of your website, additional text and more.
There is no extra cost to add extensions to your campaign. You will be charged as usual when someone clicks a call button(call extensions), a download button(app extensions) or a direction icon(location extensions) to make an action by viewing your ad. These extensions add value to your ad and provide the customer more information about you.
Extensions can steadily increase your ad’s click-through-rate and therefore maximize conversion rate because they persuade a potential customer to make an immediate action.
But Google is not guaranteeing you that by adding an extension to your ad, you’ll be always able to see it with your ad. In order to qualify for extensions to appear with your ad, your ad is supposed to perform well.
Extensions will appear only when they are predicted to improve your ad’s performance, i.e. your ad’s position and Ad Rank must be high enough for extensions to appear with your ad.
4. Targeting and Observation Settings
You can use these options if you want your ads to reach to a specific audience that is relevant to you or if you want your ads to appear on content written on specific topics. But use these options only when you want your ads shown to a specific audience that you choose.
For Display campaigns, if you are not using targeting options, your ads will run anywhere in the web, across Display Network and YouTube and only restricted by your campaign and account settings. If you use Targeting options your ads will be reaching the right audience and they will appear only in those places you wanted them to appear.
While observation setting allows you to monitor whether certain criteria you chose for targeting- such as audience, placements, or content topics -worked or not worked. This data will guide your further action in your campaign and help you make sensible bid adjustments.
5. Delivery Method
There are mainly two delivery methods you can choose to show your ads. They are called Standard and Accelerated.
If you are setting your delivery method as ‘standard’(the default option) then your ad spend will be evenly spread out over 24 hours. That means it will not be used up in the morning hours itself. This is the best option if you are starting out with a limited budget and your clicks and traffic mostly peak up during the later hours of the day.
Contrarily, accelerated delivery method will show your ad as quickly as possible starting from 12.01 a.m. If your daily budget is not that high, don’t choose this option because all the budget would be used up before it is sunrise. This can be your choice only if your daily budget is high enough for it and you need an accelerated ad delivery for some reason.
Your ad campaigns will not be a bitter experience if you know exactly how to set up your campaigns for your particular goals while always spending within your comfortable budget.
These five settings are instrumental for running a successful ad campaign and to get quality leads and conversions from Google Ads as you wish.
