6 Steps check-up to Get Google Ads Ready for 2020

Intro

We have already discussed in our previous post the steps to set-up your Google Ads in Hong Kong and make them one the most important sources for your lead generation.

All Google Ads accounts, including the most sophisticated ones, needs cleaning at some point. Well, this New Year, it’s time to reshuffle and improve the performance of your Google Ads Hong Kong account.

This guide has been written to provide you a step-by-step quick walkthrough to refresh and reset your Google Ads Hong Kong account. Once you’re done with the cleaning task, you’ll certainly find out that it doesn’t  take much legwork to refresh your account. You can even set up a monthly account cleaning task. The cleaning exercise is aimed at decreasing unwanted expenses and improving results and it’s worth your time and energy.

Important Reminder before Beginning

Prior to learning about the 6 incredible steps, you just need to understand that a high Quality Score is your ultimate aim. A high Quality Score ensures that your ads are shown more frequently while decreasing the bid amount.

1. Create a list of KPIs (in case you haven’t made one)

KPIs or Key Performance Indicators of your Google Ads Hong Kong is actually a list of metrics used to determine whether a particular Ad is successful or not. KPIs are unique to every business and depend on what outcome one seeks from Google Ads. For instance, if your primary aim is lead generation then your KPIs would be conversions, Cost per conversion (CPA or cost per action), and conversion rate. On the other hand if your primary aim is to generate traffic to a landing page then your main KPI would be CTR (click-through-rate) or clicks.

Thus, you’ve to be aware of your primary aim of running Google Ads, which would help you to create the list of KPIs.

Most of the time the main scope of our clients Google Ads in Hong Kong is lead generation so we help them to keep this in mind and identify the correct KPIs (conversions number, conversion rate, cost per conversion/CPA,  ROAS etc. etc.) when they run a PPC campaign.

2. Find the low performing KPIs

You need to determine the value of an action for your business and that would help you to set a number as your target. For instance, if a visitor clicks on the buy or subscription link, you need to find out what value it brings to the business. You also need to find out the amount that you’re willing to pay for the same. The number which you find out is the target CPA.

Besides CPA, some of the popular KPIs include CTR, impression share, conversion rate and quality score. Instead of a specific number, improvement on the metrics must be based on the historical data. It’s imperative that you check up on the KPIs to keep improving the performance of your ad campaigns.

It’s extremely critical to understand that your benchmarks might differ based on the product or service you want to promote. For instance, if you create a campaign to promote an e-book download and another to promote subscription of a product then the campaign for the subscription will definitely be more valuable and will carry a higher average CPA. Both the campaigns can be put under conversions and it’s helpful to track the KPIs for each individual campaign.

Now that you’ve identified the KPIs with low scores, what next?

Rest of this blog post will guide you on the actions to take for improving the performance of your Google Ads in Hong Kong. There’re definite ways to improve the non-performing sections of your account.

Low CTR? You need to take a look at the ad copy

If a thorough check up of your Google Ads Hong Kong account doesn’t give clear insights but the CTR is still on the low side then it’s your ad copy that is failing you. Work on your Ad copy!

Tweak the landing pages if there’s a low conversion rate

If the users click on the ads and land on the landing pages but still none are converting then you need to modify  your landing pages.

Rest of the solutions isn’t as obvious as the above. Keep reading…

3. Recheck the bidding strategy

You must be already aware about the two bidding strategies for Google Ads : Automated Bidding and Manual Bidding. You’ve to control your bid strategies at the campaign level. In the bidding menu, click on the box “What do you want to focus on?”

After clicking, you’ll get the following options:

There’re upsides and downsides of both manual and automated bidding and you must give both a try before showing your allegiance for one. It’s best to have different bid strategy for different campaigns in your Google Ads Hong Kong account.

An Automated bidding strategy doesn’t take much time for optimisation. This bidding strategy helps you to inform Google about your focus area like impression share, clicks, conversions and or conversion value. After selecting an option, you’ll then have to provide information pertaining to your target or the maximum spend based on your goal. From here, you’ll have to entrust the Google algorithm to adjust the bid depending on their predictions for performance.

On the contrary, manual bidding gives you the liberty to determine the ad groups as well as the keywords for adjusting the bids depending on their performance analysis. Thus, you can exercise greater control on the bids by using this option. Ultimately, the choice of your bid strategy depends on the time and effort you wish to spend while bidding and the amount of control you want over the bids.

4. Use and review negative keywords

We have already shown how important negative keywords are. If you wish to cut down your wasted spend and get maximum results from your Google Ads in Hong Kong then the easiest way is to add negative keywords. The simple reason behind this is that the search terms related to displaying your ad are always changing. You need to analyze all the keywords and pick the ones that are completely irrelevant and add them to as your negative keywords.

You might even create a long list of negative keywords for all your campaigns and also have a keyword list for your account.

Tip for experts: In case a particular topic keep showing up in the search terms but is not relevant to the ads then it might be relevant to your business. You can try to create a new ad group/campaign for that particular topic.

 

5. Add a retargeting audience

You can refresh your Google Ads Hong Kong account by adding the retargeting audience only when your site is tagged with  Google’s tracking pixel, and the website gets the recommended traffic as per Google’s requirement.

Retargeting audience will inform Google to show your ads to users who’ve visited your website earlier as well. You can configure these audiences at the campaign level. You can have a more comprehensive read about retargeting for Google Ads in Hong Kong here.

Retargeting website visitors using creative ways is an excellent idea as you can easily reach users interested in your brand, services or products. You can expect a higher conversion with an audience who is already aware about your presence. Remarketing campaigns usually perform better with Display ads but using it for search campaigns can also yield decent results.

6. Tweak bids for different devices

You can exercise greater control on the bidding by tweaking bids for different devices depending on their performance. You can control this at Ad group or campaign level. In order to adjust device setting, you can navigate to a particular campaign and click on the “Devices.”

Don’t forget to configure the columns to show the KPIs and then compare the performance data pertaining to every device. Now, you can decrease or increase the bids as per your requirements. For instance, if the mobile devices experience lower CPC but higher conversion rates compared to PCs then you can decide to increase the bid on mobile devices while decreasing the same for PCs.

Don’t forget to note down everything!

These Six steps will help you ensure that this New Year, you create some really high-performing Google Ads for the Hong Kong market and accomplish your business goals. Every time you make too many changes to your account, it’s important that you keep track of all the changes. It’ll be extremely handy to have everything noted down, especially when you maintain a big Google Ads Hong Kong account. Not keeping a tab on the changes, might lead to confusion and you can be easily overwhelmed by the impact of all the changes.

Thus, you can create a document and use the first three campaigns to collect notes and analyze. We prefer using Google Sheets because you’ll be able to export data to Google Ads since it has Google Sheets as one of the options.

Taking down notes for the first few campaigns will help you to evaluate whether your new strategies are a success or a failure. You can make adjustments as and when required. We wish you to have high performing  Google Ads campaigns in 2020! If you need extra help with your PPC campaigns get in touch with us for a free consult.