My Google Ads Approach to Reach a 15x ROI

Creating a campaign and investing in Google Ads alone isn't enough to improve sales and to accomplish one's objectives. Beyond that, my path has showed me that a winning strategy involves continual trial and error prior to achieving victory. How do we know that we are actually winning? In this guide, I will detail my strategy at?Lasus?which mixes academic and experimental teachings of over 5 years in investing. I will omit the basics (how to create an account, campaign, keywords, etc.) which you can learn easily on YouTube, and will instead focus on how to improve an existing strategy. It is IMPORTANT to consider that each business may require a different strategy depending on variables such as product, country and target audience. I will begin by sharing a couple of general recommendations and then detail the process that we use for improving our ROI monthly.

Advice #1: Measure well:

After configuring all the basics and having more than 10 campaigns running, I started wondering whether the investment was profitable, and although our sales increased, I had no clear way of determining how each campaign was contributing to that increase and whether the return surpassed the investment. After researching and receiving help from?Felipe Aristizabal, I noticed that the?first step?was to start measuring better/correctly. I used an?UTM?methodology, which helped us link the keyword, ad group and campaign with the lead and its conversions (sales, quotations, sign-ups, and so on). I also configured the different conversions using?Google Tag Manager, so we could track information in Google Analytics.

Advice #2: Ease measuring with automated reports.

Once we had configured a proper way to measure, we found a tool that has eased our life a lot:?Google Data Studio. It allows us to add different data sources to the same panel and standardize reports and views which help us analyze data easier. For example, in Data studio we connected Google Ads and our database and linked them with the different data sources through the UTMs in order to get a real time report of our spending and ROI in Google Ads. The result is something as follows:

I configured the dashboard above the way I wanted, and I don't have to update anything, not even the date. On the X axis you can notice the last 12 months, and on the vertical axis the performance for each month: on the left axis I have the costs per subscription, quotation, and order of a specific campaign, and on the right side there is the ROI of the campaign. Some may be wondering why I just don't track data in Google Analytics, and the truth is that I don't fully trust it, for two reasons. First because of a misconfiguration or update that usually happens, and second because Google's interest is that you spend more, so I prefer not rolling the dice with a possible conflict of interest (I will go deeper into this).

Advice #3: Save money by using a tool to prevent fraud

I personally use?Click Cease?in order to block those IPs which are trying to consume my budget without creating conversions..

As you can notice, this tool helped me save 376 usd last month in unwanted clicks.

Advice #3: Create winning landing pages

Despite having the best keywords, budget and ads, the landing pages are key to create conversions. You must have a clear structure with titles, content (preferably text, images, and video) and a clear?CALL TO ACTION.?Communication and user experience are the key. I feel that design is not a science but an art, meaning that it is subjective. So, my advice for reducing bounce rate and increasing conversions is to do an A/B testing. There are multiple tools to do this, although the one I use is?Google Optimize. I recommend also trying heatmaps and recording users with?Hotjar, so you can notice patterns that help you make decisions to improve.

Now, let′s take a look at the?process?that we perform each month.

1.?????Determining how much of the budget are we throwing away on unwanted keywords:?For this, we must optimize negative keywords by downloading the search terms from the last period to excel. Then, paste them to an existing Excel spreadsheet where you already had a bank of pre-approved existing words, and with a v-lookup function you can check whether those search terms were ok. I have been focusing on reviewing the ones that are not added (column s?#N/D) and if they are actually bad I mark them with one in column P, and then just copy the column S in the negative keyword list that you have for your campaign, and add the approved ones to the bank.

For those who are wondering why not just do this directly on the search term panel in Google Ads, the answer is simple. If you had a few search terms it would be easier, however, think about 10,000 search terms to evaluate. That's a consuming time task. What we gain with this part of the process, is saving time, I only had to check 3 terms (the green highlighted square) instead of 20 (the red highlighted square), because those of the green highlighted had previously been checked and accepted, though not added as keywords to google ads. Finally, we easily get an important insight: How much of the budget are we missing due to unwanted keywords. In this example (orange square), 15% of the search terms are unwanted (red square) and we are wasting 5% of our budget. It is curious that according to google, a keyword may have?108 clicks?but when you visit the search term you actually count less clicks,?in this case 37.

2.?????Go to recommendations and apply what you feel may help you, EXCEPT for the bid strategy (we will go deeper).

?3.?????Improve your keyword quality levels:?Make them relevant by adding them to your ads as headlines and descriptions, and to your landing page, preferably with an h1, h2 or h3 heading. If one keyword's quality level does not improve try changing it to a narrower concordance.

?4.?????Delete those keywords that do not bring conversions:?Either in Data studio or in Google ads, map those words that are only creating visits but no sales, and delete them if your target is to improve sales.

?5.?????Add the word’s “companions” that are performing well on other campaigns to the ad group:

Filter your data studio with the best ROI by keyword, and try to find a pattern in those words, for example, if all of them have the companions “buy”, or “quote”, or cities after the word, then add them to the campaign.

?6.?????Check you CTR performance, create an Hypothesis to improve it, and a test:

CTR may be negatively correlated with CPC and it is a pretty important metric for the quality of your ad, and for how high and how often google shows it. Try adding responsive search ads and start fixing relevant key words in the first position, and then fix a group of titles that are “companion words” which are related to your product or service in the second position. Always add each keyword you are advertising as a title. Create another ad that switches the first and?second group. Get insights from the best results in other campaigns and expand them across the account.

?7.?????Adjust your bid limits and strategy:?This may be the most important part of the improvement process. Since I have been investing in Google Ads, employees at google call me to “help” me “improve” my performance. Obviously, their objective (besides helping you) is to increase your spending in Google ads. Considering again the conflict of interest, I don’t recommend following all their recommendations blindly, but with a decision-making process as follows:

?The academy says that in order to optimize performance one should use “smart” bidding strategies that focus on conversions. I would advise you to try these strategies if your business is B2C and the sales cycle is within 30 days. What I have experienced in my B2B business, whose sales cycle is greater than 90 days, is that when using those “smart” bidding strategies my CPC goes up and visitors and conversions decrease, why? There must be a correlation between the number of visitors and the sales, or at least that′s part of the?funnel theory. When “smart” bidding, google pushes the bid higher for a “more qualified” lead that is in theory more likely to bring conversions to the site, and there is the problem: if google, or the tracking system, has measuring errors, then the strategy is not as smart. Errors can derive from:

• An improper configuration of conversions
• UTMs disappearing: it has happened to me that a lead which came through google ads loses its gclid or utms in the url and the conversion is not properly recorded. I have no idea why this happens.
• The time frame exceeds the one supported by google and the conversion is not recorded.

In conclusion, Google ads is a great tool and we are grateful for it for boosting our business. There are many more things that I don’t know compared to those I do know and I feel that this subject could be a university degree. It has so many variables and it keeps adding features that this guide may be useless in less than two years, hopefully not. I hope that many people find this writing helpful and I would be happy to improve it if someone feels that there is value to add. Again, this reflects only my experience, so depending on your business details you may not agree with this guide, what I can assure is that it has worked for me. If you liked it and you feel it could help someone, feel free to share it.

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