4 Google Ads tips for improving click-through rate and conversion rate

Google Ads is an excellent way to target keywords that would be extremely difficult for your website to rank for organically. With the right type of ads, any website can start gaining targeted traffic and sales almost immediately.

However, not every Google Ad campaign is a success.

The efficacy of a paid search campaign heavily depends on your strategy and execution. You have to be tactical in how you plan your paid campaign and meticulous in the way you execute your strategy.

Following are 5 Google Ads tips that will help you improve CTR and conversion rate.

1. Competitor analysis

When it comes to Google Ads, one of the most important aspects is successful competitor analysis.

You may have a brilliant strategy in mind, but that may not be the correct one. Moreover, there is no way to learn whether your strategy is the right one or not unless you run your campaigns and spend a sizeable chunk of your marketing budget on it.

That is not always an option for newbies and smaller businesses with a  limited marketing budget. Thorough testing of ideas isn’t always a wise choice.

That’s why detailed competitor analysis is so crucial.

Identify competitors that have already found some success with paid campaigns. Analyse their paid campaign strategies. See what they are doing well and adopt the same strategy. You can always add more to it from your side and improve upon it.

Tools like SEMRush and SpyFu allow you to see your competitor’s paid campaigns, the keywords they target, the ad copy they use, and more.

Instead of shooting in the dark, you can make more intelligent and data-driven decisions with competitor analysis.

2. Write inviting and engaging ad copy

Ad copy often plays the most important role in increasing click-through and conversion rates. When creating copy for your ads, think from your customer’s perspective. Understand their emotions, identify their pain-points, and then base your ad copy around that.

Here are a few tips for creating a compelling and engaging ad copy:

• Appeal to the emotions of your potential customers.
• Use statistics whenever possible to increase credibility.
• Mirror the user’s goal in your ad copy.
• Creating an engaging headline that grabs your reader’s attention and encourages them to read further.
• Utilise the display URLs to full effect by adding important and relevant keywords for users.
• Preemptively respond to common objections, questions, and curiosities in your ad copy to minimise barriers.
• Focus on the benefits, not the features of your product or service.

3. Don’t forget negative keywords and exclusions

It is easy to lose hundreds of dollars by targeting the wrong keywords in a Google search campaign. You have to be mindful of the keywords you are targeting if you want to use your budget efficiently.

You can decrease your expenses and improve results from your ad at the same time by using negative keywords and exclusions.

For example, if you are selling only women’s handbags, you can use the negative keywords list to exclude keywords, such as “men’s purses”, “men’s handbags”, and “men’s wallets”, to make your ads more targeted and cost-efficient.

Similarly, you can also exclude placements to exclude business categories where you do not want your ads to show. This can save you irrelevant clicks and extra expenses.

4. Be mindful of mobile traffic

Mobile traffic has been on the rise. It has now officially surpassed desktop traffic. The volume of traffic coming from mobile devices is only going to increase in the near future, and for that, digital advertisers need to be ready.

You are not only supposed to have a mobile-friendly website to serve to mobile visitors, but you also need to leverage any tools available to make your ads more compelling and attractive to mobile users.

This includes leveraging mobile-exclusive ad extensions, such as “app promotions” and “call-only”. The former ad extension allows you to get more app installs, while the latter one enables a potential customer to call the business directly.

These are vital tricks to increase engagement and ad value.

Moreover, don’t forget that real-estate becomes all the more important for mobile traffic. Because of limited screen size, you need to have the most important part of the information in the first line of your landing page. This will encourage a higher engagement rate and conversion rate.

What’s next?

The above-mentioned tips will help you achieve a better CTR and conversion rate. The next steps would be to measure your ad performance, test different variations of your ads, and refine the entire process to optimise the results.