How We Optimize Your Ad Budget

We've been doing Google Ads for over 13 years, so we know what to look for and how to make the most of your advertising budget.

The main topics we evaluate...

1 - Performance Tracking

In the PPC industry, there are what's known as "KPI's" (Key Performance Indicators). Some of the most popular and helpful KPI's to track are orders, phone calls, form submissions, chats, etc.

By tracking these metrics, we can evaluate the health of your overall business and identify all opportunities.

2. Website/Landing Pages

Did you know that you could be doing everything right, but if your website/landing pages are too slow you could be paying for it big time?

Page Speed

We recommend that you improve your page load speed because Google penalizes websites that don’t load quickly. We used PageSpeed Insights by Google to test your site speed.

Here's an example of the PageSpeed Insights tool:

3. Campaigns Settings

The term "different strokes for different folks" is an apt expression here. When a user searches for your product or website, they might not always be sitting at a desktop computer. Or they might be living in Miami, but searching for hotels in London for their upcoming trip. Maybe they are night-owls and do all of their searching after dusk but before dawn.

The point here is that your customer profile is going to vary, depending on what type of business you're in.

By configuring your advertising campaign to fit your customer profile, we can use your advertising dollars in the most effective ways.

We understand the "Montessori Prospective Parent" profile very well.

Campaign Types/Subtypes

It's important to match the campaign type to the overall result that you are looking to achieve. For instance, if you would like to remarket to your audience, it's a wise choice to create a whole new campaign that is dedicated to remarketing. By that same token, if you're goal is to generate leads, a conversion that's dedicated to that particular goal would be advisable.

Devices

With Google Ads we are able to segment which kind of device we advertise on. For instance, we can choose to advertise on mobile phones (we can even pinpoint which model of mobile phone), desktop computers, and tablets.

Not only that, but we can also adjust our bids depending on the type of device that a user might be using, e.g. bid more for clicks from mobile phones.

Device Insights

Google Ads can give us insight into what kinds of devices are converting better. This allows us as advertisers to be more effective in our ad spend.

Ad Schedule

Did you know your advertisement doesn't have to run 24/7? In fact, more often than not, it's better if it doesn't.

You see, the audience that's most interested in your business is going to have certain characteristics, and one of those characteristics is the time of day that they use Google. Some audiences only use Google early in the morning, some throughout the day, and some only in the middle of the night.

We also can run "Call Only" campaigns that are only available during your business hours, when it's the right time for your phone to ring.

It's important that we know which audience we're targeting, and focus on showing them advertisements at the appropriate time of day so that your advertising budget is being spent most effectively.

Ad Rotation

Ad rotation is a feature in Google Ads that allows us to have Google show the best performing advertisement or equally weight every ad.

We recommend using at least 3 ads per ad group and using the rotation method Optimize: Prefer best performing ads.

Geographic Targeting

This is a very useful tool. If you're a school that's located in Austin, Texas, you wouldn't want to show advertisements to people in Scottsdale, Arizona who are typing in the keyword "Montessori school near me", would you? NO!

That would be a terrible waste of ad spend. With geographic targeting, we can show your advertisements to the appropriate people in the right areas for your business.

That said, we recommend targeting as much additional geographic area as you are able to. The more people eligible to see your ads, the more people who may become customers.

Delivery Method

Google has two delivery method options:

**Standard** - This delivery method shows your ads evenly throughout the day.
**Accelerated** - This delivery method shows your ads as quickly as possible, each time there is a relevant search term that could trigger your ad.

Standard is usually the best option when you are limited by budget, which you are (that’s assuming you are not currently able to increase budget and capture the additional relevant traffic that’s available, of course).

When you’re not limited by budget we recommend using Accelerated.

4. Keywords and Bids

When you create and publish an advertisement, it might not get shown to the people you intend for it to be shown to. In fact, it might not get shown at all.

This is where the importance of keywords and bids come in.

You see, every time someone searches on Google they are typing in keywords and keyphrases. As an advertiser, when someone searches for your product/service, your advertisements will enter the Google bidding process if your keywords match theirs.

Now this brings up the question "what are bids and bidding?" Great question.

There are multiple people and businesses who are trying to get to the first position of Google Ads. Depending on your industry, there might be more or there might be less. The main idea here is that you have competitors, and Google can only advertise so many ads.

In order to limit the number of ads, Google has advertisers bid on their keywords just like at an auction. You would think that the highest bidder would always win. Not so. Google also takes into account the quality of the advertisement and the quality of the landing page that the user lands on after clicking your ad. In actuality, an ad that has a higher quality score can sometimes outrank an ad that has a higher bid.

Match Types

There are 4 kinds of match types:

Broad
Broad Match Modifier
Phrase Match
Exact Match

We recommend that if you are starting a new campaign to go broad, rather than narrow. This is to collect data that you can further refine and extract insights from.

Negative Keywords

An important part of our optimizations will be to monitor your search terms reports and add new, irrelevant keywords as negative keywords to prevent you from wasting money.

We recommend adding negative keywords via Shared Library. It is a more efficient way to manage all the negative keywords for the account.

We've developed an extensive negative keyword list for Montessori Schools.

Bid Strategy

Like we said earlier, when someone searches for a keyword or key phrase, your ad will be entered into Google's auction. Having the proper bid strategy in place can help you accomplish your particular goals more effectively.

5. Ad Copy

The ad copy is the actual words and phrases that are shown in the advertisement. It's important that the words and phrases are optimized for maximum results.

The ad copy is going to be the first thing a potential customer interacts with, and with the limited real estate on the ads every word counts!

Here's an example:

Recommended Number of Ads Per Ad Group

We recommend running at least 3 ads per ad group.

Ad Copy Improvement Recommendations

There are a number of best-practice improvements we can make to the ads, such as:

Capitalizing the first letter in every word (which increases CTR).
Better using keywords in your Display URLs to increase ad relevance and CTR.
Testing different strong call to actions

6. Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are free tools that Google offers to boost the quality of your ads. These are severely underutilized by most advertisers. However, they can increase the overall user experience of your ads and can give you a serious leg-up in the auction process.

Sitelinks

Sitelinks are links to other pages on your site, and they display below your ad text. Usually people do not click Sitelinks very often, but using them makes your ads larger and gives you space to say more, so they can have a significant impact on CTR.

Location Extensions

Location extensions let you show your physical address below your ad. Google decides when to show your address based upon how close a user is to you.

Call Extensions

Call extensions let you show your phone number in your ads.

Callout Extensions

Callouts allow you to add up to 100 characters of additional text below your description.

Structured Snippets

Structured snippets are similar to callouts and allow you to display additional information about your services in your ad copy.

Seller Ratings

Ratings are the gold stars you see in some ads in Google’s search results. They’re an automatic extension, meaning that Google automatically pulls ratings from 3rd-party sources such as Shopper Approved.

7. Remarketing

Remarketing is a powerful way to turn people who have previously visited your website into customers. The reality is that the more "touches" a potential customer has with your business, the higher the odds that they convert into a customer.

By only advertising to people once, you're missing out on all of the potential customers who just haven't had enough time and exposure with your business.

Google Display Network

We recommend running a dynamic remarketing campaign to show ads to people who have visited your website. This is a great, relatively inexpensive way to keep your brand front of mind.

Customer Match

We can upload a data file of your customers’ email addresses. Google will match as many as possible to people who are Google users. When those users are signed in to their Google accounts, they see your ads as they use Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail.

We can use this for advanced strategies like re-engagement campaigns, up-selling, strategic bid management, etc.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) is a feature that lets you customize your search ads campaign for people who have previously visited your site, and tailor your bids and ads to these visitors when they're searching on Google and search partner sites.

8. Growth / Performance Improvement Opportunities

Once you've got Google Ads up, running, and working for you, you might want to think about expanding your advertising channels.

While Google basically has a monopoly on internet searches, and the vast majority of searches happen on Google, not everyone uses Google.

Bing Ads

Bing is Microsoft’s version of Google, and has partnered with Yahoo! to deliver ads via the Bing/Yahoo! advertising network. Pay-per-click ads can be managed for both the Bing and Yahoo! search engines using a single tool called Bing Ads, which is very similar to Google AdWords.

Using Bing Ads opens you up to a large audience of people who don’t use Google, as approximately 30% of all U.S. searches on computers take place on the Bing and Yahoo! networks. CPCs on Bing tend to be lower than on Google. We would like to test utilizing the Bing and Yahoo! advertising networks for you.

Facebook Ads

We recommend running Dynamic Remarketing ads on Facebook.

9. Cost Estimates & Performance Projections

We can give you a more accurate number of your true cost per lead and show you areas of potentially wasteful spending. This evaluation will shed light on what your campaign is actually producing for your business, and it will also show you where you can optimize your current ad spend.