Paid Search Ads - The Long Game

Paid Search Ads are a big beast to learn and nigh impossible to master - once you think you know everything, the algorithm and UI changes and you have fallen 10 steps backwards and must relearn it. Anyone who claims to be a master at this is lying and over-selling themselves. For this reason I will be spelling things out clearly and simply in a shorter post to make things easier to understand and digest. Buckle up!

To start off, I'll show you some screenshots of the basic steps once you are inside Google Ads to do basic keyword research. There are dozens of other free and paid tools to do this as well, but this one is right within Google Ads and has Google's most up to date and accurate data. 

(Screenshots as of August 2022)

Tools and Settings >
Keyword Planner >
Discover new keywords or get search volume

Now that you know how to get in there, let's start with discovering new keywords. Sit back and think about what the laziest person in the world would search for if they were looking for your product/service, and do research to see how much volume those searches get in the Search Volumes and Forecast section. This data will tell you how often your keywords are searched and has demographics, locations, and plenty more info to help make your decisions. Implement the good ideas into a phrase or exact match.

Alright why phrase or exact match? You have 3 main options (a fourth - a variant of broad match that is just alright). 

First is broad match. Much better than it was several years ago. It will take the basic meaning behind your keywords, say, Lawn mowing service, and then look for any searches that may remotely relate to that. It could be, grass cutting, landscaping service, or in a not so great search, lawn care products. Hence the problem with broad match.

Now if you're not sure where to start? Use the Discover Keyword planner to get a few ideas, then run those ideas on broad match for a month or two to get some other related keywords and ideas. It'll cost a bit more money, but think of it as market research and as money invested in your audience. After you've added more good keywords that Google has found over a month or two, take out underperforming terms and switch good terms to phrase and/or exact match.

Phrase match. This is very similar to modern broad match and will essentially look for very similar phrase variants like the broad match. It's generally the same concept but just upgraded from what I've been able to tell after awhile of using it. It will also include any searches that use your phrase in it, like, affordable lawn mowing service, or lawn mowing service near me, etc. 

Exact match. Says what it is, it's exactly matches the phrase. When you get a lot more exact match searches they tend to be higher converting as you are hitting on exactly what the person is searching for. Has a little wiggle room for minor variations or same words but in different order if they mean a similar thing.

Check long tail variants of your existing keywords in a keyword planner. After you've been doing the broad match research campaign like I said above, go ahead and switch the good ones to phrase match; but then do another step. Grab those phrases and either with your brain or the Discover Keyword planner in Google, go check variants of long-tail versions and variations of those searches. Long-tail simply means longer phrase keywords. So instead of, lawn mowing service, you might put, lawn mowing service in Ramona California, so that you can find customers right in your city and that have a higher intent to convert. Get those and throw them on exact and phrase match.

Change some broad match keywords to phrase match if they are taking too much budget without getting relevant clicks. When you find your keywords in broad match are bleeding budget and getting clicks for non-related keywords, either turn them to phrase match or pause them (don't remove them, just pause, it'll help in doing research down the line). Sometimes you'll think a certain keyword phrase will do really well, but a month later it's spent 1/4 of your budget with no conversions to show for it. Shut it down and try again with a new set of phrases!

Check your best-producing headlines and descriptions, make variants of those, and delete those that are performing poorly. This one can be a bit of a doozy and take time. It takes a long time to set up multiple campaigns with possibly dozens of headlines and descriptions in the ads. When you first start, try out whatever you think is going to perform well and match the keyword searches you are pairing them with. Once you do that, wait at least 1-3 months before you do any big changes. Then when that time has come, you start digging through the "Ads" button on the left side and see which ones haven't gotten any clicks over the last 1-3 months. Get rid of them (and pause the keywords associated if they aren't getting clicks at all either) and then re-write them to something more attention-grabbing and real! See what is working for your ads that are getting clicks and conversions and make variations of them in order to make your ads better.

Notice I said "wait" a lot in the above sections. There's a reason for that. No matter how much budget you throw into Google (or Bing), it can't replace time. There are billions of searches going per day, don't get me wrong. But a lot of the time, your keywords are only getting searched a couple hundred to maybe a couple thousand times per month. Not only that, Google itself takes a long time to learn, compile, and organize the relevant data. Heck, Google takes like 4-5 days just to start learning a new or updated campaign before it starts actually doing some semblance of what you asked it to do.

Waiting a full quarter after launching a set of campaigns is best practice before doing any big optimizations like keyword, ad, bidding, or headline overhauls. If your boss or client is impatient, push for at least 2 months. If they are still impatient, draw the line at 1 month. Do not make any significant changes to a campaign without waiting to get a month of data minimum. You need each volume, you need Google to track view-through clicks and conversions (which are simply delayed clicks or conversions after seeing an ad up to 30 days prior), and you need time for the results in general to compile and organize. 

Now why can't we just "set and forget"? Well. We don't know how well our keywords, ads, creatives will do. Some may do really well, others may not. What makes a good marketer is doing the research up front, making a plan, and then executing it. What makes a GREAT marketer is one that continues to optimize and find ways to make the campaigns more efficient as well as simply making improvements based off data you find. It's an ongoing process, and yes, as time goes on you will narrow in on your audience, signals, and keywords and it will take less and less time to optimize as you go, but still go and do it; there are always ways to make your campaigns better.