3 Tips To Make Your Search Program More Efficient

If you’re in need of some quick wins to boost search performance without increasing spend, look no further! We’ve compiled a list of things you can do right now to improve your performance with minimal investment.

1. Insert Keywords into Ad Copy to Improve Ad Relevance

Optimizing for ad relevance is a quick and easy way to see immediate boosts to your CTR. Ad relevance focuses on how closely your keywords are related to your ads. The easiest way to accomplish this is to include your most popular keywords in your ad copy.

We made the same updates for one of our partners and in one week we saw CTR improvements ranging from +35% all the way up to +150%!

Seriously, go update your ads.

2. Search Query Analysis for Negative Keywords

Given the time that we’re in, search query analysis is especially important. With more people at home comes more aimless browsing. Doing this analysis will help prevent your ads from serving to those who are in the wrong stage of the sales funnel.

However, it’s difficult sometimes to gauge a user’s intent based on a short phrase, so here are a couple tips to help you distinguish the action takers from the lookie-loos:

• When you analyze your search terms under the keywords tab, look for ones that drive a lot of clicks, but don’t convert. This is a hidden signal that there’s a disconnect between the intent of that search and your offering.
• Look for signals of users very early in the research phase. Typically shown as “what is…” type of questions. If they don’t know what your service or product is, chances are they aren’t prepared to buy it.

By adding these negative keywords, you can reduce the cost on non-converting search queries.

3. Introduce Shared Budgets to Maximize Ad Spend

Shared budgets are a great way to allow spend to flow freely amongst your campaigns and ensure your budget is being used.

For example, if you’re using separate budgets and one of your campaigns has an increase in clicks, your ads would stop serving once your budget was hit. However, if you’re using a shared budget, this campaign could pull from a larger pool of funds and help you capitalize on the increase in performance.

A bonus is that these budgets are quick to create  – just go to your tools and settings in Google and look for shared budgets under your shared library.

Tip: Shared budgets are especially effective if you’re utilizing smart bidding strategies. In combination, your full budget will be used, and it’ll go towards the campaigns that are most likely to achieve the goal you set when choosing your smart bidding strategy.

Don’t know which smart bidding strategy is right for you? Senior Digital Advertising Analyst EJ Herd breaks them down here.

Interested In Learning More?

These are just a few examples of quick wins, but every business and every account is different. If you’d like to learn what else you can do to boost your search performance, let us know! Our environment is rapidly changing and all of us at Wheelhouse are eager to help. Take care of yourselves and stay healthy!