How can you increase your ROAS with Google Ads?

One of the common complaints against Google ads is that it is very difficult to obtain a healthy return on ad spend (ROAS). This can leave businesses feeling that the risk to profits outweigh any potential benefits.

If your organic SEO growth and social media marketing feel so much cheaper up front it can feel really easy to justify saving on Google ads. It's tempting to instead invest time into these options in order to increase your traffic. It can also be the case that businesses have experimented with Google ads previously and lost any confidence by losing money through bad advice or poor investments.

Having a poor ROAS can be down to a number of reasons, either through neglecting to maintain your account, trusting the wrong third party to manage your account or simply not taking the time to learn how to use it better. These mistakes are understandable and very common but don’t worry. We are here to help by showing you some ways you can guarantee a better ROAS.

Learn how Google Ads work

Look, we get it. Everyone is busy and so not wanting to spend extra minutes and hours ploughing through online tutorials is very understandable. It’s easy to see why it's tempting to bank on Google ads being intuitive enough or the user tech savvy enough that reading a 'how to' guide may not be necessary. However you are never going to be getting the most out of your account without first learning how it works. 

If you don’t take this time at the start you can easily end up wasting money. Though Pay per click is not necessarily a dark art - it does take a certain level of studying and learning. Sadly the interface isn’t as easy to get the most out of and understand as many would like and so this step will help you avoid the initial missteps. 

Investing time early on can help save you from making expensive mistakes later. We suggest you focus on educating yourself about  account structure, negative keywords, bidding strategies and match types. The more experience you gain the better you will be, but by hammering out the basics your early experiences should hopefully be more positive!

Be realistic when setting up your bidding strategy & budget

Google is a business, they are out to make money and so the best way to limit how much you spend is to set strict parameters. If you leave it up to Google then you can quickly start  to find that you are spending more than you would like. To keep control, be strategic when setting your budgets. 

Ask yourself what can you realistically spend on each campaign? Once you have the answer you can set your daily budget accordingly. This limit will make it impossible for you to pay more than you would like on the campaign itself. 

When you explore bidding, then remember that control is key for managing a tight budget. Bidding manually is the key to having the most control over your account.

Track spend

If this is a new area of digital marketing for you then it's natural that you may make the wrong move at some point. There are a large number of reasons that you may be spending more than you had hoped. We will outline a couple in a moment in order to help you avoid them in a moment.

However in order to save yourself from getting too far down the path of overspending, it's important to stay aware and track spending. Checking how your campaigns are performing regularly will help you get ahead of any problems before they become too big. 

By setting aside some minutes every day you can stop an issue from spiralling out of control.

Be selective in your keyword match types

When you set up your campaigns on Google ads you are given some choices around your match types. This helps to control which audience is seeing your campaign. If you are getting lots of clicks, costing you money, and yet your bounce rate is high, it may be due to your match types being too broad.

A broad match type is going to cause your ad to be displayed to a much broader audience. You may think, ‘Great a bigger audience for me to sell too!’ But users will go to Google for a specific purpose, often with a product or service in mind. If you are pulling a larger audience whose aims lie elsewhere, you are unlikely to see a good ROAS due to wasted clicks.

You can of course still use broad match keywords. But it’s important to do so strategically and alongside negative keywords. These are keywords which you include to rule out irrelevant searches.

Win more relevant clicks by bidding on both phrase and exact keywords. It’s important that you are also checking your Search Query report to make sure that the keywords you are bidding on are the right ones for your target audience.

Check that you are targeting your campaigns to appear in SERP or Websites. 

Google ads give marketers the option to display their campaign through search and display. This can be a real asset for someone hoping to increase their companies reach and boost brand awareness. However it can completely rinse your budget if you are using it ineffectively or by mistake.

This is because, with this option selected, your campaign will be displayed in both SERPs and across the wider web. It is better to create campaigns which are explicitly aimed at either search engine results or the wider web, as a user who searches for something specifically has a very different intent to a user who is casually flicking through another page.

If you would like help with your SEO or SERP ranking, or are seeking advice on how you can improve your digital marketing strategy we are here to help. It may be that you aren’t even sure where to start with getting more traffic to your site, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our digital marketing team.