When starting with Google Ads, it can be hard to tell when it’s time to scale your ad campaigns and how to do so effectively.
I’ve learned a lot of helpful strategies while scaling Google Ads campaigns for my own company over the years, so I wanted to share some tips in the hopes they could be as valuable to you as they have been to me. That way, you’ll be scaling your Google Ads campaigns like a pro in no time!
I’ll be discussing the right time to scale, ways to grow your ad campaigns, and essential pay-per-click (PPC) advertising metrics throughout this article.
Is spending money on ads worth it?
Ads can be powerful tools that bring in a steady stream of leads so your company can make more sales and grow, but running ad campaigns isn’t a walk in the park.
Your ad spending budget is just one part of managing your Google Ads account. You also need to pay attention to audience targeting, keywords, ad copy, etc., to ensure you’re getting conversions proportionate to how much you’re spending.
You may be asking, “Rodney, how should I go about determining how much I should spend on my ads?” I suggest you start slow when building up your Google Ads campaigns. Experiment with a small to moderate budget first and slowly work your way up to find the right balance for your needs.
How do you tell if your Google Ads are ready to scale?
Before allocating more money to ads, you should ensure your business is ready to take on the added costs. Scaling up too quickly can result in the opposite of your goal: a negative cash flow.
Here are the questions I recommend you consider before increasing your budget:
- Are you meeting your return on investment (ROI) goals?
- Are you spending your entire campaign budget?
- Is your impression share lower because of budget limitations?
If you have excellent ad performance and are consistently maxing out your daily budget, it might be a sign to invest more capital in Google Ads.
Keep in mind that putting more money into a campaign doesn’t guarantee better ad performance. Before you start raising the budget, you should ensure you’re optimizing your ad targeting, creatives, and other factors that influence clicks and conversions.
Things to consider when scaling your Google Ads campaign
While it’s definitely important, your ad spend isn’t the only thing that changes when upgrading your Google Ads campaign. Your campaign’s entire structure, including target keywords and creatives, must adapt to get more conversions.
Here are some of the areas I recommend you work on optimizing to scale your Google Ads account:
Budget
You might have to pull your budget back and work on increasing your return before you can safely add more money to your campaign. Tracking your ROI will let you know whether you need to raise or lower your ad spending budget.
If you determine the amount you’re spending on ads is much lower than the profit you’re making from conversions, you can confidently increase your spending to take advantage of high-performing ads.
Competitors
You should look at your competitors’ keywords and identify which ones get the most traffic.
When you know which keywords your competitors rank for, you can find and capitalize on terms they haven’t targeted or add high-quality content to challenge them on the most valuable ones.
Keyword performance
If you just use the suggested keywords without refining and adding to the list, you could be wasting some of your budget on keywords that don’t get conversions.
It’s vital to monitor keyword performance so you know when to pause or stop using a term that isn’t getting traffic.
You can track performance using metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, impression share, and conversion value. I’ll explain more about these metrics later in the guide, so stick with me if you want to learn more!
Search terms report
The Google search terms report is a valuable resource for identifying the search terms that trigger your ads. You can use it to discover new keywords and improve your existing ones.
The report shows which keywords match users’ search terms, letting you know if your matching strategy is working. If a broad-match keyword is getting search terms that aren’t relevant to your products or services, you might need to adjust the match type to exact or phrase match instead.
Looking at the search terms report also helps you spot irrelevant terms to add to your negative keyword list, which ensures your ads only show up for your target audiences.
Landing pages
Your approach to landing pages can significantly impact your ad campaign’s conversion rate. Your landing pages should be relevant to the search terms and appeal to your target audience, with a clear call to action. There’s no need to put in unnecessary fluff here!
It helps to put your keywords into groups or even subgroups and create landing pages for those specific categories. While the amount of traffic to those pages might be lower because they’re targeting a smaller audience, the conversion rate will be higher.
Ideas for optimizing your ad campaign targeting
Experimenting with the targeting of your ad campaigns can help you tap into audiences that haven’t seen your ads yet. Making even small adjustments to things like target audience location can help you find more people who want to purchase your products or services.
In this section, I’ll provide some ideas you can use to widen the reach of your Google Ads campaign.
Try different locations, languages, and timing
Your service area might include cities you haven’t been targeting in your campaigns, so you should try expanding to different areas to see how the changes affect your performance. You might discover that some places get you more conversions than others.
You could also try widening your audience by running ads at different times of the day or introducing more languages.
Tailor your ads to seasonal events
Customers spend more around holidays, even relatively minor ones like St. Patrick’s Day or Valentine’s Day. By customizing your ads to match the season and ramping up your campaign during the holidays, you can get more engagement and conversions.
If your products or services are more relevant to a certain holiday, you should take advantage of that time with promotions. You might want to increase your ad spend so you can capitalize on the extra search traffic for terms relevant to your business.
Make your landing pages compatible with mobile devices
If you don’t make your Google Ads campaign mobile friendly, you’re ignoring a large chunk of users. Most people search for things with their smartphones, so your landing pages should be easy to read and navigate on smaller screens.
If a mobile user clicks on your ad and doesn’t see what they’re looking for right away because the page is cut off or too small, they’ll probably leave without engaging with your site any further.
Target people who have already visited your site
The Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) is a Google Ads feature that allows you to target users who have previously visited your website.
In other words, you can target people who have already shown some interest in your brand. Users familiar with your site are more likely to convert, meaning your ads with RLSA targeting are optimized for conversions.
Use promotions in your ads
Highlighting promotions in your ads is an effective way to get more engagement. Whether it’s a holiday discount, limited sales event, or year-long offer, the prospect of saving money will have more customers clicking on your ads to take advantage.
For example, you could use ads to promote a free trial of your software and target your campaign to audiences looking for the solutions it offers.
Essential Google Ads metrics to focus on
When you have access to so much information about your ads, it can be a little confusing to figure out what to look at. However, you won’t get very far with optimizing your campaign unless you learn how to analyze its performance.
Here are the metrics I think you should focus on the most when scaling Google Ads campaigns:
Conversion value
One of the most essential things to know is how much a conversion is worth to your business. Measuring the value of your conversions will help you pick strategies that get you the best ROI, which allows you to scale your PPC campaign steadily.
You can determine the average value of a phone call, contact form fill-out, app install, or account creation by looking at the conversion rate for the action and the average value of the last stage in your buyer’s journey (purchase, subscription, appointment, etc.).
This conversion value calculator from Google is a straightforward tool to get you started.
Click-through rate (CTR)
Click-through rate, or CTR, refers to the percentage of people who click on your ads, which you can find using this formula:
CTR = total clicks / total impressions
Impressions are the number of views your ads have. If your ad had 500 impressions and 25 clicks, that means the CTR for that ad was only 5%.
A low CTR is a strong indicator that something isn’t working with your ad campaign. Therefore, you should focus on improving areas like keywords and ad copy to get more clicks.
Conversion rate
Even if your ads have a high CTR, it’s all for nothing unless you get conversions. You can measure your conversion rate with this equation:
Conversion rate = total conversions / total clicks
One of the ways you can indirectly boost the conversion rate of your campaigns is to run ads on the Google Display Network. While display ads don’t get many clicks or conversions themselves, they help you increase brand awareness, which leads to more conversions from your targeted ads.
Search impression share
Most of the time, your ads won’t be the only ones that target certain keywords or audiences, so there’s no guarantee your ad will show up every time there’s an opportunity (i.e., when a person searches a term related to your product).
Looking at the search impression share tells you the percentage of the total possible impressions your ad received. You can calculate your impression share with this formula:
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions
If your impression share is low, you should look at your campaign targeting, bid strategy, and Google’s keyword quality score to find areas that need optimization.
Conclusion
Hopefully, my tips and explanations have offered some helpful guidance on effectively scaling Google Ads campaigns.
I recommend you take it slow and keep trying new things so you can find the strategies that work best for your business and target audience. Rushing in thinking you’re going to hit one out of the park without the right preparation just won’t cut it.
If you keep coming back to these core strategies and metrics and continue scaling them as your profits go up, you’ll have an optimized ad campaign bringing in a steady stream of high-quality leads.
