Unfortunately, getting clicks is only half of it. Your ads aren’t effective if they fail to generate any profit.

Luckily, however, one of the most helpful and underused techniques to improve your Google paid search campaign is to focus on your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

By connecting the amount you spend on a campaign by the amount of revenue generated, you can find out which of your Google Ad campaigns is producing the largest amount of revenue and therefore, get the most out of your online advertising.

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5 Hacks to Maximize ROAS of Your Google Ads

#1 Adjust Your Bids Based on Time and Location

You can adjust your bids based on the time of day and location of the query. So for example, if you know that your ads don’t convert as well Monday-Wednesday, those clicks have no value to you, so to eliminate wasted ad spend, you can reduce your bids or pause your ads during this time.

Similarly, you may know that your ads convert particularly well on weekends and therefore during these time periods, you increase your bids. It goes the same with the time of day.

Rule of thumb is that most conversions take place during the 05:00 am and 12:00 am. If your campaign is set to run all day, odds are you’re wasting a lot of your spend on hours of the day that hardly receive any interaction. That’s not to say that people aren’t buying at 03:00 am in the morning, but it’ll be a very particular set of people who may not have any relevance to what your business has on offer.

With location, you’ll need to lookup data to figure out where to adjust your bids. Your company may only be relative to a certain part of the country, so there’s no use in it showing in locations hundreds of miles away. By adjusting the location, your ads become more targeted, increasing your return on ad spend.

#2 Negative Keywords

To increase your ROAS, you can’t afford to be paying for any unnecessary clicks that won’t convert. Which is where negative keywords come in. Let’s say for example your company sells dog harnesses and you’re running a broad match campaign with the keyword “dog harness”.

In theory, your ad could be triggered by the keywords “used dog harness”, “worst dog harness”, “how does a dog harness work”, which are all irrelevant, thus wasting your spending.

By adding the negative keywords, in the case of our example “used”, “worse”, you eliminate the possibility of your ad showing up for the wrong reasons. Remember, a lot of people will turn to Google for their search query regardless of knowing the brand they long for, so be more specific in your keywords to beat the competition and improve your ROAs.

#3 Improve The Quality Score of Your Ads

For those unaware of what a quality score is, it is reported on a scale of 1-10 and made up of your expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. A high-Quality Score translates into a low CPC (cost per click) and a higher ad ranking. It’s also correlated with a lower cost per conversion.

Your campaign’s relevancy is part of the formula that decides the Quality Score for your keywords. A great way to improve your ads’ relevancy is to arrange them into small and well-organized groups of keywords.

This will aid in enhancing the specificity of your keywords and how they match your website content so you can attract specific visitors who are searching for your content or products.

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#4 Optimize Your Landing Pages

To transform traffic into sales, you must optimize the user experience from the very moment a visitor finds themselves on your website to the time he or she completes a specific action. A mistake we see time and time again by advertisers is using the same landing page for all of their adverts, regardless of relevance and the message conveyed.

Whilst lowering your quality score, it proves to be frustrating for users, diminishing the trust they have for your brand. Your landing pages should feature content that’s coherent with the ad copy. For example, you may own a renovation company that specializes in refurbishment, property design, and maintenance.

As a Digital Marketing Agency in London, we would recommend that each of your ads target each of these specialties and the same should go for the landing pages. You must have a page built for each ad and it should be optimized with relevant imagery and keywords to optimize the user’s experience. Once this has been completed, the clicks you may have already been getting previously are more likely to turn into conversions as your customers are getting exactly what they searched for.

Related Article: The Best Landing Pages To Take Inspiration From

#5 Refine Keyword Targeting

Your keyword targeting must be specific and precise in order to attract visitors who are looking for the exact product you’re advertising and who are ready to make a purchase. Though broad match keywords can be great when deciding which keywords you get the best return from, they can amount to a lot of wasted spends due to their lack of specificity.

Let’s return to the example mentioned earlier and you’re running a broad match for “dog harness” and have added in all the relevant negative keywords. This should then allow you to see what converts best for you and where you’re seeing the highest ROAs.

It could be that “large dog harness” or “durable harness for medium dogs” is, in fact, performing best but generally speaking, the broader the keyword the less likely your customers are at a point in their journey where they know what they want and are ready to convert.

The more specific the keyword, theoretically, the further along the shoppers are during the buying process. Once you know what converts for you and what doesn’t, you can harness the information to reduce your reliance on broad match and move to an exact keyword match strategy to enhance your ROAS.

Related Guide: The Ultimate Google Ads Guide

Final Word

So there you have it, our 5 hacks to improve your Google ROAS! Make sure to implement these tricks to really get the best out of your campaigns.