Optimizing your campaign for online sales

Adjust your bid manually for closer control

If you're new to Google Ads, using automatic bidding is a simple way to manage your cost-per-click (CPC) bids. As you get more detailed insights on what's working for you, you might want further control of your bids. In this case, you can consider using manual bidding, which allows you to adjust bid amounts for individual ad groups or keywords.

With manual CPC bidding, you can fine-tune your maximum CPC bids. If you find that certain keywords are more profitable, you can bid more strategically on those keywords. Here are a couple ways to do so:

• Show your ads on the first page: To increase the chances of your ads showing on the first page, make sure your bids meet or exceed the first page bid estimates. Bidding competitively is an important part of getting your ads to show in the most visible spots.
• Use bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids: A bid adjustment represents a percentage change in your bids. You can increase or decrease every bid in your campaign to bid more or less across devices, locations, and time of day.

Choose keywords that reach qualified buyers

Taking a closer look at your keyword list can help you reach the best sales prospects, reduce your costs, and increase your return on investment.

Here are some tips for choosing the right keywords to drive more sales:

• Align keywords with your product offerings: Be sure to include your core products as keywords. When your customers are ready to buy, they'll be searching for a specific product, so things like product names and models can make for high-performing keywords.
• Understand the research and buying process: Try to understand what stage of the buying cycle a user might be in. To target serious buyers, you can try keywords that include words like buy or purchase. If you want to filter out research-oriented searches, you can add negative keywords like review, rating, compare, or comparison.
• Use negative keywords: Negative keywords let you filter out clicks that are less valuable to you. There are two main tools that you can use to find negative keywords—the Keyword Planner and the search terms report. For example, you might discover that the name of one of your products is also the name of a musical group. In this case, you can add negative keywords such as concert, ticket, lyric, album, or mp3.
• Use the right match types: Using broad match allows you to capture a wide range of search queries, while using exact match or phrase match gives you more precise targeting. If you know that a specific query is being used frequently, adding it as an exact- or phrase-matched keyword can help you manage traffic for it.

Make your ads appeal to potential buyers

A successful ad is relevant and impactful. It delivers the right message at the right moment, motivating your customer to purchase with a strong call-to-action.

Here are some tips for writing effective ad text:

• Set your ad apart from your competition: Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to see which ads are showing for a particular search. Your ad text should quickly convey how your business stands out, so featuring competitive prices and special promotions can be especially effective.
• Highlight the customer benefit: Give customers more incentive to purchase by conveying how they'll benefit by choosing your business.
• Keep it simple and specific: Focus on 1-2 selling points for stronger impact. If you try to pack too many selling points in your ad text, your message can get lost.
• Use a landing page that drives sales: Your ad should bring people directly to a page where they can buy the specific product you're advertising. Think of it this way: The connection between your ad and landing page is the bridge between a potential customer and a purchase. The stronger they're connected, the more likely you are to generate sales.
• Run seasonal ads: Customize your ads to fit the season and the promotion you're running. Take advantage of seasons (summer, winter, "back to school") and specific holidays (Valentine's Day, Halloween, etc.) to promote your products.
• Use title case: Capitalizing the first letter of every word can help boost clickthrough rates.
• Use ad assets to enhance your ad: Take advantage of ad assets to show extra information about your business.