To develop your business and reach an audience at the right time and in the right place, Google Ads remains an obvious solution. However, if this digital advertising platform is widely used, it is essential to unleashing its full potential. Several elements must be taken into account to achieve this objective. Automation, in particular, is one of the keys to going further with Google Ads. To help you take it to the next level, we present key elements to use the full capabilities of this digital solution.
Summary
How Keyword Matching Works
First and foremost, the most important thing to understand is how Google Ads works. Google’s goal is to align the interests of Internet users and businesses. For this reason, Google refines its algorithm every year to enable it to get as close as possible to the user’s search intent.
From the request typed in the search engine to the digital ad displayed to the Internet user, we can identify a certain number of essential steps:
- The user types in a query. Google interprets the input and uses spelling correction and the search for synonyms or similar concepts. This allows the recovery request to be formed. It will make it possible to retrieve all the relevant keywords about the investigation.
- The system checks eligibility. After retrieving the keywords, the system considers the keyword match type and the campaign and ad group criteria.
- It prioritizes eligible keywords identical to the original or corrected search terms.
- The creative system assembles the best-performing responsive ad for the user in each ad group that contains an eligible keyword.
- Bids are calculated for use with Ad Rank.
- The system selects the best combination of relevance and ranking. Each candidate comprises a keyword or landing page, a creative, and an associated bid.
- The auction begins. The ad with the highest ad rank for each advertiser enters the auction process.
- The auction is executed. Ads that ultimately have the highest ranking are shown to viewers.
It provides Google users with the most relevant answers to questions or searches at any time. To improve the performance of your strategy, you must therefore influence this selection process by becoming more relevant than your competitors.
Think about aligning your keyword strategy and your bids
To get started, it’s important to understand that bid and keyword strategies are related. It is your bids that will allow you to determine your keyword strategy.
If you can accurately measure your conversions and use an auction-based conversion strategy, a broad match will increase your reach and conversions.
The significant contribution of the broad match to the performance of your campaigns
User behaviours are becoming increasingly complex to analyze or predict. This is due to world events, seasonality, or constantly changing search trends.
It is necessary to adapt to this situation. A simple manual approach to Google Ads via exact phrases is becoming less and less relevant. On the contrary, it is better to gain agility by using a broad match. It will allow you to reach search terms you have yet to discover.
Why is broad match important? Because it’s the only type of match that uses all available signals to understand the user’s search intent and your keyword. Thus, the best results are associated with combining Smart Bidding strategies with broad matches. This helps increase conversions and conversion value because Smart Bidding ensures you’ll compete only in the right auctions with the right bids and audience.
Contrary to popular belief, no type of correspondence is more expensive than the other. Google’s auction system is designed not to make exact matches or broad matches more expensive. The choice, therefore, depends above all on your strategic approach.
Create relevant and impactful ads
Then you can leverage machine learning with responsive search ads. They allow you to combine your designers’ creativity with machine learning’s power. This makes it easier to tailor your message to the right query while creating fewer different ads.
To improve performance in this type of campaign, one of the solutions is to facilitate the work of the search engine. For example, you can group your keywords into similar topics. This simple action will allow the system to understand your keywords better. If he understands them better, he can select the most appropriate one and determine which ad should be shown for each user request.
Match types and quality score
It is useless to change the types of matches, hoping that this impacts the Quality Score (QS) or level of quality. Indeed, the quality score is based on the history of search impressions identical to your keyword.
So, if all the elements, such as the auction or the ad, are similar, then the broad match keyword “running shoes” and the exact match keyword “running shoes” will have the same Quality Score.
The important thing to remember here is that the quality score is just a guideline. It allows you to evaluate the overall quality of your ad compared to those of other advertisers. It is, therefore, only one diagnostic tool among others. To maintain the performance of your ads, focus on something different than this KPI.
How does Google Ads use signals?
To choose the ad that best matches a user’s query, Google Ads uses all available signals. Therefore, it is essential to understand how it works.
Take the example of a shoe store. The owner uses responsive search network ads, smart bidding strategies, and broad match keywords like’ running shoes‘ and ‘marathon shoes ‘.
To deliver its ads to the most suitable audience, search automation will integrate different signals to reach the optimal solution.
The process could be as follows:
- The search query is “running shoe.”
- This user previously searched for the ‘best places to run a marathon.’
- The system then takes this signal into account to understand its search intention.
- Google takes into account the broad match “running shoe.”
- The system estimates that the shoe store corresponds to the Internet user’s request.
- The displayed ad will feature the headline’ marathon shoe‘
- Between the title “running shoes” and “marathon shoes“, the system has prioritized “marathon shoes” because it considers it more efficient for this user.
This helps illustrate the agility of broad match to adapt to different audiences, their past searches, and the buying behaviour that Google anticipates.
The significant contribution of automation to your digital campaigns
To take full advantage of Google Ads, it is essential to use all the features offered. In particular, we can cite broad match and automation, which are more than ever at the heart of digital advertising on Google.
To convince you, advertisers who have replaced exact match keywords with a broad match in campaigns using a target CPA have observed remarkable performance. Thus, the latter noted an average increase in conversions of 35%. For movements using target ROAS, a 20% increase in conversion value was recorded.
Likewise, advertisers who have moved from large text ads to responsive ads on the search network have done well! Using the same assets and broad match and smart bidding together, they saw, on average, a 20% increase in conversions for a similar cost per conversion.
This shows that more than ever, to perform on Google Ads and in your advertising campaigns, you have to be bold. Test new formats or approaches to continuously improve the performance of your campaigns.