5 Google Ads strategies to take your Paid Search to the next level

At Evergreen, we’re always exploring new ways to maximise our clients’ return on ad spend (ROAS) and drive growth through paid media.

In this edition of T.E.A Talks, our Paid Media Director Konrad shares his top five Google Ads strategies that every marketer should leverage.

Analyse competitor ads

The first tactic is to thoroughly analyse your competitors’ ad campaigns to understand their value propositions. Use tools like Facebook’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Report to review competitors’ ad copy, messaging, creative assets, and targeting.

“Extrapolate it with your own strategy and see how it stacks up against yours. See why they are winning if you aren’t.”

Too often, brands operate in a vacuum without understanding the competitive landscape. Performing regular competitor analysis can spark new messaging ideas and identify underexploited opportunities for Paid Search.

Consider all campaign types

Don’t just default to search and display campaigns. We recommend exploring Google’s full range of campaign types – search, display, shopping, and performance max campaigns. Analyse their respective performance for your business and optimise accordingly.

“Start with your best performing campaign types and try to utilise them to the fullest”

For shopping campaigns, test performance max on the Google feed to replace standard shopping.

Experiment with bidding strategies

The third tactic is continually testing different bidding strategies based on your goals. Do you want to maximise conversions, clicks, or something else?

“Consider target ROAS if you want Google to work towards a specific return target, or try manual bidding if you want to test different strategies.”

Konrad, Paid Media Director

Don’t just “set and forget” your bidding strategy. Consistent experimentation and optimisation is key to ensuring your ad spend aligns with your evolving marketing objectives.

Leverage bid adjustments

Understanding user intent and adjusting bids at each stage of the marketing funnel is critically important.

“For the keywords high in the funnel, they are going to be very generic phrases. Further down, you get more granular based on specific intent signals.”

By bidding higher on keywords with more commercial intent, you can drive higher-quality conversions and reduce wasted ad spend.

Consistently mine search query data to identify new negative keywords to exclude and realign your keyword bids.

Adopt remarketing tactics

The final tactic is embracing remarketing to keep your brand top-of-mind for past visitors.

“You want to get in there because you know the intent is there.”

Try leveraging first-party data like customer emails, newsletter subscribers, and past purchase info to build tailored remarketing audiences.

You can also adopt strategies like deploying Google’s enhanced conversions to better understand your existing customers. Thoughtful remarketing allows you to precisely re-engage high-intent audiences.

At Evergreen, we’ve supercharged our clients’ paid media results by meticulously implementing tactics like these. By adopting a data-driven, nuanced approach to campaign management, you can extract maximum value from your Google Ads investment.