Campaign and Ad Group Optimization Best Practices

Best Practices for Optimizing Campaigns and Ad Groups

Here are a few important steps and strategies to consider for any account optimization:

1. Know your goals

Before anything else, you need to understand your advertising goals. What do you want to achieve with your ads and how will you know if you succeed? For example, does a particular campaign aim to generate sales, increase traffic to your website, or promote your company's brand? If you're focused on profits, for instance, you'll want to know how valuable a click is rather than just how many clicks you're getting.

 By knowing your main advertising goal, you can choose optimization strategies that will best help you meet that specific goal.

2. Measure the results

After performing an optimization, track what effect your changes have had. Your conversion rates, CTR, first page bid estimates, and other statistics can be good indicators of how well your ads perform. For most advertisers, the key measure of success is the return on investment (ROI). Use conversion tracking and google analytics to see which ads and keywords are most profitable. You can use these account statistics to compare pre- and post-optimization performance. Learn more about evaluating your account perfomance.

An easy way to identify performance changes in your account is to create custom alerts for the metrics you want to measure. Once you've created an alert and specified the parameters of what you'd like to monitor, we'll automatically notify you when those metrics change within your campaigns and ad groups.

3. Experiment and adapt

Allow your ad performance to educate you about effective strategies for achieving your goals. As you observe your ads over time, you might notice things that are working especially well or not so well. For example, if you find users aren't responding to a particular ad text, delete that ad and try something else.

It's important to remember that optimization changes can take a few weeks to perform to their full potential. This is usually due to the time it takes for new or edited keywords and ads to build up their recalculated Quality Scores. Therefore, wait at least two weeks before analyzing the impact of your optimization. Also, wait a few weeks before making any other large changes to that campaign.