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Effectiveness of advertising in Google Ads
The simplest (though often misleading, as will be discussed later) way to evaluate the effectiveness of ads is therefore to compare ad spending with how much revenue they bring in. In the marketing world, such a ratio is called ROAS’s (return on ad spend). As a rule, the higher the ROAS, the better for us. If you use the services of a digital agency or freelancer, you can also use the ROI, or return on investment. To calculate this ratio, you should add to the cost of advertising the cost of handling the campaign and any costs associated with running Google Ads. This will allow you to estimate the effectiveness of your advertising efforts and how profitable they are.
Ads effectiveness ratios
In Google Ads you will find a mass of data about campaigns and the ads they contain. In order not to get lost in the maze of information, it is worth knowing the most important factors that will allow you to assess the effectiveness of ads.
The first of these is the CTR (click through rate) or click-through rate. It is expressed as a percentage, and tells you how often users click on ads. It’s a statistic by which you can deduce whether your ads are of interest to your audience. You calculate it by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. The higher the CTR, the better your text ads perform in capturing the attention of your audience. To improve the CTR of your Google Ads campaigns, make sure your ads are catchy and attention-grabbing. You can include a call to action (CTA, or Call to Action) in their content, as well as information about promotions or unique products and services. You can also conduct A/B tests, displaying sets of ads to different audiences and see which one will bring better results.
Another element you should pay attention to is the average CPC (cost per click), or average cost per click. So examine whether the traffic you are acquiring is overpriced – you may find that some ads that bring a similar conversion rate to others are at the same time much more expensive than the others. If you observe such a precedent, it’s a good idea to exclude those components that inflate the rate. However, before you do so, make sure that such an action actually makes sense. Sometimes, despite the fact that a creative is more expensive, it has higher quality or converts more often.
A fairly obvious, but important factor, is ad clicks. If you are generating clicks in your campaign, it means that users are coming to your site. However, clicks by themselves do not necessarily indicate the effectiveness of your ads. What’s more important in this case is the quality of traffic your campaign is gaining. To check the quality of the traffic, analyze the behavior of users once they hit your company’s website, using dedicated tools like Google Analytics 4. If you don’t know how to work with this tool, or want to learn the ins and outs, check out our text Google Analytics 4 With GA4 you will verify how much time users spend on your landing page, what subpages they visit, whether they are interested in your products and conversion numbers.
You may want to pay attention to advertising ranking This is a value that is used to determine how much space your ads will occupy on the page relative to other ads, and whether they will display at all. The ads you set take part in the auction, so their position can change depending on the competition, search criteria and the quality of the ad itself at any given time. To find out in which position on the search results page your ads are displayed, check the display ratios at the top of the page and at the highest position. The ad ranking consists of:
- Predicted ad click-through rate: depends in part on the ad’s history of clicks and impressions (taking into account factors such as components and other formats that may have affected the visibility of the clicked ad).
- Advertisement relevance to search: the extent to which the ad is related to the search conducted by the user.
- Quality of the landing page: its relevance, clarity and navigation convenience.
Remember to make Google Ads relevant to what is on your site. If a user quickly leaves your site after clicking on an ad because they don’t find what the ad promised, all you’ll get in that case is a burned budget. Optimize your Google ad so that potential customers are shown content that corresponds to your site’s content.
Effectiveness of Google ads – text ads in search network
Advertising effectiveness provides information that helps target customers with relevant messages. This indicator determines the relevance, quality and variety of the ad text, giving one of these ratings: “Incomplete,” “Low,” “Average,” “Good” or “Excellent.” The effectiveness of an ad indicates how well a given creative conforms to Google’s proven performance optimization methods. The higher the level of this indicator you achieve, the more likely you are to generate good results. This indicator consists of 2 elements: an overall rating, which indicates the effectiveness of the relevant ad, and specific actions that can improve the effectiveness of the ad.
The easiest way to take care of the effectiveness of text ads is at the creation stage. However, if you haven’t done it at this early stage, nothing lost, you can always use the editing option to display an indicator of its effectiveness in the dialog box. To increase the effectiveness of your ad, follow the recommendations that the system places at the top of the ad setup window. The ad’s effectiveness rating and recommended actions will change as you enter data and fill in resources.
The three most important actions you can take to improve ad effectiveness are:
- Add the maximum number of headlines and ad texts. You can add as many as 15 headlines and 4 ad texts, so it can be a challenge to fill in all the fields, but try to fill in as many as you can. Doing so will give you the largest possible combination of ads and allow the algorithm to display the combination of texts with the highest effectiveness. During the ad creation process, component suggestions will be displayed to help you write effective headlines and ad texts. You can accept these suggestions unchanged, modify them or use them only as inspiration.
- Add unique headlines and ad texts. The headlines and texts should be different from each other, so the algorithm will get more opportunities to display them. Describe your products and services, their unique features may interest different customers. Try to avoid repeating the same words, phrases and ideas.
- Use keywords in headlines and ad texts. Try to include keywords in headlines and ad texts. When creating ads, Google Ads displays popular keywords to help you choose the right ad components. Take advantage of these prompts and use the recommended words in the texts.
Display Google Ads
Flexible display ads, or image ads, are most effective when you add multiple unique creative resources. If you don’t have graphic resources, you can use Google’s free library, which has virtually infinite creatives. This way, as with text ads, the algorithm can test multiple variations of the ad, ultimately displaying the most relevant composition to each user.
To maximize the quality of your display ads, use the following tips:
- Adapt your ad to different resolutions – audiences use multiple devices.
- Add at least one square image.
- Add several different images to make your ad stand out.
- Add as many unique headlines as possible.
- Add as much ad text as possible.
Similar to search ads, at the stage of creating display ads, Google Ads will display prompts, after applying which you will increase the quality of the ad. Follow them, and you will elevate the CTR and reduce the average cost per click of your ad.
There are several universal metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of ads, but for each Google Ads campaign, the metrics we should pay attention to vary. To evaluate the quality of your ads, you can pay attention to metrics such as conversion value, number of conversions, number of clicks, form completion, click-to-conversion ratio, or how much time users spend in your online store.
It’s a good idea to pay attention to metrics such as conversion value, number of conversions, number of clicks, form completion, click-to-conversion ratio, or how much time users spend in your online store.
