However, the goal of many is more than just to be able to start up a Google Ads account. With this on-the-spot guide, you will learn more gradually about how to manage and streamline your Google Ads account in everyday life.
From A/B testing advertisements and campaign settings, automating processes through scripts and automatic rules to scaling your account through ad customizers.
A/B test advertisement
What do those who see your ad stand to click on it? Is it “buy here” or “see selection here”? Does it matter whether you choose to use URL path in your ad or not? Should you use 2 or 3 headings? And what should they be?
You may now have a well-developed account with good structure, many relevant keywords and enough ad texts you consider good. But can it be better? Of course! Think of your ad as a first draft you have to work on. Is your clique 10%? Good! But what if it was 20%? What if it was 30%? Provided the conversion rate was the same, how much more would you earn then?
Thoughtful lines like the above emphasize just how important it is to test your ad message regularly. We can have a thought of what works and what doesn't, but before we have tested and have the results black on white, there's nothing more than guessing, taste and pleasure. Small differences which may seem insignificant may ultimately constitute greater differences on the bottom line.
Now you know exactly how important it is to test your ads, but how do you actually do it?
On the left, next to the campaign menu, in the new user interface, you will find “Drafts & experiments”. Click this to create a new test. We want to test the content of our ad texts and therefore we choose “Ad Variations”. Here you get the option to choose which campaign and which ads you want to test.
To find out the ads you want to test, Google Ads gives you a variety of filtering options. You can filter on the following:
- Headline (1, 2, both)
- Description
- Header and Description
- Path (1, 2, Both)
- Final URL
- Final Mobile URL
- All URLs
Let's start with you wanting to filter out all the ads based on Header 2. Maybe you want to test whether it affects your click rate that you use your brand name in headline 2? Therefore, choose Header 2 containers “brand name”.
As you can see, you can also choose to filter further to feed the selection of ads by clicking on “and” and add one to the condition. Filtering options other than “contains” are:
- Equals
- Starts with
- Ends With
- Does not content
- Does not equal
- Does not start with
- Doe's note end with
Together, these various filtering options give you a lot of possibilities for which ads you want to test. As mentioned above, you will test whether the name label in the headline works, but you only want to test it in those ads that do not already have the brand name in other parts of the ad (one URL). To illustrate, you would then use the following conditions to filter out the advertisements containing only the name in header 2:
Now we've chosen which: ads we want to test, but what Do we want to test?
Google gives us three possible elements of the ad we can test. These are:
- Find and Replace
- Update text
- Swap header 1 and header 2
In case we've illustrated it, we would clearly use one of the first two, but we're going to go through all three of them anyway.
Find and Replace
This feature allows you to select a specific word or phrase in parts of your ad and then replace it with a new word or phrase.
Let's say that Header 2 said “Buy ski lubrication at the ‘Label name’” in this case it would now say “Buy ski lubrication with us”
Update text
When you want to change larger elements of your ad text, you should select the "update text" function. Here you can change the entire headings, the whole landing pages, descriptions and so on. In the case of brand name and ski lubrication in headline 2 we would therefore do it as follows:
This function is possibly more adapted to major changes. Maybe you want to test the landing page you choose in an identical text ad has something to say for the conversion rate? Maybe you want to keep both headers, but you want to change the description? All tests involving changes in the major elements of the ad test should be performed using this function.
Swap header 1 and header 2
It's not hard to understand what this function means. In some cases you might want to test whether your ad works better with a clear action call in Headline 1 rather than Headline 2, or just which part of your message should come first.
In the case of ski lubrication and brand name, the ad would now contain ”Buy ski lubrication at the ‘Label name’ in Headline 1 instead of Headline 2. Header 1, which does not contain the tag name, will now be header 2.
Here the job is largely done through the filtering process in the previous step. All you have to do to replace the headers is click on “continue”.
Select the details of your variations
Now you have done the most important job and selected what you want to test, but it still has to fill out a few details related to the test. How long should it last? What is the name and the proportion of the advertising budget to go to the test ads?
Name
You must choose a name for your test. Here it's free to go, but we recommend choosing a name that quickly tells you what you're testing. In our example we test ads with brand name in Headline 2 versus non-brand name ads at all. So we could call it. “Fire in H2 / No Brand” since this is a name with a high scan value. It tells me quickly what I'm testing.
Start date and end date
Should the test start immediately or only in a moment? And how long will it last? The length of the test depends on several things – for example how much volume you can expect from the adverts. If we test ads with little volume, we'll probably be earning more time to test than if we test ads with many views and clicks.
A minimum of how long you should test is 2-3 weeks, but we recommend that the test period be extended. Once the test period you have set is over, you cannot extend it. So you should rather put it something further than you assume you need. You can always quit it before you scheduled.
Experiment split
How much of the budget and the views do you want to give to the test you've made? What you choose here again depends on what you are testing - and how fast you want to see results and data.
What do the results say?
Now you have chosen what you want to test. You also have to take a few more steps before you can get back in the office chair and wait for the results of the test to tick in.
During, or after the test period, follow up your results. You can even customize what goals you want to compare. If you want to see if ROAS has increased, you can choose “Conv. value/cost” instead of the standard targets. Everything can be adapted.
Discard or use the ad text
When the test period is over, you will see if the variables you tested in the advertisement led to better results or not. If the results are to be considered an improvement in line with your KPIs and the target for the campaign, you should choose to use the new advertisement you have tested. For example, if you are experiencing lower click rate and higher costs, pause the test and reject the ad proposals. Start a new advertisement variation and test something else.
Let's say you find that ads without a brand name make it better for the sale of ski lubrication (hypothetical set) and you want to use the new ad text. What are you doing with the old man?
If you are finished testing the old ads and will completely replace them with the new ones, choose the first option: pause the old ones and create new ads by the test winner. If you want to keep both ad variations, choose the last option. We advise, however, not to remove the original ads as they have valuable data, regardless of how well they have performed before. A deleted ad can never be restarted and you can potentially save yourself too much extra work by avoiding the bump off on this one.
Test Promotion Settings
If you follow the steps in this guide in chronological order, you now know how to test your ad texts. Hopefully you're already testing elements in your lyrics, but what if your campaign doesn't perform as well as you want?
Google Ads also lets you test things in the larger lines – such as the promotion settings.
Incorrect promotion settings may potentially cost an advertiser expensive, but how do you know that your promotion settings are the best for your campaign? You don't know that until you've tested. How does your campaign perform with a bidding strategy versus another, targeted at one audience rather than another, and targeted at an area across a defined area over a larger geographic location? Test. Test. Test.
To test your campaign settings, you must first create a “Draft”. This is a copy of your campaign where you can make any changes you wish. Change the bidding strategy, add negative keywords or similar. The changes are stored as a draft and no changes will be made to the original campaign.
What can you test?
There. what can you choose to test? The question is, what are you doing? not can test – and there is the answer “just a little”. You can then test all potential changes in a campaign using Google Ads experiments. Examples of changes in the campaign that might be worth testing are:
- Bud
- Tendering strategy
- Bud modifiers (time, location, units etc)
- Negative search terms
- Remarketing audiences or other audiences
- Display interests, places, diplomas or audiences
- Geographical targeting
A golden rule when you create a campaign draft you want to test is, however, to test little bit at a time. Too many changes at once may make it difficult to know what change is causing the potentially good or bad results.
When you are ready to run a test of your campaign, click on “campaign experiments” and select “Select kill”. Here you select the campaign draft where you have saved the changes you want to test. Remember that changes you make in the original campaign during the test period not will be automatically updated in the test campaign.
Remember also in this test to choose a name with good scan value and a minimum 2-3 week test period, but I would like to say it longer. When the “end date” is met, you cannot change your mind, but you must create a new experiment to extend the test period! It's important to remember that you can't pause a combat experiment either. You can change the date on the way, but do not pause the test. Your only choice is to continue testing or to remove the test.
Think about the experimental split as this cannot be changed along the way.
How do I know if the test is "completed"?
Google Ads will show you whether you can make computer-driven decisions based on the results of your campaign experiment by showing whether the numbers from the test are statistically significant or not. If your test is statistically significant, you can highly expect that the changes you have tested will affect the result and will therefore deliver the same results on the changes made to the campaign. Statistical significance indicated by a blue arrow (as in the picture below)
If you don't see any symbol of your numbers, this means that they haven't had enough data and that's why they're not statistically significant. If you see a diamond / square by the numbers, they are not statistically significant either. Some reasons why you don't see the blue star at your test results may be:
- Your test has not run long enough
- The campaign you're testing does not have enough volume
- The experiment split-the campaign you set may have been too low and therefore the test campaign will not get enough traffic
- The changes you test have not resulted in a statistically significant difference in campaign results
Automatic rules
In 2018, there should no longer be a discussion about whether or not we should automate. Any Google Ads controller with respect to himself should have automated solutions in his Google Ads account. Automations in the form of automatic rules are by no means the big ugly villain who makes those who work with the account redundant, but a helping hand that frees time to work on optimising the account.
There are essentially two simple ways to set up automations in an account and a minimum is to use Google's own automated rules. These allow you to perform most simple tasks fully automated – based on certain criteria you set in advance.
You can create rules that apply:
- Promotions
- Advertising groups
- Search term
- Advertising texts
- Search term
- Topics
- Locations
- Audience
- Age groups
- Gender
- Parent status
- Income
Based on this, there are endless possibilities for what rules you can make. Most commonly, and a minimum of what an account should contain, rules may be lowering and increasing bids, as well as rules starting and pausing keywords, campaigns and advertising groups — based on different data bases.
Google Ads budget adjustments
This policy is a must in your account if you run manual bidding on your campaigns. Automatic rules that are bud-adjusting may be helpful in the weekly maintenance routine when you have limited time, but also to make sure that search terms that tend to “be gone” in the amount are not unmoved. These rules are also useful if you need to increase and lower your bids once in a sale or special event where you are willing to pay more for your clicks.
Let's imagine you're going to set up an automatic policy for all your search terms. Then choose to create a new automatic policy, for keywords and for "change keyword bits". In this case, we can set up a rule that lowers your bids for non-profit search terms.
Furthermore, you have to decide which search terms you want the rule to apply to. This can be all search terms in an ad group, a campaign or specific search terms you choose. In this case, we can imagine that it applies to all promotions in the account except the brand campaign.
We have now determined which keywords are affected by the rule, and we must decide further when they are affected; and how they are affected. First of all, we have to decide whether to increase or decrease bids. In this case, they will be lowered. How much? With 20%. If you think it's scary to automate these processes, you can set a minimum bid. This means that even if a current keyword meets all the requirements you set, it will never be lower than a bid, for example, $2.50.
Under condition, we determine what triggers a 20% decrease in our maxbud. Here, the criteria will vary based on your account's specificities. Over, we have outlined a typical rule that could fit into a online store that sells products (ski lubrication?) and has a KPI based on ROAS (return on ad push).
But the important thing is that you always Remember to include more than just the KPI itself in the automatic rule. This is because there may be reasons why some search terms cannot be adjusted up and down exclusively on the KPI you have set. Maybe they're under optimization, relatively new in the account or similar.
In general, search terms that have cost more than 400 kroner in the last 7 days and had an average click price of more than 11 kroner are affected. This ensures that we only run the rule on keywords with a certain consumption of ad crowns and with the average click price that we consider unnaturally high in our industry. At the same time, we see that the high click price does not pay off as ROAS is below 200%. By including search impression share in the formula we make sure that these are search terms we are often visible on. Actually, over 80% of times. This means that we have good visibility on the keyword, but that we use more than we are comfortable with in relation to what we serve.
Adjust numbers up and down according to your needs and play with the different data dimensions you can set up as an automatic rule.
Pause automatic Google Ads advertising groups
Just as keywords can be bud-adjusted up and down based on different factors, keywords, advertising groups or entire campaigns can also be paused based on different factors.
For example, the rule can be set up to pause all advertising groups that have spent more than 1000 kroner in the last 30 days without giving a single conversion. Depending on your account and where “string” you want to be, you can also add a search impression share of over a certain percentage. This ensures that you pause any non-profit advertising groups.
If you want a better overview of which ad groups are paused, you can set up the automatic rule so that instead of a break, it will send you an e-mail with the ad groups concerned. This way you get an e-mail with ad group that does not comply with the requirements you have set - this is how you can go through the list and pause the ad group you want.
Get an email on drastic changes in your Google Ads account
How often you are inside your Google Ads account is probably dependent on the size of it and your goals with the advertisement. Automatic rules can help you monitor that everything is the way it is going in your account, even when you do not follow it up daily. Any account should have a set of such automatic rules on its basis. If you do not have the opportunity to follow up the account daily for a busy time – or for weekends and holidays – you will be notified if something is wrong.
The rules can be based on many factors, but a lurk rule is based on cost. You know what is the daily budget of your account and how much the account daily uses in ad crowns on “good” and “bad” days a week. Set a lower limit on how few ad crowns your campaigns can use before you would know owls in the moss and base your next automatic rule on this sum.
This rule is simple and straightforward “Send me an e-mail if my campaigns were less than 200 kroner yesterday”. In many cases the lower limit will be both NOK 2000 or NOK 2000 or even higher. Therefore, customize after your campaign.
Like the rule shown above, you can also set up similar rules as alerts if the number of conversions and ROAS is too low or if the cost per conversion is unspeakable. These rules should in no way replace the supervision that you have in your Google Ads account. They are, however, a fantastic aid in periods where time does not go completely.
Google Ads Script
We in INEVO are a huge fan of using scripts in the daily work of a Google Ads account. We've already split 4 scripts to help you bid adjust smarter and a number of useful scripts for Google Ads automation for Norwegian online storesSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.
Script works in many ways, as automatic rules do – they automate processes and help you with routine work “in the background”. The difference between an automatic policy and a script is that the script consists of a piece of JavaScript you upload in the “Bulk Actions” part of your Google Ads account.
But do you have to be able to code to use scripts? Absolutely not! There is a sea of useful resources and free scripts from both Google itself and other agencies that develop them. Is it a process you want to automate in your account? There is guaranteed a script that can help you with it.
Here are examples of some of the scripts we run every hours in several of our major accounts:
If you are interested in the scripts, you can find them in the articles we mentioned at the outset in this section of the guide. If you want to start with the most necessary, you will find two of the most basic scripts. all accounts should be held in the items below. If you don't already have them in place in your account - implement them!
Google Ads Link Checker Script
A Google Ads link checks script is the first script you should implement in your Google Ads account. You only have to do this once and it takes a short time. In return, this script can save you too many discarded ad crowns in the future.
A website, regardless of whether you sell products, services or only produce content, is often in the process of changing. New pages are created, old pages are deleted and links are coming and going. With Google Ads link checking script you avoid transmitting traffic through ads to, for example, 404 pages.
Google itself offers a excellent version of this script that you can easily customize by using a spreadsheet:
Find more information and link checks script for individual Google Ads accounts here. However, if you have collected many ad accounts in an MCC account, you can use: This script.
A script to pause ads sending to sold-out products
..and activate them when the product is back in stock. This script is a necessity for anyone who runs a Google Ads account associated with a online store of a certain size. An ideal account structure will have its own ads for each product in your store and on the way to this it can become unremarkable when it is going to keep track of sold out products. Avoid using ad crowns on product pages you know does not want to convert. The script that pauses ads for sold out products can be found here!
NB! This version of the script will activate all paused ads as links to product pages with products in stock.
Ad Customizers
Have you read ours? Google Ads for beginners guide You know how important it is to Google Ads. In an account to cover hundreds, perhaps thousands, different categories and products, it may be difficult to maintain a satisfactory level of relevance and adaptation in the individual advertisement. When we know that higher relevance and information density results in higher conversion rates we would ideally have as relevant and informative ad texts as possible – and would like to meet the customer at all steps down the purchase street.
The more the customer knows about you and your product before they click, the more chance they will buy when they click. Using tailored ads, you ensure that a larger proportion of the clicks you spend money on are actually profitable.
Ad customizers and if-functions are two helpful tools when working with Google Ads ads. Ad customizers are feed-based and allow you to customize your ad texts based on the information contained in a feed. To use a customizers, you need to create a feed and upload it to Google Ads Business data.
The feed you upload fills with different values for optional attributes. For example, these may be locations, prices or models of a product.
You wanna learn about ad customizers? We've written a supplementary guide that shows you 10 ways to tailor your Google Ads ads. Here you can learn about ways to combine ad customizers and if-functions to customize your advertising message to the audience, product, location and the like.