20 Google Ads optimisation tips for small businesses

"Optimise" is the word agencies use for the weekly work on a Google Ads account. It is not mysterious. It is twenty or so adjustments, most of them small, made regularly, in a sensible order. Here they are, grouped by the part of the account they improve. Do them in this order the first time; after that, the ones marked weekly are the ones to repeat.

Tracking

1. Count only real enquiries as primary conversions. Form sends, booking requests, purchases. Make page views and button clicks secondary so they do not steer the bidding.

2. Give conversions a value. A real sale value, or an agreed estimate per enquiry. Bidding with values beats bidding with counts.

3. Link Google Analytics and read landing page behaviour. It tells you which campaigns bring people who stay, and which bring people who bounce.

Targeting

4. Switch location targeting to presence. Show ads to people in your area, not people interested in it.

5. Turn off Search partners and Display on Search campaigns. Unless you chose them deliberately.

6. Set an ad schedule around your response hours. Or bid lower outside them.

7. Adjust bids by device once you have data. If phones bring the enquiries and tablets bring clicks, say so with a bid adjustment.

Keywords

8. Read the search terms report every week. Add what you want as exact match keywords; exclude what you do not want as negatives. The single most valuable weekly habit in the account.

9. Build a shared negative keyword list. Jobs, free, cheap, DIY, course, competitor names, towns you do not serve. Apply it to every campaign.

10. Use broad match only with Smart Bidding and solid conversion data. Otherwise phrase and exact.

11. Remove keywords that compete with each other. The same term in two ad groups raises your own price.

12. Raise Quality Score before raising bids. Better ad copy and a matching landing page lower your cost per click; a higher bid only raises it.

Ads

13. Get every responsive search ad to Good or Excellent. Plenty of distinct headlines, descriptions that answer the search, and the keyword in at least one headline.

14. Fill every asset slot. Sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, business name and logo, and a location asset if you have a Business Profile. They are free space on the results page.

15. Match the ad to the ad group. One theme per ad group, one ad about that theme. A general ad for everything is an average ad for everything.

Landing pages

16. Send each ad group to the page that matches it. The emergency ad to the emergency page, with the price and the form above the fold.

17. Test the form on your phone every week. A form that stopped working is the most expensive mistake in the account, and the quietest.

18. Make the page fast. Compress images, drop the video background, cut the scripts you do not need. Slow pages lose the click you paid for.

Bidding and budget

19. Pick the bid strategy that matches your data. Maximise clicks while the account has no conversion history; maximise conversions, then a target cost per action, once it does. Change it once, then leave it for two weeks before judging.

20. Move budget toward what converts, monthly. Campaigns limited by budget that bring enquiries get more; campaigns that bring nothing get less or get paused. Check the split on the first of the month.

Weekly, monthly, once

Once: 1 to 7, 10, 11, 14, 19. Weekly: 8, 17, and a glance at 13 and 18. Monthly: 9, 12, 15, 16, 20. Written down like that, the weekly work is about an hour, which is roughly what the retainer pays for. The audit checklist is the longer first pass.

If an hour a week is an hour you do not have, the free check below is where the software version starts: paste your website, see what would be fixed first, and the weekly list above gets done, approved by you on Core or automatically on Autopilot.