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Is there a way to make your Google Ads always rank first? The short answer? Yes! But first, let’s talk about why this is important.
Getting your ads to rank first can benefit your business in many ways. It can lead to:
All these factors are important, but you may not need all three. Ranking first is also great for brand awareness if your customers search for your industry keywords regularly, as your ads will be seen before anyone else; however, ranking first doesn’t always mean better performance. Ranking first can lead to spending more than you need to, thus, reducing your margins further. In this blog, we’ll cover how you can get your ads to appear higher, but also what you should be doing to acquire higher value clicks.
Google Ads are designed to show high-quality ads that are relevant to what people are searching for. This means that if your Google Ads aren’t attracting enough clicks, they can be penalised and even removed from SERPs (search engine result pages).
Bid adjustments can be altered across many areas, not just keywords. This includes:
Bid adjustments allow you to set a higher or lower bid price than what’s typically charged for each keyword so that it appears higher on the results page and gets more impressions. This translates into more clicks and potential sales/leads for your business. These adjustments can be made on a per-keyword basis or across multiple keywords simultaneously. You can also use bid adjustments to adjust the amount of budget spent on certain ad groups or campaigns altogether. However, many of the other factors are easily overlooked. Ranking higher isn’t solely tied to keyword bid adjustments, and while increasing keyword bids while on manual CPC is a good method, we recommend looking at other factors such as ad scheduling, quality score, and ad relevancy.
The easy way to appear higher is to raise all bids to top of page CPC which can be done by selecting your keywords, clicking edit, then selecting ‘Change max. CPC bid’, and finally select ‘Raise all bids to top of page CPC’ along with the CPC figure you’re happy to pay in the Google Ads dashboard. However, this will skyrocket your costs as you may spend more on keywords that are low performers or on keywords that already have super high CPAs. This is great if you have a generally large budget and aren’t too worried about paying more for conversions but even with this approach, there are a few things you can do to stop your costs from increasing rapidly.
Instead of raising your keyword bid adjustments to top of page, we recommend raising bids to first page CPC. This can be found in the same way as ‘top of page CPC’ but what Google will do here is place your ad on the first page. You may not rank at the top but depending on how competitive some keywords are, you may already be ranking quite highly in SERP.
Before you hastily raise all of these bids, take a look at the keywords that are achieving a decent number of clicks as well as keywords that only require a small increase to appear on the first page. Start by raising the CPCs of these keywords first before you begin increasing the bids for keywords that require high investment. Doing this will keep your costs down but also may improve your ad performance by appearing higher than you were previously.
Look for keywords that have a low search impression share and increase these as you may be able to appear more often, but again, only increase your bid adjustments to a cost that you’re happy to spend. Once you have done this, analyse the data and begin testing other keywords that you think have the potential to improve ad performance.
For those that aren’t using Max. CPC bids, and are using the Target CPA bid strategy, we recommend adjusting your CPA targets by slowly relaxing or restricting your targets depending on performance. If you’re seeing an ad group obtaining a small number of conversions, then relax your CPA target. If you’re seeing lots of conversions but at a CPA that’s higher than you’d like, we recommend reducing your CPA target.
If you are using any of Google’s automated bid strategies such as Maximise Clicks, Maximise Conversion, Maximise Conversion Value, and Target ROAS, you won’t be able to adjust bids for specific keywords as Google will do this for you and may spend more than you would have liked per keyword. Just because you are running automated bid strategies, doesn’t mean you can’t adjust bids in other areas.
For a while now, Google have told digital marketers and advertisers that changing ad scheduling, location and device bids while running automated bidding strategies don’t work. However, from our own testing as well as other anecdotal information, adjusting bids in these three areas does actually have an impact when trying to increase or decrease performance. It’s also worth noting that if you are running Performance Max campaigns, you will not be able to make any bid adjustments.
This is a step that often gets overlooked and is as important as the rest of your strategy. We recommend setting your ad schedule to all days and then configure the hours into 6-hour segments as shown below.
By splitting out your ad schedule like this, over time, your data will populate these segments and you will be able to identify at what times and days of the week you obtain the most clicks and conversions. When you identify that you obtain more conversions on a specific day or time, you will also be able to make a bid adjustment change. We recommend increasing or decreasing by 5%-10% at a time. If you continue to see improved performance, then feel free to increase bids again. It’s worth noting that if, for example, you increase the bid adjustment to 10% and would like to reduce this by 5%, you will need to select ‘increase’ and then select 5%, otherwise if you select ‘decrease’, the bid adjustment will drop by 15%.
It will take some time to populate, and we recommend looking back to at least 2 months worth of data before making any adjustments.
Similar to Ad Scheduling, we recommend expanding your location targeting to be slightly more granular. For example, if you are targeting the United Kingdom as a whole, it’s worth breaking this down by counties in the UK. This will then populate each location and you will be able to identify key areas that are high performers. With that data, you can then increase bid adjustments for those high performing areas, and also decrease bid adjustments for areas that spend large amounts but don’t convert. By making these changes, you can reduce spending in areas that don’t perform well, and this will also improve your chances at appearing higher than competitors at certain times of the day or days of the week. Of course, you can go even further and be Post Code specific; however, this can become trickier to manage. We would only recommend being this granular if you target a specific area in the UK.
The next step is to look at your ad relevance scores. The more relevant your ads are to the search results; the better ad relevance scores your ads will have, meaning they’re more likely to be clicked on by users searching for them. For example, your competitors’ ads may rank higher than yours in ad placement but if your ad appears lower and is more relevant, then chances are a potential customer may click on yours over your competitors. You can check ad relevance by modifying your Google Ads dashboard columns at the ads & extensions level. Average and Above Average are where you want to be, so look for any that say poor relevance as these are the ones you may need to change. A way to make your ads more relevant is by having a look at what keyword is triggering what ad to appear and then adjusting the copy of that ad to reflect the intent of the keyword. Start by including the keyword in a few headlines and descriptions e.g. if the keyword is [leather couch] and your ad includes the copy ‘View our range of sofas.’ You may want to change this to ‘View our range of leather couches.’ As this is more relevant to the keyword. Another thing to keep in mind is the landing page that an ad is being directed to. If the landing page is different or unspecific to the keyword, your ad might have poor ad relevance. Using the same example, if your ad that appears for the keyword [leather couch] is driving customers to your business home page, you may find that your clicks aren’t converting as much as they could be. Think about changing the final URL and driving users to a specific landing page for leather sofas and couches as this will appear more targeted and relevant. In turn, this will increase your ad relevance as well as potentially convert more clicks into conversions.
A lot of these changes will require time to test and analyse results but in the long run, you might find yourself paying less for more conversions thanks to strategic changes rather than throwing money at your ads and obtaining an astronomically high cost per conversion. Ranking first doesn’t always mean more conversions but by combining these strategies you can potentially appear higher or stronger than your competitors. We hope these changes will bring beneficial improvements to your campaigns so keep testing to find what works for your advertising. For more information on search ads, you can find helpful blogs, guides, and whitepapers on our website.
