There’s nothing worse than your Google Ads accounts under perform, and few easier ways to throw money out the window. As experts in Google Ads and PPC, we understand what it takes to turn weak Google Ads accounts around. Below, we share 3 quick overnight tips to fix your account.

1.  Check Google’s suggestions

The first step is to check Google’s suggestions for optimisations. You can find this by looking at your campaign view, and checking the ‘Optimisation score’ column – this will give you Google’s guidance on how to improve your campaign(s).

However, it’s important not to blindly accept all suggestions – in doing so, you might increase your daily budgets by a significant amount, or change your bidding strategy.

If you’re not sure where to start, review their suggestions for bids, keywords and ads. The Google Ads algorithm recommends similar keywords to the ones you’re using based on customer data, so it’s important to review their suggestions and add any to your campaigns that are relevant. Similarly, their ad suggestions will generally lead to higher click-through rates (CTR), so it’s important to review these and apply them – as long as they’re relevant.

2.  Double-check your location settings

This is a common mistake that can mean your budget is completely wasted. The default for UK Ads accounts is to target the entire UK with your campaign(s), but this is usually not suitable unless you have a large budget. If your budget is £20 a day or less, we recommend choosing smaller areas and focusing your budget on these.

The other critical mistake with location settings is that, by default, they’re set to show your ads to people ‘in the area’ (such as the UK) or those who ‘show an interest’ in the area – which would include people from other countries who are showing an interest in visiting London, for example. Make sure you update this immediately to save spending your budget on clicks from outside your target audience – this can transform your account performance very quickly.

3.  The 3% rule

One of the quickest (and most impactful) overnight fixes is to review your keywords, ads and quality scores.

Let’s start with your keywords. Initially, scan the keywords in your campaign for any that say ‘Below first page bid’ or ‘Below top of page bid’ in the Keyword Status column. If your bidding strategy is Manual CPC, you’ll need to raise your maximum bids for these keywords for them to start generating traffic.

You also want to check for the 3% rule. Generally speaking, a CTR of 2-3% is good, and below 2% should be review. Take a look at any keywords with low CTRs and either pause them for now to save budget, or review your ad copy…

Your ads should also have a CTR of 2-3%, and anything less than that means that your keywords don’t match your ads. For example, if your keyword was “men’s holidays” and your ad copy didn’t reflect this, your CTR would be low, as your customers wouldn’t get what they wanted from their search query. However, if “men’s holidays” was the first line of your ad, you would generate more clicks!

While managing Google Ads accounts is a big job, there are small bits of maintenance you can do to change performance overnight. If you’re not sure where to start, speak to our Google Ads experts who can give you a hand.