What is real-time changes in Siteimprove Ads?

If you’ve done any googling lately, you’ve probably noticed that less real estate is given to organic results. Often times, users need to scroll to see any organic results.   

Since it’s now more difficult to appear at the top of Google search results organically, an effective paid search strategy is becoming necessary for many organizations as a way to supplement their SEO strategy—and rightly so, between the fact that PPC traffic converts 50% higher than organic traffic and 65% of customers click on ads when purchasing, paid search can be a powerful business generator.

Why a precise paid search strategy matters for your business

If you’ve ever worked with paid search, you know Google Ads is complicated and time-consuming. But why is Google Ads time consuming? Well, because Google’s default settings are really good at generating Google money, but not ideal for generating you leads in the most cost efficient way. 

Below, we’ll look into an example of how the wrong default Google Ads settings can squander your budget and why customizing your settings is key for better ads ROI.

Example: Broad match keywords

Broad match is the default match type for all keywords (if you need a refresh on match types, check out this article). If you use broad match, your ad can appear when a user searches for synonyms, related searches, misspellings, and other variations (which are determined by Google). 

While broad match sounds like a good deal (you can capture a wide audience!), it can get expensive fast. Because broad match is set up to reach a wide audience, your ad can appear for semi-relevant—and totally irrelevant—searches, which means you end up paying for irrelevant clicks. 

Not customizing the match type for keywords and simply sticking to broad match is a common Google Ads mistake made by those looking to save time and reach a broad audience and it can cost you serious money with little return.  

Save time with Siteimprove Ads real-time changes

For all your Google Ads campaigns, customizing your settings and optimizing your ads can massively pay off for your business. And while that will certainly take time, we want to make it less time consuming to go from getting insights from your PPC data, to making adjustments that will affect change. 

That’s why we’ve added real-time changes to Siteimprove Ads. If you use Siteimprove Ads, you know it automatically analyzes your Google Ads campaigns and makes actionable suggestions for ways you can improve your ads, landing pages, and budget optimization, so you can focus on growth instead of day-to-day tweaks.

With Siteimprove Ads real-time changes, you can make changes from within Siteimprove that will be instantly reflected in your Google Ads account. This allows you to act on insights to improve your budget allocation across different campaigns, perform bid optimization on a keyword-level, and more.

How does Siteimprove Ads real-time changes work?

To understand how Siteimprove Ads real-time changes work, it’s helpful to understand how Google Ads is structured.

Your Google account is associated with your unique email and billing information. Within your Google Ads account, you have campaigns. Each campaign has its own budget settings.

Your campaigns will contain one or more ad groups, which are groups of ads that are targeted to a set of related keywords—basically, they are the organizational structure for your campaigns, and give Google information about who you want to target and how.

Within your ad groups, you will have keywords, ads, and landing pages.

Siteimprove Ads real-time changes let you make changes at the campaign, ad group, and ads/keywords level. 

At the campaign level you can:

• Modify campaign name
• Activate/Pause campaign
• Adjust the daily budget
• Change bid strategy (coming soon!)

At the ad group level you can:

• Modify ad group names
• Activate/Pause ad groups
• Adjust max. CPC 

At the ads level you can:

• Activate/Pause ad

At the keyword level you can:

• Modify keyword name
• Activate/Pause keyword
• Adjust max. CPC
• Change match type

For the full details of what you can do with real-time changes, check out our help center article.

How real-time changes help you gain more control over your PPC

If we go back to the examples of how Google’s default settings can end up giving you less ROI for your ads budget, we can see how Siteimprove’s insights combined with real-time changes help you stay on top of your PPC performance.  

Keyword match type

From Siteimprove Ads, you can look at how different keyword match types have impacted various metrics. For example, you can see if you have any broad match keywords driving up the cost of your cost per clicks and how many conversions each match type has over time.  

If you find that you do have a campaign running with Google’s default broad match that’s negatively affecting your campaign performance, you can quickly change the match type from within Siteimprove Ads for a specific keyword.

Start by going to your keywords in that campaign, sort by match type, and then filter on the metrics that you found to be problematic. 

Customizing your Google Ads settings is time consuming. But we’re trying to make it less so. We know a solid PPC strategy is one that’s fully customized to your business, which is why we make insights easy to act on and changes easy to make.

Learn how you can take control of your PPC strategy

Real-time changes is only one feature of Siteimprove Ads that gives you more control your PPC strategy. Siteimprove Ads is designed to make PPC less technical and complex by giving you actionable direction on ways you can optimize your ads, landing pages, and budgets.