Whether you’re trying to run your own SaaS ads or hold your Google Ads agency accountable. Knowing your stuff in Google Ads will help you increase conversions and ultimately ROI.
The first 120 days that your Google Ads account runs are arguably the most important for your SaaS. If you can feel good about your account after 4 months, then you free up room to experiment and grow faster and faster.
That strategy all depends on how you set up your account though.
To be clear, this is part two of a two part series. This article will only cover optimization. Part 1 of this series covers how to set up a strong account (everything up until this post).
Be sure that your account has the right number of keywords for your budget.
Too many keywords will lead to slowing down this process. Turning your 120 day Google Ads strategy to a 300-day nightmare.
Also see to it that your account is targeting low funnel intents. You’ll extend your account optimization time if you are not.
If you haven’t already, make sure you check off all the boxes on your SaaS Google Ads strategy setup, first too. However, this optimization strategy works for all account structures, not just the strategies this agency subscribes to.
You just enabled your Google Ads campaigns and now you’re waiting for the SaaS leads to roll in.
Have faith and hang in there, it’s really easy to pull all the levers that Google has on day one but don’t.
Practice self control and keep yourself to one task in the first seven days of your SaaS ads: Monitoring the search terms list.
Your main Google Ads optimization task on days 1-7 is to make sure the search terms that you’re showing for are in-theme.
Doing this once a day is all you need to ensure that your ads are showing to the right people.
Likely, your keywords will be transactional (low funnel keywords).
Make sure you are only showing for keywords that indicate the searcher is ready to buy. Get rid of any “how to,” “top 10,” “competitor,” “brand,” and “free” keywords that you can.
Adding negative keywords is your first solution to seeing junk in your search terms report.
You should use the checkbox and add your irrelevant SaaS searches to the negative keywords list.
If there are common themes of bad keywords, open up the ‘Negative Keyword’ tab and add those themes.
Important tip: if by day 7 there are still 50% or more bad keywords in the search term report (after filtering out the one’s you’ve excluded), then you might want to consider going tighter on the match type or pausing it for now.
Some keywords and match types just don’t meet your early SaaS goals of getting relatively precise, low-funnel traffic.
Uh oh! You open your SaaS ads account and nothing has happened, no impressions, no nothin’!
First off, give it a day or two, sometimes there’s some invisible algorithm/add approval stuff happening in the background.
If there are still no impressions or no clicks, here’s what you do.
Are your ads all approved? Are they eligible but limited?
This could be preventing the SaaS responsive search ads from showing.
Also check the ‘Ad Strength’ column.
If Google labels your ad as “poor” in strength, the algorithm will limit your impressions.
Google basically wants you to put your keywords and landing page text in these ads so make an ad or two to appease the overlords.
Here is a general guide on how to make RSAs that convert if you are struggling.
If your Google Ads aren’t showing and your Ads are perfect, check your max CPC settings.
I would suggest raising them 30% and checking back in later.
You’ll refine these las you go.
In some cases, the SaaS keywords you’re using will be too long. They might not be able to show or they won’t get more than 1 click in a month.
If you’re seeing the “not eligible low search volume” status next to your keywords you need to take off a word from your keywords:
“Enterprise SaaS Management Tool” -> “SaaS management Tool”
Or you might need to loosen your match types.
If you aren’t getting traffic to your SaaS landing page from your search ads, another issue might be that you constricted your match types too much.
Note: If you are going to loosen your match type from phrase to broad, you might actually want to add a word to keep the broad from going crazy.
Here’s an example:
Your Keyword With No Volume: “Meeting Scheduling Tool” – in phrase match
Keyword With Looser Match Type: Meeting Scheduling Tool For Schools – in broad match
Some keywords are just tough. They’re either too expensive for you or have no volume.
Reach back into your vault and select a few more quality keywords (feel free to pause or keep the old keywords).
Here’s how to select quality keywords for your SaaS account.
One week down, your SaaS Search Ads are on a roll.
You’ve been monitoring your search terms closely and used the right number of keywords so that each one is aggregating data.
For week two, you’ll be focusing on much of the same with some small differences.
Honestly, as an account manager, this is your job. It’s the true pulse of your account.
If your keywords are good, then you shouldn’t be spending more than 5-10 minutes per keyword.
Adding these negative keywords will:
All of this saves you money and increases your ROI.
Leaving your search term reports unmonitored will lose your company money.
At this point, especially as your Search Ads accounts ages to day 10-14, make sure there aren’t clicks being left on the board.
One way to tell this is by checking the Search Lost IS (Budget) column. Which is only viewable from the campaign level.
This column does not show by default in Google Ads. Go into the column editor and add it from under the competitive metrics tab.
If this number is above 5%-10% at any point before you know which keywords are working, you should lower all of your bids by 10% every three days until you hit around ten percent (or lower).
Depending on how expensive your clicks are, you might even be seeing some leads come in (just one or two).
If your SaaS is offering enterprise level pricing, you might have to wait longer to get quality leads.
It’s really important to be tracking KPIs like Avg. time on page and button clicks to gauge relatively which keywords are generating more interest.
Finally, about half way through your first month, it’s time to start making big decisions in your SaaS’s Google Ads account.
Hopefully you’ve started to even out the distribution of your clicks and have been monitoring the quality of your search terms reports.
Now it’s time to shift gears.
On day 14-20 if you are still seeing 30%-40% bad search terms for specific keywords, it’s time to pause them or make a drastic change to them.
Other than that, you should expect a handful of bad terms every time you check in but not much more than that per keyword.
Towards the 20-30 day mark, you should start getting keywords that have aggregated enough data to start making decisions that will severely improve your performance.
I would not recommend raising bids quite yet on any of your keywords for reasons we will get into in a bit.
Here are some red flags that advertisers should be aware of.
If you are seeing keywords that have 1.5% or lower clickthrough rates, that should be a red flag.
Somehow that keyword is missing the mark. This would naturally be illuminated through your scrutinous search term combing but if not, consider pausing it.
The only reason to hesitate on this is if it has an acceptable cost per lead.
If this term is bringing in quality leads for your SaaS, don’t pause it but keep a close eye on it.
First off, if a keyword has spend $400 dollars and your conversions are worth $100 a pop, pause that keyword and decide how you can make it better. Maybe add qualifier keywords or tighten the match type.
If the keyword is spot on then cut the CPC down significantly and accept that it will get less clicks than the others keywords.
Typically, it takes 100 points of data to reach statistical significance.
But this is your hard-earned money we’re talking about here so we can’t wait for 100 $15 clicks to come in.
So consider 30 clicks the low end of statistical significance for hasty decisions.
If your keyword cost exceeds the value of your conversions and has 30+ clicks, lower the bids by 15% or so.
Warning! If you are selling a product where the average lifetime value is $15,000 and your lead-to-customer rate is 20%, you can not expect to get a lead for every $200 spent. That is unrealistic at this point and you have to adjust your expectations.
Do not expect to reach 5x ROI with your SaaS ads until you’ve first reached a stable 1 ROI.
Check out your Ads. Hopefully you’ve been running two per ad group.
Are there any new status errors?
If they both have 30 clicks, is one performing better than another in terms of CTR and Conversions?
If so, copy the better performing one, and change out the headlines or descriptions (one or the other).
Check the total you’ve spent so far. Are you on track to hit your goals?
Adjust your daily budgets accordingly!
So far, your SaaS Google Ads Optimization strategy has involved tedious work with tons of patience.
If everything has gone right, the account feels like it’s in a rhythm. The data is consistent, you’ve seen some conversions, and you have a general sense of what is going to work and what won’t.
At this point, none of the search terms in your Search Terms Report should surprise you.
It is expected that a few errant terms will emerge daily but not much more than that.
At this point, even if you have a long sales cycle, you should be seeing leads, trials and sales come in.
As they start standing apart, pause terms that are definitely not working and let your budget emphasize working terms more and more.
Now it’s time to start optimizing your account for the keywords that you know are working.
Be careful here, there are some optimizations that seem “intuitive” but might end up hurting your SaaS Ads performance.
Specifically, if you are raising bids, know that if you don’t also raise budget, you might end up decreasing clicks and therefore lowering conversion volume.
Also note: Google considers the entire composition of an ad group when determining when and how to show search ads.
This means pausing or adding keywords will affect the entire ad group’s performance.
Now here comes the routine part of your SaaS search ad optimizations. You should be logging on twice a week at this point, monitoring search term reports and slightly changing bids (rarely).
Your bigger changes will revolve around promoting successful keywords and testing new ones.
A good time to grow your budget is when you see that the Search Lost IS (Budget) column 15% or more.
This means that you can reasonably raise the budget and expect your results to grow accordingly. Until that column hits zero at least.
At that point, you have to decide if you want to raise your bids and therefore raise your cost per acquisition, try new keywords or test looser match types.
If you are running automated bidding strategies for your SaaS, changing your budget frequently will scramble Google’s algorithms.
So to avoid wasting money on tests and learning, grow your budget slowly. At each level, get your campaign to a good place and then grow it again.
Google Ads quality scores are a great way to waste a lot of time early in your accounts lifespan.
However, at the 100+ day point, you may have some keywords that are getting great results but have poor quality scores.
Lower your CPCs and raise your click through rate by testing new RSAs and making new, relevant landing pages.
When making bigger changes like changing bid strategies, match types, and targeting, do so in moderation.
Google has a great experiment feature which allows users to take existing campaigns and run them in an experiment mode that runs from a shared budget.
This allows the two campaigns to run without clashing in your account.
You can designate the percent of impressions you wish to show the experiment for too!
Another way to grow your budget and increase your conversion rates is through retargeting.
In SaaS Google Ads, this means showing display ads (or increasing bid adjustments) on customers who went to your site but didn’t convert.
The average abandonment rate for leads is 70%, so you should take advantage of cheap clicks and high relevance to bring more value to your account.
At this point, it’s not a bad idea to start looking up the funnel at higher-volume, lower-value SaaS keywords.
If you haven’t already, start with competitor campaigns. You can also target informational searches as well.
Start with low CPCs and work up from there. These terms are likely to be harder to optimize.
This is where you become a google ads manager and high-level marketing strategies. Get creative with different styles of landing pages, high-funnel CTAs and lead captures and more.
Finally, when you first start running ads, it’s a good idea to add some audiences into each campaign under observation.
As your data builds, you will notice the audiences that are outperforming.
You can then take these audiences and layer them into a display campaign with some relevant display keywords (likely the ones from your search campaigns in broad match).
Display can be a place where your ad dollars go to burn so having this educated start before running non-retargeting display ads will help you see rewards earlier.
If you were to take one thing away from this post it should be that incremental, data-driven change is important.
Even if rash decision making and off-the-hip account altering gets you some results in Google Ads, you will someday find yourself confused as to what is working in your account and how to grow from there.
Disorganization is the #1 reason that Search Click Boom attributes to wounded accounts.
Decisions made without the backing of solid data will result in poor returns.
Hopefully this article helped a little with optimizing you SaaS Google Ads account in the first 120 days.
Happy strategizing & thank you for reading!
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