SaaS Google Ads Strategy: Optimize For Successful Keywords

Optimizing your Google Ads account comes down to promoting strong keywords the right way. These are the strategy mistakes advertisers make, setting their accounts back by months!

What To Do When Your SaaS Search Ads Are Performing Well?

So you’ve been running a SaaS Google Ads campaign for a month or two and things are going great! The strategy you implemented is going well. 

That’s all because you started with a great campaign structure which let you optimize your ads quickly and in an organized fashion. 

And now you’ve let your asd run, managing the search terms and making minor changes to bids but largely letting the data collect. 

When certain keywords perform well, it is important to make optimizations in a way that accelerate your growth and not slow it. 

Things like pausing keywords, splitting ad groups and raising bids all have adverse side effects that you might want to consider when optimizing. 

Here are some things to consider before making your first major adjustments.

Can you actually tell which keywords are working?

The first thing a SaaS advertiser must consider is at what point can they judge the performance of a keyword with certainty. 

In other articles, it’s been established that 30 clicks is enough to start judging a keyword.

While that remains generally true, consider this example:

Keyword	Clicks	Conversions	ROI
1	32	1	3
2	35	1	1.2
3	30	0	0
4	47	2	1.5

An advertiser might be tempted to start making drastic changes to keywords 1, 2, and 4 but these represent completely different situations. 

First, look at SaaS keywords 1 & 2.

The fact that keywords 1 and 2 are one conversion away from being the same as 3 should make you rethink touching any of them at this point. 

If you are really eager, focus more on optimizing keyword 1 since the ROI gives you a little leeway, but as far as you know with keyword 2, you just got lucky.

Of course, if the match type is tight and the intent is transactional, you may have more confidence in the data you are seeing. 

Keyword 4 is one that you’re able to start making optimization decisions on. 

Understand what different SaaS Keyword Changes will do

Every change made to your SaaS keywords is going to affect the performance, algorithm and budget in some way.

There are some changes an advertiser can make to keywords that will have negative effects on the account in unpredictable ways. 

First let’s look at raising bids.

Raising the bids of optimized keywords

It’s tempting to see a keyword working in the early days of an account and raise it’s bid. 

Technically, if your goal is conversion volume and you can sustain a 1 ROI, raising your max CPCs will be part of achieving that goal.

But if you don’t raise the budget as well, you will actually end up getting less leads!

This relationship is shown here:

Impression Share’s Help You Make Optimization and strategy Choices

Familiarize yourself with the competitive metric columns; ‘Search Impr. Share,’ ‘Search Lost IS (Rank),’ and ‘Search Lost IS (Budget).’ You should be using them to determine what type of wiggle room you have with a keyword, ad group or campaign when making SaaS optimization decisions.

Note: the Search Lost IS (Budget) column is only available in the campaign columns.

Search Impr. Share – The percentage, out of all eligible searches, that your keywords showed for.

Search Lost IS (Rank) – The percent of eligible searches you didn’t show for because your bid and/or ad rank were too low.

Search Lost IS (Budget) – The percentage of eligible searches your ads didn’t show for due to low budget.

Said otherwise, Search Impr. Share shows your the percentage of eligible impressions you showed for and the other two tell you why.

If you have a keyword or campaign that is doing really well and you’re missing impressions due to budget, raising the budget or pausing underperforming words will get you more conversions.

If rank is the issue, see if you can pause expensive keywords and raise your bids (slightly) on good ones.

Pausing or lowering the CPC of an underperforming keyword

The better way to optimize early on (if your budget isn’t flexible) is just to lower the bids or pause underperforming keywords. 

It’s nice to track higher funnel KPIs in the situation that you have really valuable conversions ($1,000+) so you can make these decisions earlier. 

Raising A bid

Raising bids is one of the most misleading actions that a SaaS advertiser can take.

A lot of advertisers think: if performance is good, raise the bid.

However, raising a bid has unexpected consequences.

One good consequence of raising a bid is reaching more impressions.

However, if you were already capping out your daily budget, you will soon discover that higher cost/click will spend your budget faster and tank conversions.

Some digital marketers believe that showing higher on the results in better conversion rates. I wouldn’t rely on this factor. 

I see many managers raise their bids only to see their conv. Rates go down.

To promote high-performing keywords, reduce the KW bids around them.

How To Isolate your SaaS keywords that are working

You’ve noticed some of your keywords have week-over-week shown reliable performance. They are exhibiting high ROI with plenty of clicks and at least a few conversions.

So now what? Now it might be scary to change anything in your account if it seems to be working ok as is. 

Google luckily offers experiment tools that make testing bigger changes fairly easy.

Here you can take an existing campaign and change almost anything about it.

Then run it within the same budget so it doesn’t force Google to choose which campaign to favor.

Don’t pause and isolate your SaaS keywords

Another common instinct for an advertiser: take a successful keyword, pause it and create a campaign just for that one.

There are a lot of factors that go into the success of a keyword in a campaign. The other keywords in that ad group, optimized ads, historical data and more are all what lead to a keyword’s success. 

Pausing and moving it, even if the campaign is identical, will hurt performance.

The recommendation is to either run an experiment or copy what’s working, create a new campaign for just that, but leave the existing keyword running.

Your keywords within an account do not bid against each other. Instead google shows the keyword/ad with the best ad rank.

You risk some weird budget cannibalization issues here. Keeping an eye on these new campaigns in the early days will help you remedy that.

Don’t automatically turn off everything that’s not working right now

Similar advice but on the other side of the coin. 

Just pausing all the other keywords in an ad group might stunt your performance.

Google accounts for the aggregate meaning of all the keywords in your ad group and uses it to select who your ad shows to. 

Especially with broad keywords.

Lower under-performing SaaS keywords before resorting to pausing them. 

Summary

Hopefully this can act as high-level guidance to your Google Ads optimization strategy.

I can’t harp enough that your SaaS and B2B accounts will behave very differently from the B2C accounts that most blog accounts talk about. 

If you are reading around on how to help your Search Ads, carry that lens in your back pocket.

Thanks for reading!