How to use 6 hidden features in Google Ads

8-MINUTE READ · By Tina Arnoldi on May 2 2017.

Keyword bids, ad copy, quality scores, conversions and landing pages. These are all components of a Google Ads campaign that advertisers are already familiar with. If you drill into your Google Ads account, you will discover six hidden features that will enhance the performance of your campaigns.

Targeting by income level or airport

Household income tiers is a hard to find location setting and allows you to target by household income and even apply positive or negative bid multipliers. This data comes from publicly available IRS data that Google has aggregated. It is not personal or cookie level data. Although there’s no risk to testing this data, monitor performance to ensure you are not missing out on volume when implementing this feature.

Is your business in the travel or hospitality industries? If so, then airport targeting is something to add to your campaign strategy since the proximity to searchers is important. With this targeting method, you show ads to people who are at an airport. This is a way to reach them while they are surfing while waiting for their flight, visiting a new place, or are getting ready to leave town. If you are not sure whether or not airport targeting makes sense for you, you can go with your regular targeting method and add airports to your geographic area. This way, you can later segment your data without creating a separate campaign for airports only. If you discover that this segment performs better or worse that other segments, then apply the appropriate bid adjustments.

Using Labels

Labels enable you to easily manage large accounts and categorize campaign types which is very helpful when an account becomes large with multiple managers. Labels help you collaborate with other users and can be used to identify geography, special promotions, industry verticals, and business goals, such as remarketing.

Once labels are applied to your ads, it is much simpler to search on label categories rather clicking through each campaign or group to find what you need. You can even add multiple labels to same item in the account.

And with the ad label testing tool available from Supermetrics, you can simplify your testing process with ad labels to test variations of copy.

Keyword planner

The keyword planner in Google Ads helps you determine which keywords to use in your Search campaign based based on search volume and expected cost. However, you can also use the keyword planner to help you decide potential content and view mobile trends.

To do this in AdWords, first enter a keyword phrase, choose to find new, and keep long-tail keywords in mind. Then use the keyword filter to get words that only have a certain number of searches per month. You can include additional filters of bid or competition and restrict it to a specific date range. When you choose get ideas you will see Google’s available data on these searches.

When you select the Keyword ideas tab along the bottom, you see even more granular data with relevant terms compared to what you searched. Look at the most popular searches in these results. And finally, by choosing mobile trends from the search volume trends drop down menu, you will see mobile performance and also breakdown by device. This information is good to know for campaigns, landing pages, and location targeting.

Auction insights

Everyone wants to know how they are doing compared to the competition especially with paid channels. You want to know who you compete against, how often you win, and how often your ad is above the competition. There are third party tools available for spying on your competitors and they provide estimates on what your competitor are doing with paid search. But did you know there is also one included in Google Ads? It is a bit hidden so there is no surprise if you have not yet discovered it.

You can choose to run auction insights for all campaigns, specific campaigns, keywords, etc. under Details and then Auction Insights. This data also provides an overlap so you can see how often you and your competitors show ads at the same time. The position above metrics is the percentage of time the competition outranks you when you show up at the same page. Impression share is how often you show up in the Google auction and is calculated by the number of impressions received divided by the number you were eligible to receive.

Dynamic ads

Managing a large Google Ads campaign when there are frequent updates due to website changes can become unruly. With dynamic keyword ads, you can choose to not display ads when out of a particular stock and can also extend the reach of your ads. This is an ideal solution for advertisers with hundreds of pages of products. To use this method, create a new search campaign with a dynamic search ads option. Choose the website and language. Although there is not as much control as with the standard approach with ads, the method automatically updates ads when the site is crawled which is a significant time saver.

Google Trends

Although not officially a keyword research tool, Google Trends can help you discover if your preferred keywords have risen in interest over time and if there are seasonal or regional trends.

The below screen is a simple example comparing the use of web analytics to google analytics in the United States for the past year, in the category of internet and telecom in the news results.

You can also use the hamburger menu on the upper left hand side to see what is trending in general for YouTube and Google. It’s helpful if you report on current events because it indicates what people are interested in at the moment. Comparing trends also provides data on the mind of the searcher for these different subjects.

However you choose to search with Google trends, ask yourself if the trends are rising or falling for your interest area. Note where trends are popular, whether it is a narrow search in your city or as broad as your country. And identify the next action to take as a result of what you discover.

By exploring these features available in Google AdWords, you can take your advertising to the next level. And with Supermetrics, you can analyze performance of past campaigns (clicks, impressions, conversions etc. ) as well as performance of your keywords.

About Tina Arnoldi

Tina Arnoldi is Analytics and Google Ads Qualified and one of the few people in the United States recognized as a Google Developer Expert (GDE) for marketing. Her agency, 360 Internet Strategy, is also a Google Partner. You can learn more about her on LinkedIn