Five tips to lift your Search campaigns.

Five tips for improving your Search campaigns, missing no opportunity and helping your company grow.

1. Make sure no campaign is running on a limited budget

Campaigns limited by budget are a mistake, because they mean you are missing business opportunities. There are only two cases of a budget-limited campaign:

• Your campaign is profitable: you should raise the budget and make sure it runs all day, or risk missing important prospects and sales that would help your company grow.
• Your campaign is not profitable: you should lower the bids on the keywords where you spend the most budget, to bring the cost of traffic down and move your campaign closer to break-even.

“I do not have enough budget” is not an acceptable answer: you should immediately ask for more, because you are missing leads and sales that are going to your competitors.

2. Think mobile-first, and segment your campaigns by device.

Most of your traffic comes, or will come, from mobile: mobile’s share keeps rising, so you have to think mobile-first, if you do not already.

• Check your ads live on mobile before you do so on desktop — it should become a reflex.
• Split your campaigns between desktop (and tablet) and mobile, which is also sensible, so that you can manage your mobile and desktop bids independently for each keyword.
• Give yourself the ability to use different ads for mobile and desktop.

3. Do not let Google optimise your bids.

We do not question the value of Google’s bidding strategies; they are obviously useful to many advertisers, not least in guiding the less experienced. But when it comes to PPC optimisation, it is hard to picture letting Google manage your investment to buy traffic on… Google.

That makes sense, does it not? If you do not run those optimisations yourself, you would do better to use an independent tool, so as to stay closer to your business objectives.

4. Do not let Google optimise your ads.

Again, the point is not that Google’s tools are ineffective: they are perfect for many advertisers, given the time they save in managing ads. But if you sell products or services in a particularly competitive industry, they are not enough. You should turn to other KPIs to identify your winning ads — PPI is an excellent one — and build on your ad tests to improve the impact of your advertising message. That work has to be done by hand, and at a regular rhythm.

Update, September 2026: tips 2 to 4 date from 2019; the automation of bids and ads is settled since, and AI Max calls for a consolidated account structure rather than a segmented one — see Google AI Max: opening the black box and adapting your structures.

5. Are you calculating your customers’ and prospects’ lifetime value correctly?

The first four tips above will certainly help you improve the return on your Search campaigns, but the foundation of success is this fifth one: you have to make sure you calculate the lifetime value of your customers, of your prospects, or of the sales generated through Google Ads.

• If you are in e-commerce, that means giving a different value to new and to existing customers, and knowing which kind of first sale leads a new customer to buy again.
• If you generate leads, that means knowing whether those prospects become customers or sales afterwards, and being able to give each of those prospects its potential value — the average value of a converted customer × the lead-to-sale conversion rate.

Calculating your customers’ or prospects’ lifetime value badly — most of the time, it is underestimated — is a considerable obstacle to your company’s growth strategy.