Things to do ads optimization is the process of looking at your account data and making recommendations by improving performance based on your account's performance history, your campaign settings, trends across Google and more.
We generally recommend a full account optimization at least once per month, with smaller optimizations and adjustments on a daily or weekly basis. This will help ensure that the account is constantly running at peak performance and that spend isn’t being wasted on things that should be fixed immediately.
This article discusses setting up your Things to do ads for success by following the below optimization techniques:
1. Optimize Things to do campaigns with feed management
Ensure maximum coverage with your feed
- Include all products in your feed: Since Things to do ads work without keywords, you could increase and diversify your inventory to optimize your query coverage.
- Have an ad group for each feed item and add the service ID as an ad group label: If you don’t have an ad group label for a service, no ads will serve for this service.
- Ensure that all of your eligible ad groups have a corresponding feed item: If you have eligible ad groups and their labels don’t link to an active feed item, your ads won’t serve. If you change the service ID between feed uploads, the service ID missing from the new feed will be automatically deleted. Regularly check if your labels match your inventory.
- Add additional languages to your existing feed: Adding additional languages to your feed can increase your coverage by being eligible to serve ads for non-English queries.
Note: A language must first be launched before your ads can serve, but you can start adding additional languages before they’re launched.
- Include all products in your feed: Make sure to include all products in your feed to maximize your query coverage.
- Ensure you add title to your feed for maximum visibility: Although there isn’t a hard limit on the character count for titles, the count of effective characters that can be included can vary, as different characters will have different widths. It’s generally recommended to limit titles to 50 characters, though longer titles will be accepted. For this reason, it’s important to make sure to include the most important information early in the title to avoid it being cut off.
- Showcase your photos: Use clear and unique photos that adhere to the appropriate Things to do Image Guidelines. Ideally make sure that the tour or activity is recognizable just from the picture without the person having to read the title.
- Update your feed: To ensure that your feeds are maximizing their coverage, it’s best to consistently update your feeds daily. Some specific areas of note to update should include:
- Prices: Make sure your prices match the price on the landing page. When you update a price in the feed, it’ll generally takes anywhere from a few hours to one day for the Things to do ad price to reflect the change.
- Ratings: Make sure your ratings match the ratings on the landing page.
Set up a feed for different languages and currencies
- Currencies: You only need to have one currency in your feed as prices are automatically converted to the currency of the user’s location in real time. For example, if currency in your feed is GBP and a user is in Rome, they would find EUR, if they’re in NYC they’d find USD.
- Languages: You can add additional languages to your existing feed by adding
localized_name,localized_descriptionandlocalized_value. Withinlocalized_value, you need to add a locale and value. You can add multiple localized descriptions to one service.
Example of services feed with localized values:
localized_name {
value: "Joe’s Food Tour"
localized_value {
locale: "pt"
value: "Joe’s TUDO O QUE VOCÊ PODE COMER Tour"
}
}
localized_description {
value: "All You Can Eat Food Tour."
localized_value {
locale: "en"
value: "All You Can Eat Food Tour."
}
localized_value {
locale: "it"
value: "Tour gastronomico All You Can Eat."
}
}Learn more about Language Codes.
Adhere to Things to do image and photography guidelines
Images are a very crucial element of Things to do ads. The guidance found in the Things to do image and photography guidelines will help you understand what makes a good image for your ads. The quality of your photos and their adherence to these policies in general are an integral element to your campaign's success. Learn more about Things to do policies.
While these guidelines are considered best practice, and therefore not mandatory, all ads and assets will have to comply with Google Ads policies.
2. Optimize your Things to do campaigns with campaign management optimization
- Bidding and budgeting: Maximize Smart Bidding’s performance by leveraging portfolio strategies and shared budgets.
- Audiences: Reach a qualifying number of audience by adding audience segment targeting to ad groups and reach people based on their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching, or how they've interacted with your business. Audience segment targeting can boost your campaign's performance by reaching people browsing websites, using apps, or watching videos. Learn more About audience targeting.
- Setting languages: Set the appropriate language based on the country, ads, and landing pages. For example, campaigns in Canada could be set to English or French, and campaigns in the United States could be set in English and Spanish.
- Mobile speed score: Consider adopting mobile technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve the performance of web pages for mobile devices. Ensuring a fast and responsive mobile experience for users is recommended.
3. Optimize Things to do campaigns with Smart Bidding
Use Smart Bidding to improve your results and improve your budget utilization with shared budgets and portfolio bidding. Since Things to do ads are keywordless, search terms can vary and can have a huge variety of traffic, so a single CPC bid isn’t an optimal setting. Like dynamic search ads, Things to do ads benefit significantly from Smart Bidding.
Smart Bidding combines an exclusive set of signals to set real-time bids for every auction to help you achieve your business objectives. The bids are based on various performance signals such as location, device, operating system, applied 1P audiences such as your data, and customer match. Learn more About Smart Bidding.
Choose your bidding strategy based on your goals
Use different automated bidding methods to meet the different objectives of your campaigns. Learn how to Pick the right bid strategy.
| Campaign goal | Recommended strategy |
| Visibility |
|
| Website clicks |
|
| Conversions or sales |
|
| Revenue |
If you don’t meet the minimum conversion number, you can start with Max. conversion value and a fixed budget. When you meet the requirement you can switch to tROAS. |
Set your campaign up for success
With the following best practices, you can ensure that your campaign is optimized for more successful results:
- Ensure that the most appropriate conversions have been included in the “Conversions” column.
- Consider adding 1P audience lists to each campaign for additional signals.
- Use the portfolio bidding strategy across as many campaigns as possible, if campaigns have similar goals or low conversion volumes.
- Use data-driven attribution, or a non-last-click attribution model.
- Increase your coverage by increasing and diversifying your inventory.
- Ensure the campaign budget won’t be capped when using target CPA or target ROAS.
- Performance should be evaluated over 1-2 conversion cycles to ensure conversions are complete.
- If using tROAS or Max conversion value, you also need to track conversion value. Learn how to Set conversion values.
Set the right budget
- When using the Maximize strategy, your budget acts as a target: A Maximize strategy will get you as much conversion value as possible while spending your entire budget. Alternatively, if your campaign wasn't spending its entire budget before, it's possible that Max Conversion Value could lower ROAS while getting you more conversion value.
- Keep your budgets unconstrained when using tCPA or tROAS:
- Monitor ‘Impressions lost due to budget’ closely and move unused budgets, increase budgets, or adjust budgets to capture additional demand.
- Make sure you aren’t limiting volume with your budget. For example, if you have a budget of $40 USD and a tCPA of $20 USD, you’ll get around 2 conversions per day.
- Improve budget utilization by implementing Shared Budgets and Portfolio Bid Strategies: With Smart Bidding you can Manage a shared budget across campaigns to automatically allocate budgets across campaigns as well as Creating a portfolio bid strategy to become more efficient across campaigns that share the same objective and goal. With more campaigns within a portfolio, you can benefit from more:
- Sales or revenue
- Precise target achievements
- Time saved
Check the bid strategy report to analyze performance when you have enough performance data
Your bid strategy report gives you a snapshot of key metrics relevant to each bid strategy type. Learn more about Bid strategy reports for automated bidding strategies.
- To access bid strategy report, please follow the steps below
- In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon
.
- Click the Budgets and bidding drop down in the section menu.
- Click Bid strategies.
- Choose dates to set a time period to analyze performance:
- The learning period should be excluded from the time period.
- The end date should consider your conversion delay.
- If you find a message indicating results aren’t statistically significant, choose a longer time period.
Note: Time periods in this case should be at least 2 weeks long.
- Look at the right metrics when analyzing performance:
- When using tCPA, compare Actual CPA with Campaign Target CPA.
- When using tROAS, compare Actual ROAS with Campaign Target ROAS.
- When using Maximize conversions, analyze conversion volume.
- When using Maximize conversion value, analyze conversion value.
Improve your campaigns by exploring potential reasons that may be limiting performance
- Ensure you have enough budget by adding budget to campaigns using Target CPA or Target ROAS, if budget constrained.
- Ensure your targets aren’t too aggressive by:
- Setting your target to your average CPA or ROAS for the past 4 weeks.
- Checking the Smart Bidding Simulator Tool for target options with results.
- Ensure targeting isn’t too narrow by:
- Expanding and diversifying your inventory to show ads for more searches.
- Optionally, add 1P audience lists to campaigns to give the bidder additional signals
- Explore if other campaign settings might be limiting the algorithm’s performance by:
- Removing bid adjustments and audience list exclusions.
- Choosing standard budget delivery.
- Selecting the best performing ads through ad rotation.
- Not using minimum or maximum CPC. Setting a Max CPC limit on the strategy will prevent you from receiving CPCs higher than that limit, but may reduce the number of conversions or conversion value they receive at their specified target.
- Ensure you’re assessing performance at the right level by checking your portfolio performance if your campaign is part of a portfolio bid strategy.
- Ensure there aren’t any conversion tracking issues by checking your conversion tag to make sure that the conversion data is being reported properly.
- Explore if your campaign has experienced other changes because, temporarily, fluctuations may arise if changes take place that make a lot of data invalid (Attribution model changes, conversion changes, new geos, big inventory changes)
4. Optimize Things to do campaigns for growth coverage
Expand your growth coverage in Things to do campaigns by expanding your targeting through several key areas:
- Destination expansion: Expand to more destinations, include the campaigns in one portfolio and let the bidding algorithm optimize. You could also create one portfolio for your main destinations and another one for all other destinations with different targets and budgets.
- Language targeting expansion: Include all available languages in your feed and in your campaign settings, or create duplicate campaigns for other languages.
- Geo targeting expansion: Make sure to target all countries in all active campaigns to increase coverage and conversions. The bidder will optimize towards the best performing one.
