Google Ads for Wedding Photographers: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

Google Ads advertising for wedding photographers helps to precisely target the right people on Google and its Search partner websites. The Search tools in your account will help you to easily target couples that are searching for a wedding photographer for their special day.

However, setting up a campaign for your wedding photography business is not enough. You need to carry out ongoing campaign management to continue improving your results because of factors like competition, search queries and more.

Here I’ve listed some tips to help you manage your Google Ads campaigns effectively. As a Google Ads consultant I’ve helped many photographers promote their businesses and found that these are the main areas to focus on.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

One of the first and most important Google Ads actions for wedding photographers is to set up conversion tracking. This should usually be done at the beginning, during campaign set up. If you haven’t done this yet then it’s the first thing you should do as you manage your campaigns.

This tracking will help you see where your leads and enquiries are coming from. You can set up conversion tracking in your Google Ads account and add tracking to your website.

A better option is to set up goal tracking in Google Analytics. And when you link this account to your Google Ads account, you can import these goals for conversion tracking. In the admin in your Analytics account, you’ll see the Goals section, and in there you can create your goals by using one of the available templates.

However, in Google Ads you’ll also have call tracking so you can see where your calls are coming from. Using the call extension, you’ll add your phone number and a Google forwarding number will appear each time your ads appear and people can call and that is tracked.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

When you first set up your Google Ads campaign, you should add negative keywords to block irrelevant searches. However, as you run your campaigns and monitor them, you’ll see some searches that are not relevant and you’ll need to block them.

Your search terms report will be very helpful here. You can find this report under your Keywords tab in your campaign. In there you’ll see all the search queries that have triggered your ads including those you just got impressions for but did not lead to a click.

So, it’s best to select them and then bulk add them as negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level or add to a negative keyword list.

 

3. Update bid strategy

An effective Google Ads strategy for wedding photographers should include using the best bid strategy for the goals. There are automated and manual bid strategies in all campaign types including Search, Display, Video and others, and it’s important to pick the best one during campaign management.

If you don’t have a lot of time to manage the campaign daily or weekly, then you should choose an automated bid strategy. And if you want to get as many clicks as possible, then you should use Maximise Clicks.

However, you can switch to a conversion focused bid strategy like Maximise Conversions. But, only use this one when you are getting at least 15 conversions per month and tracking is all set up correctly. This helps the machine learning system to set the right bids at auction time to get the most conversions.

 

4. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page is an area of great insight in your account. Here you’ll see recommendations to improve your campaigns and some will be relevant and some won’t. So, review each of them carefully and apply the ones that will lead to an uplift for your campaigns.

At the top of the page you’ll see the Optimisation score. This is an estimate from Google of how well your ads are optimised and how they are set to perform. You can improve this score by applying the relevant suggestions and dismissing all that are not.

 

5. Do competitor analysis

Use a competitor research tool like SERanking to research other wedding photographers in your locations. This tool will help you see the keywords that they’re bidding on and what the average cost per click is for each search keyword.

You’ll also see the ads that they are using. And next to each you can see the average position and whether they rank at the top or bottom. This insight helps you to choose the right bid strategy and you can use a manual one and bid accordingly.

The tool also gives you an idea of how much they’re paying to advertise each month on average. However, this tool may sometimes not bring up any data for some competitors especially for small advertisers with small budgets, which is often true for wedding photographers.

 

6. Consider broad match type keywords

A common problem that wedding photographers experience is low search volumes for their keywords. This tends to fluctuate and many keywords will not have clicks some months.

So, it’s a good idea to consider adding broad match keyword versions of your keywords. Adding these after running your phrase and exact match keywords for a while will lead to an increase in impressions and clicks.

But you should monitor these carefully. Often broad match keywords will drive searches that are not relevant beyond synonyms, close variants, plurals, singulars and more, that you’d get with all match types.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

Take some time to review how your keywords are performing by checking their quality scores. This metric shows how your keywords are performing at auction time for factors such as expected click through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.

As the screenshot above reveals, each quality score factor has a rating of either Below Average, Average or Above Average. So, you should work to improve these all to up to Above Average, to get 10 scores.

 

Get in Touch

As a Google Ads expert for wedding photographers, I can help you set up and run effective Google Ads campaigns to promote your business. Contact me below to discuss your requirements.