Google Ads is a prime source for website traffic that converts. However, the process for getting the most out of your investment is not straightforward. To get the best results possible, implementing Google ad tactics to craft winning ads and sustainable campaigns are essential.
The good news is there are endless rewards and the potential stream of new business.
Consider these thirteen advanced methods to wring more profit from Google Adwords.
Make Tons of Ads for Testing
It’s not much fun making distinct ads. However, that’s the best technique for testing, which is an essential component of marketing success.
You may tap a third-party tool for easy ad creation, or you can do it yourself. Either way, the point remains the same. Tracking different ads lets the market decide which one’s are the best performers.
That’s a massive deal because better ads save tons of money over time. Running a poorly performing ad for too long is one of the fastest ways to fail.
Each Ad Group Needs a Specific Landing Page
Another crucial Google ad tactic is ensuring that people land on pages that best match the ad.
Clicking from one page to another should never cause an unsettling feeling. The way to anchor the message is to use similar branding and images and text. That way, the visitor feels like it makes sense when they visit.
Naturally, strong branding also helps with creating a consistent voice and message. It’s relatively easy to accomplish when the same person works on ads and pages. However, in larger organizations, it may take inter-departmental co-operation to smooth out the rough edges.
Master the Art of Remarketing
The idea or remarketing is straightforward enough. The term refers to the process of showing ads to people who have visited a site page.
However, there are numerous advanced methods to remarket using lists and demographics, so it’s worth learning as much as possible about how it all works.
The excellent use of specific lists is to upload customer data. That gives Google a chance to mirror particular characteristics for your campaign. The idea is that it’s easier to find people like your best existing customers and display ads to them.
Remarketing to people who have visited a page or clicked an ad is a low-risk way to increase conversions. Since the people have expressed interest, they were likely interrupted before leaving your page.
People who abandon carts are a prime example of this type of effort. With a re-engagement campaign, you should be able to coax them into completing the purchase. Many marketers will provide additional incentives to get them to buy.
Leverage the Power of Google’s Advanced Campaign Tools
Google provides advanced campaign tools to help marketers pick the best overall objectives. That’s powerful because each campaign objective requires a different technical structure.
- Sales
- Leads
- Traffic Generation
- Product and brand conversion
- Brand awareness and reach
- App promotion
All of these objectives are grounded in reality and are a fantastic place to start.
Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the ideal way to get the most out of a Google Ad campaign. Optimizing the ad copy, landing page, and keywords all are methods that increase conversions. CRO requires testing and conversion tracking to ensure accuracy. It takes a genuine effort to implement these optimizations. However, few other strategies deliver as much bang for the buck.
A powerful method to optimize conversions is taking continuous feedback from visitors. It’s one thing to think your site is ideal; it’s another to ask the people using it what they think.
The method for doing this can be a combination of surveys, live chat encounters, and email or text followups. Directly asking people to provide feedback works well and can help anyone make their website perform much better.
Create the Ultimate Buyer’s Journey
Effective PPC ads work best when the pipe visitors into a streamlined buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey covers everything from the information on the page to the presence of live chat support.
It’s worth placing yourself in the shoes of a visitor and removing every possible obstacle that stands in the way of a purchase.
- Awareness: The first step on the journey is awareness of the product or service. Ads are an excellent way to create interest.
- Consideration: This critical stage is when the customer learns more about your solution. You can help them make the purchasing decision by bulking up your resources and including white papers, blog posts, and videos. Each of them should expound on vital points about how your solution solves their problem thoroughly.
- Decision: At this point, the buyer has all the info needed to make an informed decision. Will the buy from your brand or a competitor with a better price? Getting feedback at this stage is critical for the improved development of your offerings.
Maintaining a keen awareness of where a person is in the buyer’s journey empowers marketers. This information makes it easy to customize offers to close more sales.
Understand Audience Targeting
Targeting the right people is a significant factor in determining campaign success or failure. If you’re selling an established product or service, the demographics of your best customers are a fantastic starting point. If your campaign is new, and so is the offer, you’ll need to use a best-guess approach.
Google Adwords provides precise audience targeting, depending on which campaign type is in use.
You can quickly choose from any of the following.
- Remarketing lists
- Custom combination lists
- Life events
- Interest categories
Granular control over audiences is a way to ensure less waste in all campaigns. You have the power to use lists any way you want and to manage them as you see fit.
Make the Most out of Negative Keywords
A fast way to get more from ads is by using negative keywords to prevent your ad from triggering.
A negative keyword is a word that should never trigger an ad because it’s wrong or unprofitable. An example would be the word “free.” Unless you’re offering a free product or service, you won’t want to pay for ads that mislead people.
More specifically, some words almost may not apply to a specific product (such as a size that you don’t carry.) It’s worth both the time and effort to make the negative keyword list as extensive as possible. You may also add words once a campaign is in action if you see poorly performing clicks.
Dial-in the Keyword Matching Types
Pick from the keyword matching types and select the ones that are most appropriate for a campaign.
Broad matching is usually too vague for everyday use. Exact match is generally a superior choice but requires more setup work.
- Broad match: (This type provides the maximum reach but with a cost of minimum relevance).
- Modified broad match: (This type is a variation from broad matching, which bumps up relevance by reducing the reach slightly.)
- Phrase match: (This choice provides medium reach and medium relevance, providing a middle-road approach to advertising).
- Exact match: (This type has the minimum amount of reach but offers the maximum level of relevance).
- Negative match: (This type is almost always used to make website visitors more relevant by reducing reach to less qualified traffic).
Optimizing ad campaigns means selecting the best keyword matching type and then refining the rest of the campaign to extract the most value.
Don’t Be Lazy About Filling in the Ads.
It’s worth filling out all the appropriate information in every field.
It may save time to go through the ad configuration quickly. Still, it’s well worth filling out optional fields to flesh out your ad to its fullest.
This advice also applies to fill out the text fields with as much text as allowed. There’s no reason to skimp, and the extra words may help relevance.
When filling out a lot of ads at once, the work is tedious. That’s why some people will look for third-party tools to help. If you ever find that you’re overwhelmed with the task of ad creation, it might be time to do the same.
Geographic Targeting Saves Money
It’s worth taking advantage of Google’s geographic targeting features to reduce costs.
If your offer only applies to a specific area, there’s no good reason to pay for displays anywhere else. You will likely want to target the smallest subset of people for a local product or service, and doing so provides substantial savings.
- Country
- State/province
- DMA (Designated Market Area)
- Congressional district
- County
- City
- Zipcode
Advertising to people within driving distance of a store is logical and profitable. Failing to choose the best geographic targeting options will result in paying for ads to people who don’t have the opportunity to convert.
These optimizations are easy to make and will return improved results.
Use Optimized Mobile Campaigns for Best Results
Most buyers are using smartphones to make their purchasing decisions. That means mobile campaigns are pre-eminent.
Mobile ads require custom optimizations. The primary factor in understanding is that the displays are smaller, so it’s not feasible to use the same tactics as for desktop ads.
You will probably want to use expanded text ads, which provide more information and which load fast. It’s also well worth it to carefully match the landing page with the ad.
It would be best if you also learned new jargon for mobile ads because they are slightly different technically from alternatives.
Understand and Implement Conversion Tracking
It’s vital to track conversions, or your entire ad campaign is for naught.
The way to add conversion tracking will differ based on your site type, but it’s generally a straightforward process. You’ll need to edit the page to add a bit of javascript code that triggers a conversion event, which is trackable by Google.
Without putting this code in place, there’s no way to determine which ads are getting sales! It pays to avoid that mess by tracking all events for later analysis.
Conversion tracking gives marketers the confidence to make changes and improvements in their digital strategy. Tracking visits and analyzing the numbers is the fastest way to ensure better results.
It Pays to Get Better at Adwords
Marketers can use any or all of these tips to juice up their campaigns. One of the best features of Google Ads is that it allows for small campaigns. You don’t have to burn through a massive budget to test results. That alleviates some of the pressure of gettings things right the first time.
With enough practice crafting ads and running campaigns, most people gain sufficient experience to improve their conversions. If things aren’t heading in the proper direction, it’s effortless to pause, stop, or reconfigure any ad campaign.
Remember, Google Adwords is very expensive when the campaigns aren’t optimized. Many marketers lose money consistently, primarily because they don’t bother to use all the tools and tips at their fingertips. When that happens, it’s not uncommon to pay many dollars for each click, even when it’s unrelated.
The problem with irrelevant traffic is that it doesn’t convert well. Any business that pays too much too often for that type of unmatched visitor will fail in their campaigns.
It may be worth paying for additional training or education to learn more about Google Adwords. Google itself offers certification programs for anyone who wants to test their expertise. Google has many self-learning tracks for advertisers, so there’s no need to jump in first and experiment.
Determining objectives and the overall budget are excellent starting points. Once you know what you want visitors to do and how much you’re willing to pay to accomplish it, you’ll have all the foundational components together to succeed.
If you haven’t been using AdWords, you may be falling behind competitors in your market. The program is the single biggest driver of conversion traffic for many commercial websites. With the right mix of knowledge and training, anyone can squeeze much more from their campaigns. Contact a Propellant Media representative for information on effective advertising. Marketers have more control than ever over conversions!