Ensure you know your audience
As with any marketing activity, it’s imperative that you understand your target audience to allow you to reach them effectively. Ask yourself questions such as:
What do your target customers do online?
Where do they do it?
When, where and what are they searching?
These will help you to deliver a more concise and targeted plan and will increase the efficiency of your Google Ads campaign.
With 3.5 billion [3] daily searches on the Google platform it’s tempting to ‘go big’ and try to get your ad in front of as many people as possible. However while it may sound counterintuitive to limit the number of eyeballs eligible to see your ads, doing so will ensure that your offerings and messaging are as relevant to a searcher as possible, ensuring your ad’s reach to the right audience. Understanding who your customers are allows you to use demographic information like gender, age and location to adjust bids and develop a more targeted approach.
Conduct keyword research
Keyword tools can help you discover cost, competition and volume for search terms. Finding those relevant keywords which best represent your business can be a difficult task. There are synonyms to consider, alternative meanings to negate, and long tail terms to unearth, all of which take time and the navigation of specialised tools. Without this research, you can end up overpaying for unrelated keywords or worse, identifying queries that are searched for so infrequently that you never get the chance to do any advertising.
Spend time researching what keywords are going to be best suited to your products and services. Ask yourself how much a keyword is worth to your website? For example, if you own an online holiday cottage company, do prospective customers search more commonly for ‘self-catering cottage’ or ‘holiday cottage’, and is it more important to capture the common search terms, or the ones that indicate a more committed potential customer.
Write killer ad copy
Not every advertiser also happens to be a copywriting expert. The key to success is a healthy balance between qualitative and quantitative components. To write copy that converts, focus on maximising click-through rate by ensuring every text ad has a pair of compelling headlines, a call to action and includes the keyword you’re bidding on. Use extensions where possible to make your ad bigger and more informative.
Part of writing killer ads is to ensure you’ve designed a great landing page, ensuring that your customer follows a strong call to action and embarks upon a sound customer journey and experience with your brand, hopefully converting into a sale. Follow these 5 guidelines for high performing landing pages:
Minimise form fields
Focus on benefits, not just features
Use multiple high quality product images
Make your call-to-action really clear
Make sure your landing pages work on mobile devices.
Activate the conversion tracking tool
Testing, reviewing and evaluating performance is one of the most important aspects of PPC and if you fail to do this you will not reap the rewards in your future PPC plans. Google Ads conversion tracking is a powerful tool that lets you identify how well your ad campaign is generating leads, sales, downloads, email signups and other key actions for your business.
The data recorded by conversion tracking allows you to identify which areas of your campaign are working and which are not, so you can optimise your bids, ad text and keywords accordingly. The whole process relies upon placing a ‘tag’ on your website and then watching conversion data roll in. It sounds easy enough, but it can be tricky to get this linked. Getting it right is something you really need to do, because the only thing worse than no conversion tracking is inaccurate conversation tracking.
Deliver a stronger strategy
Google Ads can be a minefield for small businesses wanting to promote their business online, but many recognise the need to participate and develop a PPC strategy. So if you are thinking of investing in Google Ads, following our 4 key tips will ensure you get a head start. Honing in on these elements will help create a solid foundation and deliver a stronger and more effective PPC campaign which has a higher rate of converting sales.