As a business owner, Google whether you’re looking at advertising, business pages, maps, or analytics can be a very scary, unknown place. We understand the struggle that you may feel. It’s overwhelming with all the options you can choose from, and the biggest questions are likely how much do you spend, where, and, what kind of return will you get? However, once you understand the role and possibilities that Google Advertising and Analytics play in scaling your business, you can choose your goals and work towards hitting your targets. With patience and the right strategies in place, you’ll start making leaps and bounds in the right direction when it comes to increasing your sales while decreasing your cost per lead.
But, before you think it’s all sunshine and butterflies, we need to talk about a few things. Things really help you target your ideal customers so that you can increase your sales and your bottom line effectively. Many business owners who try to tackle Google Advertising on their own or who hire a person to run ads for them that aren’t as knowledgeable as they should be waste a lot of money.
And a side note: You don’t necessarily need a huge budget to achieve your marketing goals. You can make incremental steps up in budget as you go, once you start seeing your campaigns convert. If anyone has told you it takes months to see results with Google advertising, call us. That is not true, from our experience.
1. You want to be on the front page of Google. Paying for Google ads can help you bump your business up above your competitors quickly.
Google Ads serve over 3.5 billion daily interactions, so it can be a very competitive place to get to the top of the leaderboard depending on your keywords. Your ads can appear in a variety of ad formats beyond traditional text-based ads so be sure to look at taking advantage of display ads, video ads on YouTube, shopping ads, app promotion ads, and others in addition to your typical paid search ads. It isn’t as simple as searching for a keyword related to your business and seeing it pop up in the search results. That’s the general idea but there are many variables at play when it comes to how Google decides which ads to show and why. Not only are ads targeted by keyword but they are also targeted by whether or not the person searching has already been to your website or not, what particular region they are in, and if they have a similar search history as your competitors’ customers. This is why planning plays a crucial role in creating a strategy that gets you real results.
2. Think like your customer to understand their point of purchase for your product and write your ads to their pain points.
When you create a Google Ad you start by choosing common keywords relating to your business, writing your ad copy, and then tweaking your landing page to help you capture the most amount of leads possible. Even the call-to-action on the page matters in terms of whether it says “BUY NOW”, “BOOK NOW” or “SIGN UP NOW.” In order to be able to not only create a Google Advertising campaign but, to optimize your ads to create the best leads possible you need to understand how a customer wants to complete their purchase.
For more information on understanding your customer’s buying journey, read our previous blog HERE.
Google Advertising offers pretty precise audience targeting. You can target specific audiences based on factors such as demographics, interests, behaviours, and geographic location, enabling you to reach your ideal customer base but, if your ads aren’t constructed to match those demographics outlined, your ads might not convert, or worse, they might not even appear. It’s not just about being willing to pay for a click. You also have to have a better ad rank than your competitors to appear beside, below, or above the other ads targeted to the same keywords. Within your Google Analytics dashboard, you have access to the “Behaviours” section, which, when combined with your acquisition and conversion flow data, enables a deeper understanding of how your prospects’ needs may travel through your website as they research and purchase your products or services.
3. Google advertising with a remarketing strategy can target customers that have been to your website but, that didn’t actually buy something.
Remarketing ads uniquely target people that have almost bought from you in the past but, didn’t actually finish the transaction. Having this strategy in place, helps you increase your sales by recapturing their attention either with another product or a reminder that they wanted to buy your product. For a large number of businesses, retargeting is the most effective ad display strategy of all and it tends to be one of the most affordable ones too. The goal with a remarketing ad in some cases is about creating a virtual billboard that your customers see everywhere – or seemly everywhere – while they make their buying decision. This is why properly installing and leveraging a tracking code installed on your website is a crucial step in building out your campaign.
4. Google Advertising offers extra ad features like image and call extensions to get you more leads. If you use them, you could get a higher placement as well as better conversion rates.
Google is picky. It has an opinion and will choose certain ads to show over others based on how the ad is setup, where it clicks to, and how useful the information is on the page the ad takes you to, but Google also looks at how many tools you use in your ad as well. You might read that as favouritism but, it’s really about providing the customer with the best possible experience online.
To ensure your advertising budget goes a long way, it’s essential to prioritize the quality of your ads and to personalize them as much as possible. Specifically, Google evaluates various aspects of your ads, including bid amount, keywords, and landing pages, assigning a Quality Score ranging from one to 10. A higher score leads to better ad rankings and increased conversion opportunities.
In essence, your goal is to create an ad that is unequivocally clear and valuable to the searcher throughout their journey while keeping it as specific to the unique keyword as possible.
5. Pay attention to effective keywords. Not all keywords are worth bidding on.
A keyword in the context of Google Advertising refers to a specific word or phrase that advertisers target when setting up their ad campaigns. These keywords are relevant to the products, services, or topics they want to promote. When users enter search queries on Google that match or are closely related to the targeted keywords, the ads associated with those keywords may be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). Keywords play a vital role in connecting advertisers with their target audience and determining the relevance of their ads to user searches.
For example, if you’re an electrician, common and effective keywords may include…
- “Electrician services” – They are seeking general electrical services and solutions for their home or business.
- “Residential electrician” – They need an electrician who specializes in residential properties and can handle household electrical issues, installations, repairs, or upgrades.
- “Commercial electrician” – They require an electrician with expertise in commercial properties, such as offices, retail stores, or industrial buildings, to handle electrical projects specific to those environments.
- “Emergency electrician” – They have an urgent electrical problem or outage and need an electrician who provides emergency services and can respond quickly.
- “Electrical contractor” – They are looking for a professional electrical contractor who can handle larger-scale projects, such as new construction or remodelling projects.
- “Electrical repairs” – They need an electrician to diagnose and fix electrical problems, such as malfunctioning outlets, switches, circuit breakers, or wiring issues.
- “Electrical installations” – They are seeking an electrician to install new electrical systems, appliances, fixtures, lighting, or security systems on their property.
- “Electrical upgrades” – They want to hire an electrician who can upgrade their electrical panel, wiring, or other components to meet current safety standards or accommodate increased electrical needs.
- “Electrical safety inspections” – They are interested in having an electrician assess their electrical systems for potential hazards, code compliance, or safety improvements.
- “Licensed electrician” – They prioritize hiring a certified and licensed electrician to ensure quality workmanship and compliance with electrical regulations.
It’s also important to create ad groups that are tightly focused on a particular product or keyword list – it increases click-through rates (CTR) and you can easily track keyword performance and other metrics.
Additionally, you will want to continually monitor and refine your keyword selection based on their performance, relevance to your target audience, and your specific marketing goals.
6. Align your ad copy with your landing pages. Google LOVES this and it can lower your cost per click.
Your primary objective is to establish a well-defined pathway leading your customers to conversions. To achieve this, it is crucial to align the messaging on your landing page with the content of your ads. By ensuring consistency between the copy in your ads and your landing page, you can provide a seamless experience for users, enhancing their understanding and motivation to make a purchase.
Also, keep the keywords consistent across the ad copy and your landing page. The whole goal here isn’t to just create an ad that someone clicks on. It’s to create an ad someone clicks on…and then actually finds the product or information they were looking for. If it doesn’t match, Google won’t push your ads as much as they could so be sure to make optimizing your ad copy and your landing page a regular task to widen your audience and increase your results.
7. Use negative keywords to sift out the customers most likely not to complete a purchase.
Why pay money to attract a group of people who won’t buy your product OR that are just a bad match for your business? If you own a butcher shop, and someone is looking for vegan recipes, why would they click on your ad to make a purchase? They most likely won’t! So it’s best to not target vegetarians – unless you are in fact a vegan butcher – and target an audience who is more likely to purchase your product.
Building a list of negative keywords is a core strategy in eliminating keyword mismatches and checking what keywords are searched that make your ads pop up on Google will help you fine-tune your strategy to increase your conversion rate and grow your revenue. This helps refine your results while ensuring that your ads are shown to the most relevant customers possible. In the most basic of explanations when you review and eliminate keywords making them negative keywords you’re telling Google not to show your ads when those keywords are typed in.
8. Google automation will become your best friend BUT, don’t implement every suggestion. Computers aren’t as smart as you might think.
Leverage the power of Smart Bidding and Responsive Search Ads to optimize your conversions but, when it comes to automated optimization suggestions don’t let the campaign implement the changes without your approval first. These tools can dynamically adjust your bids, either increasing or decreasing them, based on various factors such as funnel stage, relevance, keywords, and competitor activity. It can also target wider variations of your keywords, automatically pull images or text from your website, and sometimes what Google comes up with on its own could actually hamper your results even though the AI had the best intentions in its robotic mind.
9. Continue to measure your results to improve your ads performance over time. You can’t just set it and forget it.
Discover how visitors are clicking on your website, identify popular pages, and uncover the search terms that are driving traffic through the insights provided by your analytics. This data is crucial for measuring success and identifying patterns which then you can better target your campaigns towards.
Within the Google Advertising platform itself, you’ll find metrics that offer insights into why changes may have occurred in terms of impressions, click-throughs, or costs, and if you pair your ad account to your analytics account the data paints a fuller picture for you to access and analyze. BUT, you have to actually take the time to review, understand, and implement your adjustment ideas.
Most importantly Google Advertising and many other digital advertising platforms are continually evolving. Tomorrow, there may be even more opportunities to optimize your advertising budget or there might be a new tool to test out. That’s why working with a marketing company, like 3SIXTY Marketing Solutions, is smart. Not only can our experienced team of Google Advertising experts help you seriously maximize your return on investment we will save you a ton of time along the way. Want to find out what kind of return on investment you could be getting from Google Advertising? Sign up now for a free consultation! Or if you have already stepped into the world of Google Advertising and would like a second opinion on your advertising campaigns and where you might be able to improve them, give us a call. We’re all about helping you get more for your dollar while growing your business.
