Today’s digital marketing practices are designed to drive traffic to a particular website, product, or service. Google Ads dominates the industry with its pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform. Businesses literally pay a fee to Google every time someone clicks on an ad. Advertisers also pay Google for every 1,000 impressions (CPM). This is a count of how many time an ad is seen or engaged by a viewer. PPC advertising is a very effective way for businesses to generate traffic to their website from people searching for the types of products and/or services they offer.
Google Ads was launched on 23 October 2000. This made Google the paid advertising platform that has dominated the industry to this day. The platform allows you to create and share ads that appear on both mobile devices and desktop computers. This way your target audience will find your ads the moment they start looking for the types of products and/or services you offer. This way your ads will pop up before their eyes at the perfect time, which is when they feel the need for whatever it is you’re advertising.
Because the ad platform is inherently intelligent, over a period of time it can help you analyze your ads and improve them, so they reach a much wider audience. This allows you to hit your PPC campaign goals much sooner. No matter how large or small your ad budget, you have the ability to customize your ad campaign to fit within your budget. You can do this either by setting a monthly limit or pausing your ad spend when necessary.
Google has more than 85% of the search engine market globally. This means that Google Ads is by far the most powerful advertising and marketing company in the world. All online retailers and digital marketers who know what they’re doing are making Google Ads a major part of their marketing arsenal, and Reveal Digital Marketing is no exception.
Unfortunately, many online retailers and digital marketers are ill informed as to how to get the most out of their Google Ads campaigns. Keep reading to learn how to maximize your ROI by “doing” Google Ads the right way.
Best Practices for Maximizing Google Ads ROI
For many, embarking on a Google Ads campaign may seem like a gamble, but there are some tried and true methods for success. These best practices will help you maximize your results:
Clarify Your Objectives
What are you seeking to achieve with your ad campaigns? What do you expect your ROI to be?
It is crucial that you choose wisely when identifying the products and promotions you intend to feature because this is what you’ll be investing in. This is when you’ve got to think strategically by choosing areas that are highly likely to generate a positive ROI. This is where your focus should be.
The answers to these questions should help:
- Is this campaign for the purpose of launching a new product or service?
- Are you having a sale in order to liquidate items that aren’t selling?
- Or are you promoting high-ticket products to maximize your profits?
Having a clear idea of what you’re trying to achieve with your ad campaign helps you plan your strategy.
Who do you want your ad campaign to target? Before embarking on any marketing campaign, you need to identify your target audience. You will need to research your target demographic and put yourself in their shoes to figure out an effective strategy for reaching this particular audience. Doing this will ensure that your ads appear when your target audience is searching and give you a high clickthrough rate (CTR), which is everyone’s goal.
Select the Most Effective Keywords.
The next best practice when embarking on a Google Ads campaign is selecting the very best keywords. This is exactly what you need to maximize the effectiveness of your campaign.
Eliminate ALL broad keyword terms since you might only have this one chance to entice your target audience. This will take a lot of testing and tweaking until you are happy with the results of your demo. The keywords you select are a huge part of your campaign and they need to be the best ones for your purposes.
What will happen if the keywords you select turn out to be too broad? It won’t be pretty. Google will show your ad to the wrong audience, resulting in fewer clicks. Even so, you’ll end up with a higher ad spend.
You will need to continually check which keywords are generating high quality clicks while eliminating those that do not. It’s unlikely that you would get this right on the first try, so you’ll keep adjusting your keywords to ensure that your ads are being seen by your target audience. Continue adjusting your ad groups as well until you get the results you’re looking for.
Also, your ads must be clear about what the offer is, so that viewers immediately pick up on it. Just because you’re paying for advertising, there is no guarantee that the ad will garner results in a competitive marketplace with your rivals running ad campaigns as well. It’s important to pair the right keywords with the most relevant content for best results.
Consider the following:
- With the mindset of a user, list the keywords you associate most with your product
- Determine which keywords are currently being used by your competitors
- Be very specific about the keywords you choose and that they target a specific crowd
- Or to reach a larger audience, choose broader keywords
- Ad groups share similar targets, thus contain similar keywords
- Start with just 10-20 keywords for each ad group and progressively increase them
It is critical that you choose the right keywords for your Google Ads campaign. Figure out what the audience you’re targeting usually searches for, and make sure that the keywords you select pertain not only to your ads, but your landing pages as well, plus your products and/or services. A reputable advertising and marketing agency like Reveal Digital Marketing would also consider things like keyword competition, keyword matches, and negative keywords.
Make Sure Your Ad Landing Page is Optimized
Unfortunately, setting up your Google Ads campaign is just the start. You also must make sure that you provide an excellent user experience once they click on your ad. So, there is more to do.
Enticing users to click through is the first step, now you need to make sure that what they clicked through for is there for the taking. This is why it’s important for your landing page to be optimized for conversions. Your audience must be convinced that your product and/or service solves their problem, answers their questions, or otherwise meets their needs. Your landing page should display the same keywords for it to generate conversions.
The only way to determine what your customers want would be to observe their behavior. You can do this by interpreting the data from your Google Ads, which is shown on Google Analytics. This data allows you to quickly react to their behavior by changing your photos, the catchline on your product page, to keep testing everything, and only keep what works. Creating your Google Ads campaign should give you a good start on optimizing your website, including the landing pages, for your target audience.
Reveal Digital Marketing can help you with all of this, while ensuring that your website can be viewed on all types of devices, including mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and desktops.
Raise Your Quality Score (QS)
Google uses a Quality Score (QS) in determining where ads rank. It’s not complicated – the higher your QS, the higher you rank, which means better placement. All businesses want their listing to appear on the first page of Google in their particular keyword searches. If you have a low QS, fewer people will see your ad, and therefore you will have fewer conversions or sales.
QS encompasses a variety of factors, including ad quality, ad relevance, keywords, anticipated clickthrough rate, landing page performance, and past performance on Google’s results page. The bottom line is that the more relevant your ads are to the user, as well as the landing pages associated with your ads, the higher your QS. Calculating your QS is complicated as it involves adding up your QS column to other data using a 1-10 scale.
Google will tell you what your QS is, but it is up to you to raise it and thus your ad rankings. It involves reviewing their numbers and improving your website accordingly to increase your overall results. A good digital agency like Reveal Digital Marketing can help you with all of this.
Your Ads Must Display Well on All Devices
Because so many consumers these days are shopping on mobile devices, you need to ensure that your ads display well on those screens, as well as desktops. You need to see how your ads will look on large and small screens. Determine if it makes sense to use ad extension tools and make whatever adjustments you need to ensure that you are not losing consumers who search on mobile devices.
Ignoring the audience who primarily uses mobile devices is a huge mistake, especially now that so many people only use of the mobile devices available to them at home. More people than ever are stuck working at home due to the pandemic, so your ads must display nicely on mobile devices.
These best practices will serve you well in developing a strategy for your Google Ads campaign. With some experience running Google Ads, you will improve your results. If you have questions or want more information, please reach out to us at Reveal Digital Marketing.
