Google AdWords is one of the best tools marketers currently have to promote a business’ products and services to consumers. But this pay per click system requires serious skills, time, and a good strategy to act as the foundation of this entire effort.
Going into Google Ads without this background can end up with very disappointing, and costly results. In this article, we’ll go through some of the basics of a Google Adwords strategy to help you create this foundation and run better ad campaigns in the future.
You might also be interested in: How do Google Ads Work?
Choosing Your Campaign Goal
One of the most important things with Google Adwords is choosing the right goal for your campaign. When you create a campaign, you can select a goal that is designed to help your campaign succeed, as Google will then recommend additional features and setting to help you reach that goal.
Choosing the wrong goal can greatly affect your ad performance, so it’s really important to stop and think about what you want to achieve with a Google ad, ad group, or even campaign.
Here are the main goals for creating ads for Google:
● Sales – designed to help you sell products;
● Leads – designed to help you get leads, such as phone calls, event sign-ups, etc.
● Traffic – guiding users to visit your website and increase traffic;
● Product and brand consideration – encourages potential customers to consider what you have to offer;
● Brand awareness – helps you raise awareness about your brand and offers.
Choosing the right Google Ads campaign goal is the first step towards optimising your ads. For instance, if you need to increase sales and choose the “Sales” goal, you will get additional features that help you start the purchasing or conversion process, such as bidding strategies aimed at getting clicks, or ads that show to potential customers as they browse sites or apps partnered with Google.
Choosing Your Bidding Strategy
Google Ads offers several bidding strategies designed for different campaign goals. Choosing the right one will determine your ad spend, and whether your money was invested properly.
A default option you have is manual bidding, where you tell Google how much you want to spend per each action. This is a good strategy in the beginning, but to remain competitive you may need to look into other bidding strategies as well.
Bids for Boosting Conversions
Smart Bidding is a great choice of conversion campaigns as it uses machine learning to optimise for these actions and gets you the best results for the best prices. There are 5 Smart Bidding Strategies to consider:
● Target cost per action
● Target return on ad spend
● Maximise Conversions
● Maximise conversion values
● Enhanced cost per click
Bids for Clicks
Google has two different cost per click bid strategies available:
● Maximise clicks
● Manual CPC bidding
Bids for Visibility:
● Target Impression Share
● Cost per impression
● Cost per thousand impressions
● Cost per views
Choosing the right bidding strategy is a way to ensure you’re spending money efficiently. Google lets you establish a daily or monthly budget, but how you will spend said budget depends on the bid you choose. If it’s the wrong one, your budget may run out before you reach your goals.
Choosing Your Ad Format and Designing Your Ad
It’s important to consider the right ad format that will help your ad campaigns reach their goals, and design the ads.
Here are the ad formats available:
● Text ads – those than run on the Search network with a landing page link, and a short description;
● Image ads;
● Responsive ads;
● App promotion ads;
● Video ads;
● Product shopping ads;
● Showcase shopping ads;
● Call-only ads;
The type of ad you choose needs to be relevant to your campaign goal. For example, if you’re looking to increase the number of phone calls to your business, call-only ads are explicitly designed to help you meet this goal, and will only appear on devices that enable phone calls to allow people to easily get in touch with you.
Remember this is the component of your Google Ads Campaign that potential customers get to see on the Search or Display Network. What you’ve been doing so far is to ensure that Google shows your ads to the right people, and charges you based on the goals you want. But, when it comes to the conversion rate, that ad itself is the element/that convinces users to take a specific action or keep looking.
When you’re creating the ad, remember to:
● Write clear ad copy, complete with a clear call to action to encourage users to convert;
● Choose a relevant landing page for your ads, and make sure the page is high-quality in terms of SEO;
● Spellcheck and grammar check your ad text;
● Leverage your essential keywords;
● If you’re using photos or videos, make sure they are high-quality and can catch people’s attention;
● Make sure there is no disconnect between the ad copy and the landing page, etc.
When you design your ads, you can also check your Quality Score to see an estimate of how well it will perform. It’s a score Google gives based on a few different criteria:
Criteria for Quality Score:
● The Quality Score – analyses how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing page are to a person who sees the ad. Higher Quality scores also reduce the costs of the campaign and lead to better ad positioning;
● Landing page experience – how relevant your landing page is to a user who clicks on your ads in terms of page content and navigation;
● Exp. click-through rate – how likely is your ad to be clicked on when shown;
● Ad relevance – how closely your keywords match your ad text. Relevance is an important factor in Google ads, and a low score usually means that either your ad copy is too general or too specific for a user query, or that you’ve used the wrong keyword.
The Quality Score is a telling sign of how your ad will perform, and how users will respond to it. If you notice any issues with it, remember to make the necessary changes fast, to ensure your ads are as optimised as possible.
Over to You: Create Your AdWords Strategy Now
Google Ads presents many amazing opportunities for marketers and business owners, but there is no denying that this pay per click system can be a rather steep learning curve. It takes a lot of time and effort to fully master it, but some businesses can’t afford that luxury.
If you’re looking for help in creating an effective strategy and running a high-quality campaign, Australian Internet Advertising is here to be of assistance.
Our Google marketing team is happy to lend a hand and ensure you reach your business goals with Google Ads. Book a free 30-minute strategy session with us now to get started in your Google AdWords journey, or call our office at 1300 304 640 to find out more about what we can do to help.
