Paid marketing is as essential as any other digital marketing strategy. It gives you a much-needed boost to gain traction and increase the chances for conversions.
A successfully executed paid ad campaign can have a positive impact on your revenue. And the reverse is also true for poorly run campaigns.
Google has more than 93% of the market share in the search industry. So, it's an ideal choice for running paid campaigns for small businesses. However, it's easier said than done to create ad campaigns that yield positive results.
When running Google ad campaigns, you're paying the platform to display your ads to the set target audience. So, every click has a cost. Therefore, a poorly executed campaign can affect your financial stability especially if you're a new company with a small budget.
How to prevent that from happening?
Here are 5 tips to ensure your Google ad campaign's success.
1. Optimize Your Landing Page
The main objective of running a paid ad campaign is to attract traffic, generate leads, and ultimately make a sale. That's why one of the core factors that determine the success of your ad campaign is its conversion rate.
Landing optimization plays a key role here. To acknowledge a high conversion rate of your campaigns, you have to ensure a seamless user experience once people land on your site. This is often overlooked by most businesses.
Creating an effective ad campaign is not just about optimizing your ad as per the best practices. You should also optimize the page on which a user lands by clicking the call to action.
A page that takes forever to load is less likely to add any value. It's reported that a 1-second delay in page load time can cause up to a 7% loss in conversions. This is alarming especially when each click costs.
Other than this, you have to consider creative aspects as well. This means your content. Content plays a vital role in ensuring conversions. That's why it's the core focus for around 87% of marketing visionaries.
The message of your ad copy should be in line with what's mentioned on your landing page. This assures users that your ad is not just a sales pitch but a promise.
2. Do Pinpoint Targeting
An average company sees around 200% ROI running Google ads. You can yield similar results if you are laser-focused when creating an audience for your ads.
Google allows you to target people based on their demographics, affinity, in-market or life events, and interaction with your business. You can also create a custom audience based on the interests or purchase intentions and search patterns of your target audience.
To do pinpoint targeting, you have to create a custom audience as per the characteristics that best represent your potential customers. For this, you would need to add interests that resonate with your audience using respective keywords.
Google uses this information to target people who have used similar search phrases to seek desired solutions. This allows you to promote your product or services to an audience that's interested in solutions similar to yours.
3. Use the Right Keywords
Your ads reach the right audience by targeting user intent. Hence, it's essential that you use the right keywords when designing your campaign. The results displayed by Google are determined by the respective search queries of users. And the same goes for sponsored posts.
Your first priority should be to identify the right keywords that best represent your audience. This demands thorough research and often trial and error to finally select the keywords that drive fruitful results.
Once you've identified the right keywords, your goal is to use the correct match types. There are three match-types for keywords when setting up a Google ad campaign - broad match, phrase match, and exact match.
- A broad match targets search queries containing your keyword(s) without considering the order or arrangement of the words that comprise the query.
- Phrase match narrows down your targeting by showing your ads against search queries that contain the specified keyword(s) in respective order.
- The exact match only targets the search queries that are the same as the specified keyword(s) or the related searches.
For example, if your chosen keyword is 'online scheduling solution', your ad will be displayed to people using the same exact keyword or its variations such as online scheduling software.
So, the goal is not just to identify the right keywords but also to select the fitting match-type to drive optimal results.
4. Exclude Negative Keywords
For your Google ad to perform exceptionally, you have to exclude negative keywords from the campaign.
Negative keywords are phrases that may comprise a few variations of the search queries you're targeting. These variations usually attract junk traffic that's why it's better to exclude them from your list in order to ensure seamless targeting.
For example, let's say you're a mid-tier personal planner software and your target audience comprises professionals.
In this case, you should consider excluding negative keywords like 'free', 'cheap', and 'personal' etc. These keywords, if not excluded from the list, would form different variations. And these variations would likely send junk traffic to your site.
So, negative keywords are words or phrases that you use to exclude irrelevant demographics from your target audience.
5. Keep Testing
Around 70% of people avoid clicking on paid ads. So, creating an effective ad campaign requires a thought process to ensure that you don't just bleed money but get results.
The best way to make sure that your ads yield optimal results is by testing different variations and seeing which one performs exceptionally. Google recommends that you create at least 3 ad variations before running a campaign.
You can't just create one ad and expect it to bring astounding results. You have to test different versions of an ad to find the one that performs best. This may cause you to burn a little more ad budget than expected but it will all be worth it in the end.
You can create different variations of your ad by trying different combinations of headlines and ad descriptions. That's a more simplistic way. If you want to take it up a notch, you can test different target audiences, bidding strategies, keyword variations, and more.
It’s a Wrap
There you have it. The 5 tips to ensure Google ad campaign success for small businesses. The list is small but it contains all the effective ways to help you create an ad campaign that brings amazing results.