Google Adwords - Maximizing Your Search Campaigns - Part 1
If you're looking for ways to increase your sales and capture hot leads, search marketing is a fantastic place to start. What makes search marketing so special is that you're meeting a want or need the customer has. They're already raising their hand by searching for a product or service your business offers so the only thing you need to do is make sure your business is visible.
While ranking highly in organic search and local listings is crucially important, there is still enormous opportunity by tapping into paid search as well. This is why you'll see all the big businesses invest in paid search even though they may dominate organic rankings. Even Amazon who has recently banned Google products such as Nest and Google Home continues to invest heavily in paid search on Google.
With that said, paid search is an extremely competitive marketing channel and having professionally managed campaigns is crucial to your success. In this week's blog, we will review tips and tricks that will help your ads stand out from the competition, drive more sales and improve your return on investment.
Account Structure
The first and arguably the most important best practice is related to how you (or your agency) sets up your account. Google's hierarchy for search advertising includes campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords. Setting up the account and campaign(s) appropriately is critical to your success.
Campaigns
Campaigns inside Google Adwords are important because they control several aspects of your advertising plan including:
- Budgets
- Geographic targeting (who sees your ads)
- Ad Schedule (when your ads show)
- Bids by Device (allowing you to bid more or less for a mobile phone vs a desktop)
- Ad Delivery (should the budget be spent as soon as possible or spread out through the day?)
When setting up a campaign inside Google Adwords it should be tailored to the individual effort. For example, if you were to be running ads for different languages, you would want to have two separate campaigns set up so you can serve English ads to one audience and Spanish ads to another. Or, perhaps you want to spend more of your daily budget on returning customers by uploading your customer emails into Adwords; you could create a separate campaign for that effort and allocate a larger part of your budget. The options are endless here which is why you'll want to consult with an expert who can help you create the most effective advertising plan.
Ad Groups
This is probably the number one area we see where improvements can be made in Google Adwords search campaigns. Ad groups are a way to separate out which ads get served to customers and which keywords trigger those ads. Google actually incentivizes ad groups being structured properly by lowering the costs you pay per click AND increasing your ranking through their quality score system. For example, if you are a dentist you would want your ad groups structured by the TYPE of work someone may need to be done. This could result in needing to set up numerous ad groups:
- General dentist terms
- Teeth cleaning
- Exams & X-Rays
- Fillings/Cavities
- Crowns
- Root Canals
- Implants
- Teeth Whitening
Each of those ad groups we mentioned would then have specific ads catered to the group. For example, you would want to make sure your ads included the words "Teeth cleaning" in the teeth cleaning ad group and would target specific keywords related to teeth cleaning in that group as well. This way, when someone searches for teeth cleaning they aren't getting an ad related to implants and vice versa. This will drastically improve your click-thru rates, conversions and quality score of your ads.
Ads
Now that we have an understanding of what campaigns and ad groups are, it's time to get to the good stuff! Ads are your opportunity to hook potential customers and bring them to your website and/or get them to call your business. Once your campaign has been established and you've created your ad groups, it's now time to generate your ads.
In Google Adwords, ads include up to two headlines (30 character max each), a description (80 character max) which helps you convey your message to customers, the landing page URL you would like the customer to go to when clicking your ad and a URL path that effects how the URL looks to the consumer viewing your ad.
To maximize the effectiveness of your ads you want to:
- Think like your potential customers
- Utilize all the ad text available
Thinking like your customers will help you create ads that are appealing and drive action while utilizing all the ad text available will help your ads stand out from your competition. When combined you have a winning formula for a great ad.
Note: Be sure to create at least 3 to 4 ads per ad group so you can test which ads are resonating best with your target audience. The great thing about Google Adwords is that Google will optimize which ads are displayed to your customers based on which copy is performing the best.
Conclusion
Now that we have some best practices defined for campaigns, ad groups and ads, the next step is to create keywords which will trigger your ads to be shown. Please join us next week for part two of our Maximizing Your Search Campaigns series where we will discuss the importance of keywords and how you can ensure your ads are delivered to the right audiences. You can look forward to key insights that will help you convert more customers and minimize any unnecessary costs due to inefficient targeting.
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