Are your Google Ads working as well as they could and should be? And how can you tell? As competition heats up and search becomes a much more crowded space, the dollars invested in PPC campaigns continue to rise as brands jockey for best position. Meticulously planning and analyzing your Google Ads strategy is essential if you want to improve performance.
A Google Ads Plan to Drive Results
Successful Google Ads campaigns take serious skill, planning, and time. You need a carefully calculated budget, well-researched keywords, the right channels, and more. This probably isn’t breaking news, but there’s still plenty of confusion about how to do it. In addition to creating ads that speak directly to your mobile users, focus on these five items to get started.
- Know your goal. While it’s always nice to generate brand awareness, the point of any Google Ads campaign is to grow sales. Design your ads based on the specific action you want your target market to take.
- Keep customers top of mind. The AIDAS principle of advertising applies to whatever medium you’re using. Your ads should attract attention, raise interest, spark desire, inspire action, and provide satisfaction.
- Be authentic. Don’t mislead your audience with ads that aren’t relevant to the landing page they’re led to.
- Use negative keywords. Negative keyword targeting prevents your ads from being shown to users who would not find them relevant.
- Target ads. Google has a lot of helpful advice on using targeting to your best advantage. A good targeting strategy includes exact, phrase, and broad match terms as well as behavioral and geo-targeting.
And always, always be testing. Which takes us to the next stage of the process, analysis.
Analyze AdWords Results
Testing and changing elements of a Google Ads campaign is essential to success. You must consistently re-imagine and reconfigure your existing ads, even if you believe they’re performing well. Google Analytics or another analytics tool is a necessity for accessing the data you need to understand how your campaigns are performing.
Specific keyword performance should be regularly checked, especially in the early days of a campaign. Pay special attention to keywords that attract traffic but don’t convert. There’s no point paying for clicks that don’t turn into leads or sales.
Search term reports can be your best friend when it comes to low click-through rates, decreased time on site, higher cost-per-click keywords, and a range of other issues that have a negative impact on your bottom line.
Make Improvements
With Google Ads, there is always something that can be improved, with even the smallest tweak like changing the order of words in a headline making a dramatic improvement.
One simple way to boost performance is to create at least two versions of an ad and then monitor which one gets the most attention and conversions. Eliminate the other one and repeat the process by creating a second new ad. Other steps to take:
- Use remarketing to remind prospective customers of your product or service.
- If a keyword has a low click-through rate, take a look at the position the ad is appearing in. Try adjusting bids for better ad positioning.
- Expand your keyword list so your ads appear for more search phrases, which should translate into more traffic.
- Revisit target group definitions. The less precise they are, the greater the risk users will quickly abandon your site.
Finally, take a look at what your competitors are doing by using a tool like SEMrush that lets you among other things, discover keywords you may have missed, see how specific keywords perform in paid search during specific periods, and which keywords work best for mobile and desktop searches.
Plan Well and Results Will Follow
Thoroughly planning and creating a strategic Google Ads campaign is critical to its success. Without a plan you risk spending money without making money. From keyword research to PPC consulting, tracking, and creating great ads and landing pages, Atkins Marketing Solutions can create a customized solution for all your PPC advertising needs, including Google Ads campaigns that convert. To learn more, contact us online today or call us at 714.904.4453
Stuart Atkins
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