Create, monitor, and optimize your AdWords Campaign.
Let’s tackle the best practices you must implement to capitalize fully on your campaigns. For those among you that loves definitions, this is what Search Engine Marketing is all about: all the tools that Pay Per Click offers advertisers to get the most out of their paid advertising campaigns online!
Establish clearly what you want to do.
In setting up your Google Ads strategy, you will have to bid according to the objective you want to achieve with your advertising campaign. Google offers several bidding strategies, adapted to different types of campaigns and advertising objectives.
For instance:
—> Do you want to increase online sales?
—> Do you want to increase website traffic?
—> Do you want to increase your brand notoriety/visibility?
If your goal is to get as many clicks as possible, your bid should be on a cost-per-click basis, where you only pay if a user clicks on your link. On the other hand, if you want to increase the visibility of your brand, it will be better to adopt a bidding strategy related to the impression rate you want to obtain. Google will automatically determine the amount of your bids according to your objectives, so that you can achieve them. For example, if you enter 80%, the search engine is likely to display your link first in 80% of situations where it matches the user’s query.
If you rely more on the conversion rate, you’ll need to determine how much you’re willing to pay for each conversion, and Google will set your bidding to get you the highest possible conversion rate. Finally, if you’re concerned about the number of times your videos will be viewed, enter the amount you’re willing to pay for each view, which is the cost per view (CPV).
By asking yourself these kinds of question, you will be able to grasp more easily the general goal(s) you want to aim for with your Google Ads campaign(s).
Translate the campaign’s aim into precise, coherent, and measurable objectives, and determine how much you want to spend on them each month.
Once you have clearly defined what is the general goal or set of goals you want for your campaign(s), break it into different subgoals. Each of them must be coherent, while being specific to one aspect of the larger objective, and measurable.
For instance, you could state:
- “My aim is to sell more than X products/services per month after a Y month period”.
- “My goal is to have over Z visitors per week on my website after Y months”.
- “I want W views of my ads from individuals belonging to the audience I want to target at the end of my campaigns”.
That way, you will be able to establish the different key statistics you will want to track, and over which level reached by these metrics you consider your campaigns to be a success. It will also enable you to visualize what kind of conversion (aka when a specific action you want your user to perform is achieved) you want to track in the long run.
Finally, it will allow you to have a glimpse at how much you will have to spend/How much you are willing to pay for your Google Ad campaign(s). When establishing your budget, remember that Google spreads ad spending monthly, but campaign overall budgets can only be set for a daily basis. This means that you must take your monthly budget for Google Ads, and then divide it by 30.4 (which is average number of days that a month has for Google). You will then have your daily overall budget!
Choose the right type of campaign and bids
Now that you have fixed your general goal for your campaign and coherent sub-objectives related to it, you can begin to build your own campaign. And after the language and geographic area you want to target, the first thing Google Ads will ask you is the type of campaign you want to set.
Google Search Network campaigns
Ads shown on the Google Search Network appear on the search engine results page depending whether the ad contains specific information that answers the user’s initial search intent. These are text ads whose content is consistent with the different keywords entered in the user’s query, and with a link redirecting to a specific page of a website.
Google search ad campaigns are perfect for targeting customers that are looking for information about a certain type of product. If your overall strategy is done properly, you could increase the number of visitors to your site for your offering, and even the sales themselves.
Google Display Network campaigns
These ads can be of different formats such as banners of various sizes or videos. They appear on a wide network comprised of Google’ own websites, and independent affiliated websites. Their occurrence is based on different targeting methods:
- Keywords
- The content of the current visited webpage
- Remarketing to users who already visited a website
Therefore, the Google Display Network uses contextual targeting that do not rely on a precise search query. It also uses ads that could be compared, in a sense, to more traditional advertising, such as advertising in newspapers, or billboards when it comes to banners.
As a result, the Google Display Network is very efficient when it comes down to increasing your brand’s visibility.
As for bids
Choose a CPC bidding strategy if you chose to do a Google Search Ad campaign, and a CPM ad bidding strategy if you are more looking to increase the visibility of your company through a Google Display Network ad campaign. Also don’t forget to set the bidding limit for your bids realistically (i.e. at a decent level vs. the competition), to maximize as much as possible the bidding amount during the auction process, which is the first factor used by google to determine the infamous Ad Rank.
Maximize the quality score of your ads
Remember: The Quality Score is the other main variable that determines the Ad Rank used to attribute a position to the different ads during the bidding process. As a result, the better it is, the better your ad’s position will be. Here are below a few tips for you to have a better-quality score for your ads.
Organize your campaigns by themes
For example, if you are a dealer of new and used cars and want to advertise that you sell both:
- Create a first campaign for brand new vehicles.
- Create a second campaign for used vehicles.
Subdivide each campaign into ad groups.
Each of them must promote a portion of your offering. For instance, if your brand-new vehicle campaign is for a brand like Audi, each ad group could focus on just one model.
As a result, your campaign could be comprised of one group:
- Called “Audi A4” for the A4.
- Called “Audi A5” for the A5.
- Called “Audi A6” for the A6.
And so forth.
For each ad group, keep in mind the following:
You must produce the right message at the right moment to generate the action you expect from users seeing it according to your online advertising goals.
On the Google Search Network.
Write ads that are coherent with the theme of the ad group. For an ad group promoting the Audi A4, the ad content and call to action will have to focus on the A4 only.
When it comes to picking selecting keywords:
- Choose some that also belong to the general theme of the ad-group.
For example, for the all-new Audi A4 ad group, “all-new Audi A4”, “new Audi A4”, “new Audi A4 sedan for sale”, or “2020 Audi A4” could be interesting keywords. - Use the Google Ads Keyword Planner, which is a precious tool to get keywords ideas for your specific ad group.
- If some of your keywords/expressions trigger your ads for unwanted searches, enter them as “negative keywords”.
That way, your ads will not show for these keywords. - On a more general note, choose the match rules (i.e. rules followed by your keywords to trigger or not your ads) wisely for your keywords.
You will increase then their relevance for your search ads in Google’s eyes.
On the Google Display Network
Choose your ads’ content and execution, and your targeting method according to:
- Your audience socio-demographics.
- Your audience online behavior.
- Your audience interests.
- The content theme of websites where you plan your display ads to appear.
Redirect your ad to a landing page:
- Whose content answers both users’ initial search intent and the promise you made with your ad
- That delivers the promised content in a way that is effortless to digest for users (ex. Fast loading times, enticing visuals, effective structuration of content, ease of navigation on the website, etc.).
Monitor and optimize the performance of your ads.
Various statistics can help you to see more clearly the performance of your ads. Because it is not enough to inject a significant amount of money for your advertising: you have to make sure that the ads reach their objectives and if this is not the case, you can make the necessary adjustments.
Indeed, it is possible to observe certain trends or indications, following the performance analysis and test different variations of ads, targeting or create new campaigns to improve performance and obtain the expected results.
Click through rate (CTR)
As its name suggests, this statistic allows you to quickly know what fraction of users who saw your ad clicked on it; you will then know if your keywords are performing well enough or if you need to correct the situation. This statistic is available for each ad which allows you to know which ones work best and which ones need to be optimized.
Conversion rate
How many users have clicked on your ad and then performed a specific action (purchase, call, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.)? The conversion rate will tell you what percentage of users have performed an action after visiting your site.
Remarketing
Do you want to redirect users who clicked on your ads but did not take any action afterwards? You can create a remarketing campaign on the Display Network that will target former visitors to your site to encourage them to come back and increase your conversion rate.
For richer and more complete ads
Once your ad has been created, you will be able to add even more substance to it; and that’s where the various Google extensions will be of great help! Whether it’s geographic information, links to other pages or call to actions, this information can increase not only your click through rate, but also your conversion rate.
Various extensions are available:
- Location extensions
- Affiliate location extensions
- Callout extensions
- Call extensions
- Sitelink extensions
- Structured snippet extensions
- Price extensions
- App extensions.
The type of extension chosen depends on your objectives. Whether it is to incite users to make an online purchase or to visit you, to contact you, to download your apps or to increase your conversion rate, these extensions are a must to add to your ads.
You want to launch your campaign online?
Now that you have all the tools on how to create a Google AdWords campaign, go ahead and place relevant and well-targeted ads online that respect your advertising budget!
In short, it is more than pertinent to opt for a Google Ads strategy to increase your visibility on the Internet and attract new users; of course, you have to inject money to create quality and attractive ads, but think of it as an investment that will pay off in the medium and long term! Keep in mind that there are many advantages to using Google Ads:
- Better visibility,
- Increase in conversion rate,
- Ability to target one or more user groups,
- Etc.
If the development of a Google Ads strategy is relatively simple, the expertise of digital marketing specialists will be of great help. LeadStream agency professionals can help you carry through your AdWords campaign and set you apart from the competition; contact us today for a quote!
