For many businesses, Google AdWords is a vital marketing tool. It’s a pay-per-click advertising platform that helps drive targeted traffic to your website. When advertising campaigns are set up and optimised correctly, they can boost your online sales dramatically. In this post, we’ll take a look at how to use Google AdWords effectively.
- Work out your budget carefully
The cost of advertising on Google AdWords can vary from a few pence up to several pounds for each click. The amount you pay will depend upon the level of competition in your niche and the number of other advertisers bidding to have their adverts displayed for the same keywords and locations that you are.
For this reason, it is important to think carefully about your budget. Pay too little and your adverts might not show at all or get poor placement. Pay too much and you might not get the ROI needed to make a reasonable profit. If you pay £1 per click and only 1% of click-throughs result in a sale, that’s £100 advertising costs per sale. There’s no point paying this if you are selling a £10 product.
Before you commence your ad campaign, there’s obviously some maths to be done to make sure you pay the optimum amount. Luckily, Google AdWords does give you lots of control over your spending, for example, you can set daily and monthly limits to stop you overspending. - Choose the right networks
When advertising on Google AdWords you can choose to use search networks, display networks or both.
- Search networks
Search network advertising means your ads show up in Google’s search results. This is the most popular type of advertising and has the highest conversion rates. However, you are limited to displaying text only ads. - Display networks
Display networks show your ads on the sites of third party websites, such as blogs. They have lower conversion and click-through rates than search networks but do let you use images of varying shapes and sizes to create powerful banner ads.
Ideally, you should always use the search network as your primary channel, however, you can create other ads to be used on a display network to enhance your advertising campaign.
- Search networks
- Use the best keywords
When you use Google AdWords, you are paying for your advert to show up when someone has used specific keywords in their search query. You need to make sure, therefore, that the keywords you want to show up for are those which are most likely to result in both a click-through and conversion. You don’t want your ad to be irrelevant to the searcher, nor do you want to pay to have someone click through who isn’t interested in buying.Also Read : Best Keyword Research Techniques for SEOGoogle AdWords lets you use four different types of keyword matches for your advertising campaign:
- Broad match type
Broad matches enable your ad to be displayed on searches which are broadly similar to the keywords you want to be found for. It means you are likely to get more traffic though it may be less focused on your target market. - Broad match modified
This is similar to a broad match but you get to specify specific keywords or phrases that have to be included in the broader search query before your ad is shown. This helps target your ads more precisely. - Phrase match
A phrase match ensures your ads are displayed when a searcher types in a particular phrase, such as, buy cheap furniture or best golf clubs. This not only ensures better targeting but increases the chance of conversion. - Exact match
Exact match type adverts will only display if the searcher types in a search query that is identical to the keywords you have chosen. This enables highly accurate targeting but also risks you losing out on those customers who have used similar but not exact searches.
- Broad match type
- Optimise your adverts
Once your advert appears in the search results the next task is to make sure it gets clicked on. To do this, It has to offer searchers what they are looking for and give them an incentive to click on the link. To achieve this, the advert itself needs to do more than just use the keywords in its text. It should use catchy headlines, a concise well-written description and a clear call-to-action.
If you are going to make the most of your advertising campaign, you should consider using different variations of your ad and then split test them to see which are most effective. The more you do this, the more you can optimise your advertising for success. You should look at such factors as which versions produce the most click-throughs and which convert best. - Create bespoke landing pages for your ads
To improve your chance of converting users who click on your ads, it makes good sense to send them to a specially created landing page on your website. That page should be completely focussed on selling to those visitors and catering for their specific needs. If you have different ads for different products or for different customer types, there should be a separate landing page for each.
The landing page provides detailed information that those specific users want to know about in order to convince them to buy.
Also Read : 7 Tips for Writing a Landing Page That Converts - Monitor your advertising campaign
We’ve already mentioned split testing your adverts but you should also be monitoring and testing every element of your campaign. You can, for example, use AdWords to generate Search Term Reports that tell you how well your current search terms are performing and what new search terms might improve your success.
As you can integrate AdWords with your Google Analytics account, you are able you to track the performance of your advertising campaign all the way to conversion. This way you can measure your advertising ROI and see which parts of the selling pathway are most effective. This might show you that your landing page doesn’t do its job well enough or that there is something about your checkout page that turns customers off at the last minute.
Monitoring and testing can help you tweak your campaign so that it performs at its absolute best and provides the best possible return on investment.
Conclusion
Used effectively, Google AdWords can transform the success of your online trading. From reading this post, you should now have a better idea of how to optimise your AdWords advertising campaigns to make them perform even better.
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