As Google will tell you, you do not necessarily have to spend a fortune on AdWords to get the maximum out of your PPC advertising.
But even if you have a small daily budget, you would justifiably want to ensure that your money’s not getting wasted. This post can help.
- Planning
The first step is to plan your campaign well, before even spending a dime.
Many businesses make an unnecessary rush with their AdWords campaign. Successful advertisers are the ones who plan their campaigns well ahead of time, so they can minimize risks and maximize the chances of creating profits in the long run.
Here’s your checklist:
- Select the service or product you are going to sell.
- Determine the customer acquisition cost; one that is acceptable to you.
- Make a proper estimation of your CPC.
- Approximate the test advertising budget.
- Researching
Once you have received a calculated idea for your metrics and direction, it is time to research your keywords, customers, and competitors.
Note: We recommend starting with search advertising for most businesses at the start before moving on to the display network.
Your checklist for search advertising campaigns:
- Define your target customers.
- Create your initial search keyword list. You may use Google’s Keyword planner for this purpose of yours.
- Identify negative keywords to block.
- Find out your competitor keywords. You may use the KeywordSpy tool for this job.
- Sort your keywords and identify buying-intent keywords from the list.
- Organize your keywords into similar and relevant groups.
- Finalize your test advertising budget.
Your budget to test keyword should be equal to: (100 clicks) x (Estimated Cost Per Click)
For display campaigns, the following tips can come to your aid:
- Identify the demographics (age ranges, gender, parental status, income) of your target customer.
- Find out relevant interests for behavioral targeting. You may take the help of Google’s Display Planner for this job.
- Identify relevant topics and keywords for contextual targeting.
- Recognize relevant placements.
- Your offers
The three biggest factors for your advertising success are – your audience, offer, and your copy.
Analyze your competitor’s offers and choose your structure, for e.g.:
- Free sample
- Special discount (if any)
- Free gift
- A guarantee
Other things to consider should be inclusive of the following:
- Price
- Reason as to why you are making the offer
- A reasonable deadline.
- Ads
If you can get more clicks on your ads, you will not only be able to increase the traffic on your page but will also be able to get discounts on your CPCs and improved ad positions.
The following tips can help:
- If you are using search campaigns, use keywords in your ads to increase relevance.
- In case of display campaigns, try to match the ad copy to the interests, demographics, topics, and placements of your target customers to increase relevance.
- Communicate results (or benefits); not just features.
- Always include a call-for-action in your ads.
- Use relevant ad extensions to increase the number of click-throughs. These are inclusive of things like site links, call, location, callout, review, etc.
- Know the dimensions of text ads:
The headline should be of 25 characters.
The description line 1 and 2 should be of 35 characters each.
The display URL should be of 35 characters.
- Landing Pages
Your landing page is where people “land” themselves after clicking on the ad. Its conversion rate is considered one of the biggest leverage point in online advertising.
- Always send traffic to a dedicated landing page (NOT to be confused with the homepage).
- Make sure of having an attention-grabbing headline.
- Reduce distractions by limiting navigational options.
- Prepare an irresistible offer.
- Increase the credibility of the page by having testimonials, endorsements, and media mentions (if any).
- Tracking
If you are not tracking your sales and conversions, you are most certainly wasting your money. To maximize your ROI from Google AdWords, you must track the entire sales funnel starting from your keywords to customers:
- Setup relevant Google AdWords conversion tracking.
- Setup call tracking with tools like Convirza, ClickPath, DialogTech.
- Use CRM tools to track sales.
- Use metrics to track the number of prospects and sales from the campaign. Sales conversion rate, revenue, and profit per click.
- Campaign setting
As we said up above, for most businesses we would recommend search advertising because search traffic typically has the strongest buying intent.
In spite of that, make sure you create separate search and display campaigns because both of them have to be set up and managed differently.
- For search advertising campaigns, target search and disable the display network.
- For display advertising campaigns, target display and disable the search network.
- Always advertise one product per campaign.
- Limit keywords per ad group to fifty at the very most.
- For search advertising campaigns, start with phrase match. Your goal should be to identify profitable exact match keywords.
- Choose proper language and location settings.
- Setup ad scheduling on the basis of business hours and other relevant times.
- Continuous optimization
Google AdWords should never be based on a “set it and forget it” marketing tactic. To be successful, you must continuously optimize your campaign by improving your targets, ad copy, and your landing page.
- Use the keyword search terms report to determine poor performing keywords. Review quality scores and cost per action.
- Again use the keyword search terms report to determine top performing keywords to add to the campaign.
- Optimize your ads for target CPA. If there’s no conversion data, optimize for the most number of clicks within budget.
- Make sure of having at least two ads per ad group.
- Test the headline of your landing page to capture attention at a moment’s notice.
- Add credibility indicators to your landing page like the BBB logo, press mentions, third party seals like MacAfee or VeriSign, etc.
So that more or less sums up the post. Hope you had a nice and enlightening read.
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