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Launching a Google Adwords campaign can be one of the most effective and fastest ways to grow your business, but if done incorrectly it can also be the costliest. A large portion of small business owners are often overwhelmed with how to get an Adwords campaign up and running, and often those who try to take the task on themselves get frustrated with the lack of return on investment (ROI). Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) requires time, testing, and knowledge of how to create a proper converting ad to generate the returns that businesses hope for.
Google ranks its ads based on advertiser budget, bidding amounts, landing page optimization, and click-through rate, making it important for business owners to use all available methods to improve campaigns for increasing ROI. This means having a strong, relevant landing page that the ad links to (the home page is not recommended for ad campaigns), having well-written ads that engage audiences, and bidding in a way that will rank high in the ad results.
Here Are 7 Useful Tips To Help You Achieve ROI:
1) LIMITED BY BUDGET
Many businesses may have a small budget when they start an ad campaign, but this budget limitation can often lead to the dreaded words ‘limited by budget’ in your campaign. (see attached image). Thankfully, there are a few ways you can address this issue without adding more money to an ad campaign.
a) Use ad scheduling
b) Decrease bids — being first in ad results is not a requirement for success
c) Pause keywords that are not bringing results
d) Discontinue high cost per click (CPC) keywords until you can increase your budget
e) Add negative keywords
Some of the above we will discuss in more detail below.
2) KEYWORD MATCH TYPE
Many new advertisers tend only to select 'broad match' when starting a new campaign because they believe that will bring the most traffic and may not understand all the options. ‘Broad match’ is one of the quickest ways to give your money away with little chance of seeing any return. While ‘broad match’ is the standard match type in Adwords, this means it will display your ads for anything remotely relevant to your ad campaign and in any order.
For example, if you are selling children’s shoes and are considering using “children’s shoes” as your keyword with a broad match, your ad may show things like “unique children’s shoes,” “best children’s shoes,” or “shoes for children.” By using modifiers like ‘+.’ you can help put focus on the phrases you want to return results for. This is called a ‘modified broad match.’
Other types of match types include ‘phrase match’ and ‘exact match’ which offer more restrictive control over when and where your ad appears. A great place to learn more about match types is WordStream (http://www.wordstream.com/), a leading online advertising agency and a recommended resource for keeping up to date on the industry.
3) SCHEDULING YOUR AD
AdWords, by default, will run your ad throughout the day, which for some websites will be fine. But what if you are a salon, restaurant, or other service business or shop only open from 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.? Then there is no need to have your ad running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can specify the exact hours you would like your ad to run by looking in the advanced settings area of your ad campaign and creating a time frame that is most favorable to your business.
4) NEGATIVE KEYWORDS
By utilizing negative keywords in your campaigns, you can better attract the right leads without spending the extra money and having your ad not show up for irrelevant search terms. For example, if you are a shoe store in New Jersey, but only sell children’s shoes, you, of course, would not want your ad to appear for any searches other than children’s shoes related terms. If we take a look at the Google Keyword Planner (https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/) and look for relevant keywords for our children’s shoe store, we may see something like this: (see attached image)
So based on the above image you can get a feel for the search volume in Monmouth County, NJ for kid’s shoes and related terms. Now we can see some terms we may not be interested in using in our ad campaign. If you are selling high-end, luxury shoes then you are of course not going to want “cheap shoes for kids” to show your ad, so you will want to add the word “cheap” and “discount” to your negative keyword list. If there are specific brands you do not carry; you may want to add those brands to your negative keyword list as well.
5) GEO-TARGETING
If you are a local business then Geo-Targeting your campaign is critical for success. In the sample above for children’s shoes, the keyword planner results are based on a Geolocation of Monmouth County, NJ. So the results shown for average monthly searches are based on users searching from Monmouth County, NJ. When doing your keyword analysis, you should be utilizing this local data to determine the volume and to find the best keywords for your local niche.
6) ANALYSIS
When running a campaign, you must dedicate time to monitor and amend it based on the reports you are provided. Adwords offers its ad partners advanced metrics so you can see how your ad campaign is doing at any given time. This can help you make informed decisions on what ads to pause, what keywords to remove, what phrases to add to your negative keyword list, and more.
In the attached report (see attached) you can see that several keywords have brought this advertiser no visits at all, you can also see that one of the keywords brought only one person to the website, but that no conversions took place. Conversions are based on the code you have to track whether a visitor makes a call, completes a form, or takes some action. These are the types of things business owners need to evaluate at least weekly to ensure they are not spending money that is not bringing results.
7) COMPELLING ADS
Writing compelling ads can make a difference in whether visitors click your ad or your competitors. Think about the person you are trying to sell your product or service to and what problem they are looking to solve or what item they are looking to buy. How can you compose your ad to intrigue them and make them click to learn more? It is important to test ads and use variant ads to see which is more efficient. Different headlines and calls to action can help you learn more about your potential customers and in turn, bring you better ROI for your campaign. Unbounce (http://unbounce.com/ppc/write-high-performing-adwords-ads/) has a great article with examples of how to create high-performing campaigns.
