Many SMEs are terrified of Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), even if they are confident in other areas of digital marketing. The pay per click (PPC) advertising platform has a fearsome reputation for being expensive and unpredictable – as likely to lose you money as to make it, and many SME owners avoid Google Ads as if it were an online casino.
This fear is unjustified – there are many safeguards built into Google Ads that give users tight control over their expenditure and help them measure their ROI.
Nevertheless, it’s easy to get lacklustre or disappointing results from Google Ads. In this article we explain 4 tips you can use to get more value and a better ROI from your Google Ads spend.
1) Improve your Quality Score
Google loves quality content, and has an inbuilt Quality Score for every keyword on your Google Ads account that rates the keyword from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) based on the ‘quality’ of the advert itself and the landing pages linked to it.
Keywords with high quality scores benefit from a lower cost per click (CPC), so focusing on improving the quality of your content and user experience will go a long way to reducing the cost of your Google Ads campaigns, as well as increasing your chance of conversions. ‘Quality’, in this context, equates to relevance to your target market, so the first thing to do is to ensure that your landing pages relate directly to your campaign keywords (no attempt to bait and switch, using non-relevant keywords to increase your click through rate (CTR) by deceit), and that the content on each landing page is well written, has a clear and unambiguous CTA, and is useful to your prospects.
2) Use re-marketing
'Re-marketing’ presents personalised adverts to visitors who have previously visited your website (or a specified landing page). These adverts are effective ways of optimising your Google Ads spend, as most visitors won’t purchase from you or even get in touch on their first visit to a landing page – but they might do if they subsequently see a re-marketing banner which prompts them to return to the page a second time. Re-marketing is a good way of sustaining engagement from your PPC campaigns and of improving the Quality Score for important keywords.
3) Track your conversion rate
It’s hard to improve a PPC campaign if you don’t track the relative success of your adverts and landing pages. The answer to this is to track your conversions – a conversion being an incident of someone visiting your landing page through your advert and responding to your call to action (CTA) by, for example, filling in an enquiry form or making a purchase. You can track adverts on Google Ads by setting up a Google Analytics tracking URL. These can be configured to monitor conversions from different campaigns, platforms, sources, landing pages, and promo codes – fill out a Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder web form to get started. Using a tracking URL enables you to define specific campaign goals, and then to optimise your content to improve your conversion rate.
4) Organise your Google Ads campaign structure
Not all Google Ads campaigns have the same purpose. For instance, some may be conducted for branding awareness purposes, others to sell specific products and services, and some may be hybrid campaigns encompassing elements of both sales and branding. Each type of campaign has different criteria for success. Likewise, some campaigns may be directed at different buyer personas, or at prospects at different stages of the buyer journey. What all this means is that the expected response rate and performance criteria will be different for different types of campaign, and without good organisation, it can be hard to set realistic expectations for performance and expenditure, and equally difficult to optimise your advertising costs.
For accuracy and better control over your spending, we recommend structuring your ad groups/campaigns to align with target audiences with similar search behaviours and interests, and setting one goal or focus for each campaign (sales enquiries, purchases, e-book downloads etc).
Google Ads Management from JDR
Google Ads is a highly effective lead generation platform through which you can generate profitable sales qualified leads quickly – and can often be used to bridge the gap while waiting for results from slower burning tactics like organic SEO and email marketing. At JDR, we offer tailored Google Ads and other PPC management to support your sales goals and help ensure the best returns from pay per click advertising. To find out more, please call 01332 343281 today.
Image Source: Pixabay
