6 Google Ad Campaign Tips You Never Knew You Needed

Starting a Google Ad campaign can be a smart move for your business, as we discussed last week. But Google ad campaigns with Google Ads can take some trial and error before you’re generating real, meaningful leads.

Here are some tips that can take your Google ad campaign to the next level:

1. Take your time building your campaign carefully — rushing can lead to wasting your money.

Some brands get excited to start getting leads and feel they need to rush their Google Ads campaign. This could be a costly error, as lack of detail can lead to spending lots of money on keywords that aren’t relevant to your goals… In fact, this should be a major consideration in selecting your keywords.  If your goal is to increase sales on your new coffee filters, think about terms like “best pizza,” “cheapest pizza,” and “pizza near me.”  Do not concentrate on how-to keywords, like “pizza recipes”, even if they are recommended by Google’s Keyword Planner as a related term. These searchers are looking for information not products to purchase. Make sense?

2. Landing Pages are more important than you think.

Landing page design is very important, and often overlooked. It should be 100% focused on the goal of your Google ad campaign. If your goal is sales, then it should “sell” your product like a salesman. Simply illustrating your product features and pricing with beautiful imagery. It should not link to other pages as our goal here isn’t SEO, it is to get your customer to buy this product. You don’t want them to browse the rest of your site in most cases, because they may get distracted or lose interest. Remember you want them to focus on your goal!

If you want them to fill out a form or call you than that should be the 1st thing they see and the content on the page should support why they should immediately sign up, call you, or send you their contact info.

We don’t recommend sending them to your website and having them figure out what to do. Make it easy for them to get what they searched for and what you want them to accomplish.

3. Keywords your customers would use, not industry pros.

Keywords are a “key” component of your Google ad campaign, see what we did there? They are what will trigger your ads to show up in search results for potential customers.  ALWAYS think of your keywords from the perspective of an average customer. Use the terms they would enter, not the terms you would use.  An example of this would be a shoe store running ads for “visco-elastic foam running shoes”. Although this term may directly describe your product, it may not be the language a searcher would use. They would likely search for “foam running shoes, foam sneakers, or memory foam shoes”. These terms are more simple and less technical, making your customers more likely to search them. If you are a technical product, like a computer for graphic designers, then concentrating on some technical terms may be a good idea because your average customer wants a specific computer for this specific industry purpose.

4. Be sure you can track your results before you launch your Google ad campaign.

You must get some tracking in place to monitor the results of your Google ad campaign. Or you would just be throwing money at Google with no idea of what is working and what isn’t.  1st of all, get Google Analytics on your site, without this you aren’t monitoring your traffic, where it comes from and what they are looking at on your website. Analytics can be integrated with your ads campaign so they can share data and help interpret your results.

Next get your remarketing tags in place, we like Facebook and Google for this.  The reason to do this is so that when you spend money to run traffic to your site you can follow up with these specific visitors with future ads… Ever see those ads for a website that follow you around for weeks, reminding you of a product you recently viewed? It’s highly effective, you should be doing this too!

Also be sure to get conversion tracking in place to monitor which keywords are leading to conversions and which keywords are leading to visitors that aren’t interested in your product or service enough to convert. You can also remove keywords that don’t work and focus on more clicks to the keywords that get your leads or sales!

5. Clicks don’t equal conversions.

As referenced above, not all clicks will lead to a visitor becoming your customer. So don’t get overly excited when you get 1,000 visits today on your website, that doesn’t mean your campaign is working according to your goals. You could make enticing ads that get people to click but if they aren’t doing what you need, adjustments are in order.

6. Fine-tune your Google ad campaign with Search Terms Reports.

Search Terms Reports are the #1 way to refine campaigns. Find out what people are typing into search engines to trigger your ads – sometimes they aren’t useful.  Back to our example of a local pizza shop. If your ads are showing for “pizza recipes” you are wasting money… these searchers want to make their own pizza at home, not order yours. Make “recipes” a negative keyword and save that money!

Want more help with your Google Ads or Facebook Ads? Contact us and see how we can help get your business on track!