Pay-per-click is one of the fastest and most effective forms of internet marketing. With the right approach, PPC marketing can give highly targeted traffic with only a limited investment, but it’s important to know the basics. .
Some Facts About Google Ads (AdWords)
How Google Makes Money: About 97% of Google’s total revenues come from advertising. (Google Investor Relations)
ROI: Businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads. (formerly known as AdWords). (Google Economic Impact Report)
Recent Changes: Recently Google changed the name from Google Adwords to Google Ads, converted to a new interface and added a bunch of new features.
The sad fact today is that there are many websites on the Internet which are providing tricks to crack PPC, but the information they provide often doesn’t work. With this article, I have decided to share some of the tactics that you can apply this year and get success from your campaigns.
My top Google Ads tactics:
Tactic 1:
Search Retargeting:
Remarketing to website visitors is not just limited to display ads. You can create an audience in Google Ads of the users who have visited your website and add it to your search campaigns. Since these are people who have already been to your site, you can target them in the following ways via search campaigns:
Bid adjustment: You can do a bid adjustment for the keywords for your remarketing audience.
New Ads: Show your website visitors different ads compared to others who are new to your brand. You can include an attractive offer to get your website visitors to convert.
New Keywords: You can target them with a different set of keywords, potentially broader than what you normally use. Since these are people who have already been to your site, their probability to engage with your ads is much higher.
Tactic 2:
Use Negative keywords:
Negative keywords help keep your costs low and will prevent your ads from showing up on irrelevant keywords. Example: Lets say you are a company that offers sales training. You would not want your ads to show for keywords such as “physical trainer,” or, say, “fitness trainer.”. So you add “physical” and “fitness” as negative keywords to avoid triggering your ads for these search terms.
Negative keywords best practices:
Turn the campaign live and then look out for words that should be added to the negative keywords list to avoid wrong searches.
Negative keywords can be added at the account, campaign, and even ad group level. This gives you flexibility if you only want to exclude certain words for an adgroup or for your full ads account.
Make your negative keyword list carefully. Too many negatives may result in shorter reach for your ads.
For display campaigns, negative keywords should be applied to the topics and may still show for pages containing close variations of your negative term.
Tactic 3:
Landing page content:
Having a highly optimized landing page is essential for the success of a search campaign in that improves your Quality Score and helps keep your costs lower. For the user, the landing page is the destination after they have clicked on your ad. Users normally look for a solution or information when searching on google. The goal of the landing page should be to provide a positive user experience and to ensure them that you have the intended solution after the user has clicked on the ad.
Here are landing page best practices.
Include keywords and solutions on the landing page that you have mentioned in the ad copy.
Include a call-to-action (CTA) to direct them on to next stage. Examples of different CTAs are Download, Sign up, Register and or Call – typically designed in a button format with plain text
Avoid push notifications and popup boxes on these landing pages
Make the landing page design responsive (in other words, a mobile friendly design that fits the device being used)
Tactic 4:
Smart Bidding Strategy
Google has made it easier for marketers to rely on its machine learning algorithm for its bidding strategy. Manual bidding is still an option for the experienced users. Before working on the bidding strategy, it is necessary to identify your search engine marketing goals.
Once goals are identified, here are the most commonly used smart bidding strategies:
Target CPA: Optimize for conversion by specifying a certain cost per acquisition limit. For example, let’s say your CPA is $100. Google Ads will set keyword limit to achieve this CPA.
Target ROAS (return-on-ad-spend): Optimize for conversion while targeting a specific return on your ad spend. Include a percentage amount in return that you would like to earn for each $1 spent on Google.
Maximize Conversions: Get the most conversions from your campaign while spending your budget.
Maximize Clicks: To generate the most traffic to your site, use this strategy to let Google ads get the most clicks for your ad campaign.
Target Search Page Location: To get maximum impressions on the first page and or as the first-page result, use this bidding strategy.
Strategy 5:
Make use of Extensions:
Expand the information shown on your ads by making use of the various ad extensions provided by Google. Extensions let you occupy more real estate on the search result page, resulting in better CTR.
Example of Google Ads with Extension:
Goals and Extension:
For local results, use location, affiliate, and callout extensions.
For customers to contact, use call and message extensions.
For conversions, use sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and price extensions.
For app downloads, use app extensions.
That’s all for now, go ahead and implement these strategies on your campaigns and see the results yourself. And remember to always keep testing and optimizing!