Google Ads is a powerful and multifaceted tool that can deliver incredible results for your business. Google Ads pay per click campaigns are an excellent way to drive qualified traffic to your website. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad and you can set your own budgets, with no minimum spend. In our experience Google Ads is particularly suited to lead generation and online shopping, as well as general brand, product and service awareness. If you are currently engaged in a Google Ads campaign or considering adding Google Ads to your digital marketing mix, there are a number of ways that you can maximise the impact and return on investment of your campaigns.
Optimise Your Landing Pages
If there is only one thing that you do to support your Google Ads campaign it should, uncategorically, be to make sure you have great landing pages for people to click through to from your ads. You can do all sorts of things to get people to click on your ads but if they get to your site and the content is not relevant, it’s badly designed, has no clear call to action or doesn’t render well on their mobile device, you will lose them. You will have paid for their ad click and received little to no benefit from your investment. Monitor your bounce rates (percentage of visits that leave your site without visiting any other pages) and make it your mission to have the best landing pages possible. If you are grappling with an unwieldy website that is difficult to update, consider using a third party landing page provider like Unbounce, Optimizely or Pagewiz. If you are in the process of redesigning your website, wait until it is complete before launching into Google Ads.
Link Your Google Accounts
Create and link your Google Analytics, Google Places, Google+ and Webmaster Tools accounts with your Google Ads account to take maximum advantage of powerful data insights and potential extensions to your ads. Extensions to your basic ads with Google+ social annotations, and Google Places map results generally make your ads more prominent, more successful, and cost less. For good account linking, it is important to retain the same google login across all accounts.
Set Clear Goals
For the most transparent data regarding the success of your Google Ads campaigns, it is important to create clear goals for your campaign and to set these up as measureable conversions with associated financial values. For example, you have two goals for your Google Ads Campaign. One is a micro conversion of signing up to your enewsletter and the other is a macro conversion of submitting a contact form. You may determine that the value of the enewsletter sign up is $5 and the contact form lead is $25. If correctly set up within your website, Analytics and Google Ads accounts, you will be able to clearly report on the Return on Investment of your campaigns in relation to these two goals. For example, during the last 7 days you spent $400 on Google Ads, which generated 15 enewsletter sign ups ($75) and 20 Contact Form submissions ($500), giving you a positive return of $575/$400 x 100 = 143.75%.
Get help from an Google Ads Professional
There are lots of things to consider when setting up and managing an Google Ads campaign, including choosing the correct campaign settings, keeping the campaign structure tight, regularly optimising performance, writing great ads, using the available data correctly to make informed decisions for optimisations and much more. If you have the time and interest to learn about Google Ads yourself, there are excellent training guides available on Google and Google Ads certifications you can work towards. However, if like most businesspeople, you are primarily engaged in the business of running your business, consider engaging an Google Ads Certified Professional to help you. consider engaging an Google Ads Certified Professional to help you.
-Threesides Marketing is a Google Ads Search certified partnerÂ