It’s not easy to run and manage your Google Ads paid campaigns when cash is being spent on your campaigns every second.
You not only have to manage the creative and technical side of your campaigns but also manage yourself emotionally to control your natural tendency to make decisions on the fly or maybe to stop or start campaigns on the whim.
Not that you can’t, but there are better ways to make this work instead of killing the switch on your campaigns every time you think your campaigns aren’t working.
Plus, your Google Ad platform is constantly changing and there’s a lot to manage even if you wanted to launch the simplest of ad campaigns on Google.
How about an even better idea? Do all that you can to make them work better.
Here are a few ways to Juice up your Google Ad Campaigns:
Start with Google Audiences (not Campaigns)
Most businesses — and even marketers and agencies — jump right into the campaign set up and go about launching campaigns. With Google Ads, there’s a lot that needs to be done even before you get there.
One of the first stops you should be Google Audiences (just like Facebook Audiences).
Within Google Audiences, it’s imperative that you add the Google Audiences tag and ensure that you are tracking your audiences as they visit your website and/or landing pages.
While the obvious fallout of this is to get into the possibility of “remarketing” to your existing audiences on Google, there are several other ways for you to use your Google Audiences.
Don’t skip the basics
Using Google Ads comes with its own set of rules
With Google Ads, a lot depends on your campaign settings, how you set up your ad groups, the keywords you select, the keyword match types you use, the bidding strategy you select, and more — all this even before you go about creating your actual campaigns (like ads, landing pages, and sales funnels).
First, set up your Google Ad campaign the right way (Skip Google’s Defaults).
Note: While we are on the subject of Google Ads Basics, here’s a detailed post explaining how to squeeze more out of your budget as you run your Google Ad campaigns
- As seen above, don’t choose both “search network” and “display network” — those are the defaults. Just pick “search network” and uncheck “include search partners”.
- Specifically, enter the exact locations you want to target for your campaign (depending on your business). In “location options”, select “people who live in this location”. In some business cases, like car rentals, apartment rentals, travel, or tourism, you might want to use “people who are interested in this location”.
- Choose the lowest budget possible for your campaign. You’d need to start with a low daily budget because you need time to do split testing, optimize your campaigns, and make several tweaks before you go all out and spend.
- Be sure to stay on “standard” delivery for your ads (and not “accelerated” — unless you are promoting an event or something else for which the promotions are time-bound).
Use extensions (No, they are not optional)
If you aren’t using extensions within Google Ads, you are missing out on opportunities. Adding extensions help give each of your Google Ads tons of context and more real estate each time your ad shows up on search (for your keywords).
Extensions, by themselves, are pretty useful to add relevance to your users and provide them with more information for your business. Google gives you tons of options for extensions, as shown below:
When you use extensions the right way, it’s like your ad is on a booster shot. Here’s how an ad with extensions looks like:
See how your basic Google advertisement now looks bigger, with a lot more content showing as reviews, phone numbers, hyperlinks (leading to specific pages on your website, reviews, and more?).
Choose keywords. Use match types judiciously
One of the fundamental reasons why most businesses lose their ad budgets faster than they can launch a campaign is because they conveniently miss out on keyword match types.
By default, they go for “broad match type” which will trigger your ads for absolutely anything closely related to your keyword.
Google Ads provides you with Match types to help you control how and when your ads are triggered based on how users input keywords. Google gives you four basic match types to choose from: Broad match, Broad Match Modifier, Phrase Match, and Exact Match (as shown below):
If you are just starting out, pick out the most relevant keywords appropriate for your business and use “phrase match” or “exact match”.
Sort keywords into appropriate Ad Groups
With Google Ads, you don’t just dump keywords into ad groups without reason. The more strategic you are with adding and sorting your keywords into ad groups, the more successful your ad campaigns will be.
Group your keywords into tight themes and then put them into appropriately named ad groups.
Here’s an example:
Create Objectives, Workflows, & Funnels
Don’t start any Google Ad campaigns without making sure you have your objectives sorted out first. You won’t be able to create workflows and sales funnels without deciding what your campaign objectives are.
- What are your objectives for your Google Ad Campaign?
- Are you trying to just get traffic to your brand new website?
- Are you looking to generate leads?
- Do you want your potential customers to call you?
- Would you like your customers to directly shop for your products and services after they search on Google?
- Are you trying to promote an app?
- Do you want to use simple text ads, banners, or video ads?
How you launch your campaigns, the Google Ad platform features you’ll use, and everything else about your campaigns will depend on your answers to the questions above.
Don’t skip this step.
Write ads in pairs for A/B testing
So, you’ve picked up the keywords most appropriate for your ads and you’ve created appropriate ad groups for your keywords. The next step is to create ads for your Google Ads campaigns. But don’t just create a random number of Google ads (or even worse, just one single ad).
Instead, create ads in pairs. You can then use these pairs (for each ad group) to test your ads out so that you know what works and what doesn’t.
Point ads to landing pages
The reason why find ourselves repeating this point is only because, despite the repeated advice, many businesses still don’t use landing pages for their campaigns.
Landing pages are focused, easily editable, and can be built to match the message or offers you make on your ads. Landing pages are the starting point of your sales funnels.
You’ll understand this better with an example. Let’s assume that you are giving away an Apple Watch as a freebie to generate leads for your business.
Your Google Ad could look like this:
This ad should point to a landing page, as shown below: (Courtesy: Leadpages)
As you can see, the landing page:
- Puts your focus right on the watch itself and a button for you to click.
- Has no navigation menus or other links (like social links) for you to click on. No distractions.
- Has a countdown time to urge you to take action due to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
Funnels & nurturing
The meat of marketing is in the follow-up. In the case of paid advertising, it’s email marketing automation that allows you to follow up (albeit differently), consistently, and it’s almost automated.
Using email autoresponders, you have the ability to nurture and engage your leads without pushing them too much. Nurture your leads with more information, insights, helpful tips, and an occasional push to allow your leads (or subscribers) to buy your products and services.
If nothing, there’s at least brand recall and familiarity being built up as you keep sending your email newsletters, RSS-to-email campaigns, and broadcasts on top of your autoresponders.
With an ROI of 3800%, email marketing is the true money-maker you might not be using at the moment.
How are you running your Google Ad Campaigns? As you can see, there are a lot of moving parts in a single campaign not counting split testing, creatives, landing pages, and optimization.
Need help with your Google Ad Campaigns? Get on a scheduled call with us now.