Businesses of any kind can gain a wealth of benefits from promoting online. While social media pretty much dominates people’s lives everywhere in the globe, one cannot deny that search engines are still the top destination of most customers. This is because anyone can open their browser and search for something, whether it is information, product reviews, images, videos, or answers to every question they have in mind.
This makes search engines one of the most powerful tools when it comes to marketing your business. Imagine the possibilities—ranking so high up the search engine results page and expanding your reach exponentially. You can then capitalize this visibility by driving users to your website, encouraging them to explore and gradually go through your sales funnel.
However, it is easier said than done, as organic search is a ruthlessly competitive sphere. In fact, the online world is so saturated that it’s becoming harder and harder to be visible in search engine results, much less rank on the first page. Before you give up, though, you should know that there are other ways to win the search engine game.
One of them is Google Ads and how they can efficiently grow your traffic and increase your conversion rate. Running an effective search engine campaign can make a whole world of difference to your marketing and promotional efforts.
Table of Contents
Know Your Target Audience
As in any aspect of marketing, you can never run a successful strategy unless you know and understand your audience. Google ads are no exception. If you want to get your message across to the right customers who have higher chances of converting, then you must know who they are. Ask these questions:
What kind of people are they?
Are they professionals?
How old are they?
What could be their motivations and fears?
What problems are they trying to solve?
Asking these probing questions will allow you to create a picture of your ideal customer. This knowledge will help you tailor your Google ads to the right audience. You will be able to create ads that are relevant to their needs and experience, increasing your chances of converting them into paying customers.
Zero In on Your Objectives
You have to be clear about your goal. What are you trying to achieve with your ad campaign? Answering this question will allow you to create a tactical action plan. Are you trying to drive more traffic to your website? Do you want to generate leads and optimize for conversion?
Setting a clear objective helps you choose the best ad format that will suit your needs. Otherwise, you’ll be aimlessly experimenting on every ad without really getting good results because you’re not clear about what you are trying to accomplish. You can also avoid spending money without getting anything in return.
Create Effective Landing Pages
Running an ad campaign on Google requires a more targeted approach. You won’t want to waste your time and money attracting less qualified leads or driving pointless traffic to generic content. That’s why you should choose the most relevant and valuable landing pages. Your website’s home page is not one of them.
Instead, bring your potential customers to a targeted landing page packed with important information on the product or service you’re promoting on your ad. It has to be connected to the ad you’re running; otherwise, you’ll disappoint users who clicked on your ad thinking they’ll find more value only to be brought to a page with generic content. This might even lead to high bounce rates, which can hurt your cost per click (CPC).
Key In on Keywords
This step is probably the most integral part of your Google Ad campaign. You want to match users’ intent, so choosing keyword phrases that exactly correspond to what the user is looking for will give a higher chance for your ad to perform well. Broad keywords may have a more extensive reach, but your click-through rate (CTR) will suffer. People will not click on your ad if they see that the result is not closely tied with their intent.
So what do you have to do to ensure that you’re choosing the right keywords? You’ll need to conduct thorough keyword research. The keyword you’ll be picking must be relevant, matching closely with your ad, target user intent, and the content of your landing pages. It’s ideal to get keywords with less competition as it will not be too expensive. Plus, you will be narrowing down the field and targeting more relevant potential customers.
Experiment to Find a Formula
There’s no perfect ad format when you run your ad for the first time. Chances are, you will be doing a lot of tweaking, experimenting, and testing to find the right formula for your business and objectives. You can try different ad formats until you find one that can give you what you’re aiming for, whether it’s generating leads or gaining the highest click-through rate.
Google provides several options for ad formats, such as the following:
Text ads
Responsive ads
Image ads
App promotion ads
Video ads
Product shopping ads
Call-only ads.
Each of these has a specific purpose and benefits. It is up to you to check which ad format will suit your objectives best.
For example, you’d like to attract people looking for those ready to buy your product or service. This ad allows you to target those with buyer intent. It’s as simple as it can be. Search ads use text only. It doesn’t include images and other visual embellishments, so the focus is solely on the quality of your ad copy, which means you should put more attention on showcasing the benefits of your product or service instead of its features. You’d want to appeal to your potential customers’ needs and emotions, after all.
Make Powerful Calls to Action (CTAs)
Calls to action are some of the most critical parts of your Google ads. It is the one feature that can draw the eyes of your target audience and compel them to click. There are many ways to pull this off. One is making the CTA button stand out from the rest of your ad elements by using striking colors such as green and orange. You can even test them out to determine which of the two colors will perform best.
It’s also important to use powerful action words to sound convincing. Some of the best ones include “Apply now,” “Subscribe,” “Download,” “Get a Quote,” and “Watch more,” among many others. Your CTA must, of course, reflect your objective. It’s a matter of knowing what you want your target audience to act on and how this action can lead to the achievement of your goals.
Monitor and Analyze Results
You can’t run ads and leave them to the hands of fate. You must constantly monitor them and ensure that you’re achieving what you’ve set out to do. Does your ad give you a good conversion rate and click-through rate? Are your display ads generating brand awareness and driving superior traffic to your website? Do your ads help you boost conversions? But beyond determining the essential metrics, you should be able to analyze the results.
You should be able to gauge whether your ad copy, format, and CTAs are performing well. Knowing this will help you improve or maintain the ads that you’ll be creating in the future. You can tweak underperforming ads until they work.
While it’s vital that you emphasize your ads’ quality score and click-through rates, it’s just as essential to pay attention to conversions and profitability. You’re spending on your ads, so it’s only sensible that you expect a good ROI.
Take Advantage of Remarketing
Google has been honing the remarketing technique for years. Users have experienced seamlessly hopping from one site to another and seeing familiar ads. Chances are, they have been retargeted by the sites they had visited before.
This is how it works. First, you visit a particular shop and browse through their offers. You might have added a thing or two on your cart but eventually abandoned them. Now, that specific shop can try to remind you of your recent visit and entice you to go through with the transaction by showing you ads of the products or offers that you’ve viewed before.
This personalized serving of ads is quite effective. You can do the same by running Google dynamic ads connected to your Google shopping feed. This allows you to specifically target recent visitors to your website and recapture leads who are more likely to convert. Most of them might be requiring a little push or two, and retargeting ads will do the work for you.
In Conclusion
Google ads are some of the most efficient ways to promote your business in the online world and usher in a wealth of benefits, from driving traffic to your website and generating leads to converting visitors into buying customers.
Of course, the latter is the most vital objective. Spending on Google ads is all worth it if you can get optimum return on investment.
