By Emily Wilson
Any business that wants to be successful needs to have the right Google Ads campaign on its side. Even though organic reach is important, you can’t hope to master SEO and be on top of your industry without pay-per-click (PPC). This helps you reach a wider audience and allows you to raise brand awareness faster than ever before. Of course, none of it is possible without the right Google Ads campaign that sets your business apart from the competition.
Don’t worry if you’re new to PPC, this article will help you understand exactly what you need to know.
1. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your website is just like choosing the right keywords — it improves your return on the ads investment. One of the most effective ways to optimize your website is to ensure you have a good landing page that goes hand-in-hand with your ad.
If you’re marketing a completely new product, the customers who click on the ad should be taken directly to the product page on your website, not the homepage. This leaves out the extra step of finding the product manually, thus increasing the likelihood of purchase and improving your conversions significantly.
2. Keep It Local
A smart thing to do for any business is to focus on local SEO. Competition can be strong regardless of where you’re from so it’s better to conquer the local turf first. As well as that, Google has placed a high emphasis on local SEO, making businesses who work it well more successful. Of course, this is only applicable to businesses that have a physical location associated with the services and products they provide.
The specific advantage you have by going local with your PPC campaign is that the keywords will be suited to your region. That makes it easy to reach the customers that need your services the most. Highly targeted traffic is the best kind of traffic you can get for your website, and keeping things local is the ideal way to do it.
On top of this, local ad campaigns save you money. They prevent your ad from showing up for searches that are too general. This is useful for scenarios when the customer is too far away to be able to even visit your store.
3. Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes
If you want to choose the right keywords, you’ll need to think like your customers. Think about what things you would search on Google if you needed the services and products your company offers. Implement these SEO strategies into your keyword search.
To get a clearer idea of what to bid on, you can also list what search words your customers are looking for when they type what you may offer into Google. Starting with something general then narrowing it down to more specific phrases and words is perfect for finding the right audience.
You can also always turn to Google’s Keyword Planner to find brand-new keywords that are suitable for your business. The tool will also allow you to see how many times peoples search for those phrases and words and how much traffic certain keywords will be able to bring to your website. On top of all of this, the tool lets you add negative keywords. This prevents keywords that are unrelated to your business to be associated with your ad.
4. Keep Things Simple
One of the biggest misconceptions in the PPC world is that you need a big account with a lot of keywords in order to be successful. More often than not, the opposite is true. Keeping things simple is a standard part of running a small business. You really don’t need a big account in order to be successful. With a bigger amount of keywords in your account, you actually have a better chance of overreaching and wasting your money.
It’s better to start small and gradually grow your account according to your needs. You need a lot of time to nurture your account and make it grow. That means that keeping it small will make it easier to keep things under control and grow your campaign in a healthy way.
5. Start Slow, Don’t Overreach
The most common mistake business owners who are new to the PPC game make is overreaching. It’s easy to have confidence when you’re just starting out and things seem pretty simple to keep under control. Add a little beginners’ luck to the mix, and you’ve got yourself a business owner that thinks they’ve mastered PPC just when they started it, making them overreach.
Overreaching is the number one thing that kills your account. First off, you can end up incorrectly targeting your ads. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the device, location, or network targeting or if we’re referring to the match types you have as your keywords. The matter of the fact is that incorrectly targeting ads wastes your money faster than anything else.
You need to make sure that your targeting choices are refined and that your match types are focused on your traffic and prequalified viewers. If you want higher click through rates and higher conversion rates, you’ll definitely need prequalifying. In other words, this is a sure way of getting more cash.
6. Set a Consistent Budget
You need to have a clear cut budget for your Adwords campaigns. It’s very easy to get carried away and spend more than you anticipated, but this kind of careless approach ends up costing you more than it earns you in the long run.
Setting a daily budget can save you from overspending each month. Changing the budget day after day is not going to give you clear results and will definitely not help you make a profit by the end of the month. In fact, changing your budget often can lead to a reduction in your account’s performance. Google has to recalibrate how they show your ads each time you change the budget, thus making you perform less efficiently.
7. Track Your Progress
Without tracking your Adwords, you’ll never be able to tell if you’re making an impact or not. This is why tracking your progress is one of the most important things you can do. One of the things that are highly recommended to help you track your progress is installing Google Analytics. This app goes particularly well with your website and offers an in-depth analysis that will help you understand exactly how your campaign is doing.
As well as that, you need to track conversions. They’re a very clear sign of which keywords, ads, campaigns, and ad groups are performing well and which are not. This information is valuable because it lets you know what things you need to drop and what things you need to focus on. In other words, it’s a direct sign of what you need to do in order to double your profits.
Conclusion
As you can see, climbing to the top of your industry doesn’t have to be impossible. The process may take a while but PPC is here to help you along the way. With the right ads, you’ll be seeing more highly targeted traffic and better conversion numbers in no time. This might be an investment, but it’s one that doubles in revenue over time. If you’re in this for the long run, you can’t hope to get anywhere without PPC. We’re confident these tips will help you choose the right Google Ads campaign and bring your business the success you always hoped they could.
