ZOG DigitalAre your ads converting like they should?
Any “Joe Schmo” can put together a Google AdWords campaign, but you need a deep understanding of how Google’s unique features pair with audience behaviors and interests to profitably achieve your goals. Proper planning, targeting and research can make the most of your marketing dollars and develop effective campaigns that drive sales. Utilize these five strategies to ensure your brand is converting efficiently and putting the proper content in front of the right people.
1. Goal Planning
Google AdWords campaigns should be focused on growing sales instead of generating brand awareness. Leave the branding campaigns to platforms better-suited to that style of engagement such as social and banner ads. Identify what you want to achieve from your overall campaign and from each target audience segment. Campaigns that lack proper planning may leave money and opportunities on the table.
To generate more action from consumers, identify specific actions you want your target audience to perform. Highly targeted ads focused around specific actions connect buyers and sellers by aligning goals with user interests. Set quantifiable goals for individual ad campaigns and benchmarks for your ad CTAs to gauge performance, content effeteness, most-engaged audiences and conversion rates.
2. Ad Development
Create an experience that promises and delivers. Ads that offer quality content and fit the needs of users can generate higher Quality Scores, which boost exposure and lower ad costs. To achieve this, your ads need to tell a compelling story with a limited amount of content, and expand upon that experience with relevant and engaging landing pages.
Stay consistent and concise to offer value and promote action. Include your top targeted keywords in your ad copy and landing pages to resonate your CTAs and relevancy. Structure your ads based on goals and offerings to create niche ad groups that can be individually tracked and measured against defines benchmark metrics.
The more fluid and engaging user-experience you can create, the more likely you will be to drive users to convert.
3. Budgeting
Allocate your budgets based on brand goals and user trends that are uncovered through historical data analysis. Keeping a close eye on trends in data can be the best way to avoid pouring money into campaigns that don’t result in a high return early on. Because different audience segments will be more receptive to different offerings and content, don’t be afraid to take big risks or kill an underperforming campaign and moving budgets to one that is more successful.
When determining your budgets, put more money into exact match keywords that closely target your brand and promotional efforts to generate the best return.
4. Targeting
Google AdWords offers a handful of unique targeting options that allow your ads to best reach consumers, test content and maximize the utility of marketing budgets. Start by categorizing ad goals and offerings, and segment within different audience groups by stage of the purchase cycle. Then, separate ad groups by keyword type, in addition to category, to keep the campaign well-organized.
Negative keyword targeting can open new opportunities to capture relevant views from searches not directly related to what you’re advertising. Diversify your targeting among all three types of keyword targeting — exact match, phrase match, broad match — to capture a wider audience. Be sure to deliver the right content for your and targeting based on where a consumer is in the customer lifecycle. Explore additional targeting options based on geo-targeting and web behavior to deliver user specific ads at the right time and place.
Pairing highly targeted users with the right content will increase the success of campaigns and lower cost per engagement.
5. Testing
Don’t blink — you might miss something.
To keep campaigns cost effective and drive conversions, it is important to constantly monitor data or risk missing potential opportunities. Be sure to add enough time to include ad campaign tests that span the entire process by using keywords, targeting, ad copy, landing page design and follow up marketing campaigns, such as email blasts.
By continually testing your entire AdWords strategy, you can identify weak links in the chain that may stop users from taking action. Experiment with one solution at a time to isolate what tactics generate optimal results. Continue to A/B test with slight variations of ads and targeting, and analyze data to see what your target audiences are most responsive to. Once you find what works, keep only those ads performing well and repeat your process to continually hone your campaigns.
Additionally, establish conversion tracking to identify what keywords trigger a sale or lead. This allows your brand to tie a distinct ROI back to each campaign and influence bid management and optimization to keep ads efficient and effective.
Conclusion
What you don’t know may hurt you. Staying integrated in your Google AdWords campaign through each step allows flexibility and control to influence lead generation. Establish a bottom to top approach, working backwards to first identify your goals and audience behaviors. Let your audience influence how your campaigns are structured and modified to increase conversions and stay cost effective.
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