Search Campaigns are one of the most effective ways to drive leads, generate brand awareness, and improve your bottom line. In this lesson, we will go over what all you should make sure you are doing at each stage of the Google Ads timeline to make sure you are getting the best results from your campaigns.
Campaign Pre-Launch
Goal Definition
Having a clearly defined goal is the most important step in making sure you succeed in any ad campaign. What metrics will you be focusing on? Is your goal to increase sales? Build a subscriber list? Drive more online traff? Be as specific as you can here, so you have a clear definition of what success will look like to you and your business.
Competitive Analysis
Analyze what your competitors are doing in terms of similar PPC (Pay Per Click) Ads. Search out their ads in Google, see what key words (search phrases) they are targeting, and think about what you could be doing differently, or what you could add to these to attract even more visitors to your brand. Using a tool such as SEMrush, or a similar platform, can help you get a thorough understanding of just how well these competitor ads are performing.
Audience Definition and Campaign Settings
Ideally, you want to clearly define your audience at both the campaign (general) and ad group (specific or targeted) levels. Make sure that your location, device and time targeting are set to reach the right people at the right time at the right place — once you know who your audience is.
Keyword Research
The backbone of any successful ad campaign is always thorough keyword research. Keywords are specific search phrases that people type into Google (ex. “Car mechanics near me”). Start at a high level and do a broad search of relevant keywords to your business, then start narrowing down from there. Make sure to include both long-tail (longer, specific search phrases) and short-tail (shorter, broader) into your strategy.
Set Up Conversion Tracking
Make sure you are tracking conversions to specific goals you set (Does a person call your business after clicking on your ad, for example). You’ll need to set up conversion pixels on specific web pages to track this, but the insights you get will be well worth the work!
Optimizing Your Campaign
Campaign Organization
Before we get too far along, if you are planning on running multiple campaigns, it is impoertant to remember that separate campaigns should be clearly defined based on your product, website or goals. For example, you may have different campaigns for different locations, languages, or keywords. When in doubt, just mirror the structure of your website with how you set up your campaigns.
Creating Ads
Writing compelling copy that has a clear and easily understandable call-to-action is critical to the success of your ads. Make sure you are aligning your copy with Google’s requirements for the number of characters you can use in each line!
Ad Extensions
You will get the most out of your ad by including every extension that is relevant to your business (location, phone numbers, address, etc.). Google will make sure that all of this inforamtion is shown to someone who views your ad.
Set Up A/B Testing
If you’re running multiple ads around a similar product or service, try an ad rotation that ensures you will get sufficient data on each.
Kick Off Your Campaign!
Once everything is set, launch your ad and get ready to check its pogress!
Daily Check-ins
Check Your Budgets
Check on your overall spend vs. conversions regularly. You’ll be able to see whether the campaign is performing as you want, or you need to make changes.
Checking Search Terms
Checking Google’s search terms report will show you exactly which searches your ad is showing up in. Since Google will automatically show your ad in similar searches to the key words you have already defined, sometimes you’ll see it appearing in places you don’t want it to. If this happens, just mark it as a negative in the report and it won’t happen again.
Weekly Check-ins
Keywords
You’ll want to keep an eye out to make sure that you are still performing well for your selected keywords, and which, if any, should be replaced with new ones. This is your ad spend budget after all, if one keyword doesn’t perform after a week or two, don’t waste money waiting for it to turn around. Instead, do some additional research and replace it with a different keyword that you think will perform better.
Create New Ads if Needed
This is specific to businesses running multiple ads at once. If you see, via your A/B testing that you set up previously, that one ad is doing great and another poorly, take the lessons learned from that successful ad and create a replacement for the poor ad incorporating what has worked well. As a general rule, however, you will want to give any ad 1-3 weeks before making any decisions on its future since PPC ads tend to perform better the longer they are active. But by that 3-week mark you should have a clear indication of what actions should need taken.
Monthly Check-ins
Review the Data
This is your chance to really see how your ads are doing. Did you hit or miss your goals? What lessons can be learned from your successes and failures? You can the make adjustments based on established data trends.
Don’t Ignore Your Landing Pages
Do you have an ad that has high clicks, but low conversions? This might be telling you that your website isn’t as optimized as it could be. Take a look and see what may be preventing potential customers from converting once they get to your site, then make the appropriate changes (WE CAN HELP WITH THIS!)
Adjust Audience
By this point, you’ll have a pretty clear picture of how your targeted audience and locations are performing. If you have low clicks, for example, you may need to refine your audience, location, or other settings. Keep in mind, an ad that works well in Indiana may do poorly in Ohio. Location can make a big difference at times, so get specific before going broad, that way you can analyze different audiences most effectively.