Drive relevant, qualified traffic to your site exactly when people are searching for the types of products or services your business offers.
Google (and Bing) search ads let you get your product or service in front of potential customers right at the moment they’re looking for it. If the ad is relevant, your site fulfils the promise the ad makes, and the proposition is compelling and competitive, you’re on your way to conversion.
The key to making search ads work is understanding the search demand, the intent behind the keywords that you consider relevant, and the pages on your site that you send users who click on your ads to.
Poor combinations of these elements, such as targeting keywords that are broad and informational and sending them directly to transactional product pages, result in bounces and wasted budget.
So there are a lot of parallels with SEO when it comes to proper preparation for search ads, in that preparation of your site for inbound traffic is absolutely critical. Check out this blog post on categorisation for more detail on this concept. Simply put, someone searching for ‘lawnmowers’ is at a different stage of the purchase journey than someone searching for ‘2 stroke lawnmowers’ and if the page you land those searches is on doesn’t match the intent of the query, your conversion rate will suffer.
Best practise for Google Ads campaigns is to begin setup by matching the structure of your site. Campaigns and ad sets are structured in a thematic manner, with your target keywords grouped by topic. Ideally you want to get things well segmented, but of course that takes a little more time. We like to test numerous ad variations so we can continually optimise on the best performers too.
We hear from a lot of people who have had bad experiences with Google search and 90% of the time that’s down to a poor choice of keywords, or bad landing page experience. Google reps with targets have a bit of a habit of suggesting broader keywords than sites are ready for, which tends to increase cost and lower conversion rates, and unless you’ve spent time making sure your site is fast and optimised for the searches you know are important to you, any ads you run are likely to underperform.
So we take a fairly wide view when it comes to managing Google Ads – the theory is simple enough, but the implementation of a wider strategy is the key to making them work effectively for your business.
If you’re an e-commerce business, there’s a lot you can do with your feed via Google’s merchant center and shopping ads too, not to mention the various retargeting options that are available.
Ad Standout & meeting demand with relevant content is key to good performance.
Considerations:
Past Performance
What have you been up to? What’s changed recently? What sort of marketing have you tried in the past? Who did it for you?
Technical
What technology are you using? What’s your site built on? What’s the loading speed like? Do you have retargeting pixels & analytics set up correctly?
Resource
Time & Budget – Who do you want to reach? Over what time-scale? Can you write expert content? Where are your competitors spending? What ad assets do you have?
Audiences
Who purchases your services or products? What else do they buy? How often do they buy? Do you maintain email lists?
Products
How well presented & configured are your products and services? Do you have a feed you can use to send product info. to Google & Facebook?
Conversion
What does a conversion look like? A sale? A lead? How easy it is for a potential customer to convert? What are the barriers?
How about an audit?
Obviously, you don’t have to know all the answers to the questions above. You’ve got a business to run, and we understand that. The best way to kick things off is generally to let us audit your various digital marketing assets. Check the website over, kick the tyres, review any previous ad campaigns and ensure the various tracking tools, feeds and pixels are where they should be.
We do that, and then we come back to you with a plan that aims to achieve your goals.
We’ll provide you with a roadmap to maximising the efficiency of your digital marketing channels and then set about implementing it.
Read more about some of the specific services we offer below, or just get in touch for a chat now.
