Google Adwords offers a good platform for advertising online, and it also allows you to pay so that you can show up on the first page of Google search terms that potential customers may have been searching for online. The average cost per click in Google Adwords is between one and two dollars, and Adwords allows you to use pay per click ads in addition to an inbound marketing campaign. It also allows you to use the right keywords that are relevant and highly searchable so you can create a successful account and set a budget for your campaign.
However, before you invest in Google Adwords, it is important to familiarize yourself with the following five things.
Understanding Keywords
Keyword research is important when it comes to understanding your audience and what it is they are looking for online. You cannot have a successful online campaign if you don’t know what your audience wants. When conducting keyword research, you should be investing in keywords that indicate an intent to buy and consider the affordability factor of each keyword.
While choosing keywords it is important to note two things: 1) Competition for the keyword and 2) The kind of traffic it will generate. If you are just starting up we recommend using long tail keywords rather than highly competitive shorter keywords. Long tail keywords also allow you to target prospects further down the buying process. Be sure to optimize your site for these keywords.
Check your Competitors
Checking in on what your competitors are doing will also give you an edge because you will be obtaining the knowledge you need to successfully identify landing pages, keywords, and ads that will work the best for you. By knowing what your competitors are doing, you will be better equipped to optimize your Adwords campaign so it is more effective.
Google Analytics is free and very easy to install, and it allows you to create a customized URL for each ad and will provide a dashboard so you can compare your efforts with other campaigns. To outrank your competitors, you should focus on improving organic rankings and getting to the top of search engine pages.
SEMrush has a tool to check the keywords that your competitors are bidding for. The site also gives you an idea of the keyword difficulty and monthly traffic for a specific keyword. Needless to say the free tool only allows a certain number of keyword searches.
Activate Remarketing
It is far more difficult to bring in new visitors to your site than to convert visitors who have seen your content. To ensure that you have a loyal set of customers actively employ remarketing through adwords or Google’s Display Network (GDN). Build a remarketing list in Google AdWords. Segment your audience to come up with different lists of users who will see different ads. Remember to always differentiate between more and less valuable visitors. Users who visited your blog will be less valuable than those who checked your pricing page – spend most of your resources on groups which promise higher conversion rates.
Landing Pages
Your homepage is what tells your customers what you are doing and who you are but this isn’t the page you want your potential customers to go to. The landing page puts the focus on what is being advertised and provides all the information the customer will need in order to motivate them to make a purchase. The landing page will help improve your conversion rate, so it is important that you align your ad with your landing page. This means that when a potential customer clicks on your ad, they are taken directly to the landing page with that product which
maximizes the clicks and optimizes the landing page to increase your quality score while lowering your conversion costs and increasing revenue.
Optimize
A/B testing is a method used to compare two versions of a webpage to determine which one is performing better. Kissmetrics is a tool often used to track because it also creates a funnel report. It combines behavioural analytics and segmentation to help you better understand and engage your customers. Kissmetrics will show you what methods have been working and what hasn’t been working and will offer more meaningful insights so that you can take steps to improve your campaign. Being able to track this information will make measuring your success a lot easier to do. This is especially important because Google gives a quality score to your ad. The higher the quality score the more your flexibility to bid lower as the rank of your ad is a function of both the quality score and bid amount.
Same applies to testing landing pages. Landing pages are customized for your visitors and help push them to perform certain actions, such as buying. So, combining the landing page with a tool such as Kissmetrics, you can gain the information you need to reach a wider audience and sell to people more effectively.
Overall
Google Adwords is consistently seen as one of the best ways to reach your prospective customer, drive traffic to your business, and ultimately increase sales. These 5 tips will help you get started on you first campaign using Google Adwords.