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Top 10 Tips: Google AdWords

 

Advertising with AdwordsGoogle AdWords can be an extremely cost effective marketing tool for your business. Set up as a pay-per-click model, you are only charged when a user actually clicks on your link, which means that you will never be caught overpaying for an ad that has few clicks and abysmal conversion. As you can imagine, Google AdWords is an advertising platform that is specific to Google and its related channels, like the Google Display Network. Luckily, since Google is currently ranked as the #1 most popular search engine worldwide, your ad will reach a significant number of your targeted customers.

Here are 10 useful tips to maximize your AdWords budget, and drive new customers to your page:

1.   Check your website. This may seem like a no-brainer, but often business owners get so excited by the prospect of new clients, that they forget to check whether their website is really ready for an influx of hits. Wouldn’t it be awful if you spent your hard-earned dollars on an ad that got clicks, but nobody actually bought anything or tried to find out more, because they simply couldn’t figure out how to navigate your site?

2. Define your goals. Before placing your ad put some thought into what exactly you want. Are you looking to raise awareness? Increase sales? Attract new clients? Put good thought into your goals and objectives as they will drive your choice of keywords.

3. Consider your budget. As with any advertising strategy, it is necessary to set your budget, and use it effectively to reach your goals. Consider your daily and overall budget when setting your bids in order to maximize reach and minimize expenditures.

4. Choose keywords wisely. Keywords are the golden ticket to a successful AdWords ad. Effective keyword choices will determine whether or not your ad appears in appropriate searches, where people will actually want what you are offering. Keywords should be specific, like “marathon running Bahamas” if you are advertising for a trip to the Bahamas marathon, rather than simply “running”, which is too vague to suggest that anyone searching for that keyword would actually care about your trip.

5. Use negative keywords to increase your targeting. Negative keywords allow you to choose words that you are not wanting to be associated with, in order to increase your targeting. So, for example, if you were trying to attract clients to your legal firm that specializes in helping people create their Will, you could put “Will” as one of your keywords (if you wanted to be open-ended), and have “Smith” and “Wheaton” as negative keywords, filtering out people who are searching for something completely different.

6. Try multiple ads and keywords at once. Google AdWords allows you to create distinctions between campaigns and ad groups. Create multiple ads within your campaign, using different keywords, to see which work best.

7. Take advantage of day parting. Day parting allows your ad to run in only the parts of the day that you want. So, you can run your ad in “off hours” to try to encourage business at those times. Or, you could run your ad only when your business is open during the day, so that people who are interested can come in straight away.

8. Choose an appropriate landing page. Have you ever seen an ad for a fabulous shirt that you want, only to click on it and have it take you to a home page that doesn’t display the shirt? If you’re really interested, you may click around blindly trying to find it, but most often you’ll get frustrated and change your mind. Don’t lose sales by linking people to irrelevant pages.

9.  Target specific devices. If your business is a coffee-shop-cum-art-gallery that is most often frequented by hipsters and artists in their 20s and 30s, you can bet that most of them will be walking around with iPhones in their pockets. Consider targeting one of your ads to mobile, and seeing how effective it is when compared to a more generic ad. You may be surprised.

10. Measure measure measure! Always keep track of how your ads are doing, both in terms of click through rates and conversions. Look at the effectiveness of your ads on their own, and when compared to one another, in order to find the best keywords and hooks that work for your business.

Looking for more help with Google AdWords? Call Solution 416 today and we can work with you to place your best ad yet!

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