HEY!
In the dynamic business environment we live in today, platforms such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and others give us the great opportunity to advertise our business in an easy and quick way in order to get the most out of people who are most likely to have interest in what we offer.
Today, we will focus on advertising on Google, where there are many ways to specifically target ads, regardless of the type of business you have and manage.
Do you wonder how this is possible?
If you often ask yourself how to start with Google Ads or:
- What marketing goal and strategy do I apply?
- What audience do I target?
- What visions and creative strategies do I apply?
- How do I communicate the value of my business more effectively to potential customers?
- How do I optimize my landing pages and website?
- How do I create a working sales funnel?
- What keywords and phrases can I use?
- What bidding strategy and budget will be best for my marketing goal?
Well, you are in the right place!
Find out the first 7 Steps needed to launch your Google Ads campaign in order to generate sales and business growth.
Step 1: CHOOSE AND DEFINE THE MARKETING GOAL
Defining the marketing goal of your Google Ads campaign is the first step to creating a successful campaign.
Depending on the type of business you have, you can define 6 Google Marketing Ads Overlay goals for your business needs:
- Sales
- Website traffic
- Leads
- Product consideration
- Brand consideration
- Brand awareness & reach
And if none of these goals meet the business needs you have, you can create a campaign without linking it to a specific goal.
What is important when setting goals and analyzing them later is to clearly define your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which can then measure and determine how successful your campaign has been?
Step 2: ACCOUNT STRUCTURE
A well-structured account will ensure that searches that trigger your ads are relevant to your target audience, resulting in better quality results and lower prices. Keep in mind that ads and ad groups in each campaign must be closely related to specific products/services and topics, so you can then create themed ads around them.
For example, if you have an online shop that offers different categories of products – clothes, shoes, handbags, you should know that if these categories are in separate ad groups but in a single campaign, they will share the same budget. In this way, the entire budget set for this campaign will be distributed across all ad groups based on user demand rather than evenly.
So, in order for your ad group results to be more accurate, the best approach is to create a separate campaign for each ad group (product category) and allocate your budget between them.
Step 3: CHOOSE THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR YOUR CAMPAIGN GOAL
The types of keywords match that trigger your ads can be in 3 major keyword types: Broad Match, Phrase Match и Exact Match.
- Broad Match – This is a standard way to enter keywords or even be called: broad match, which means your ads can also show on searches that include incorrect spelling, synonyms, related searches, and more.
- Phrase Match
Here, the keyword is entered with quotation marks and the ads can appear on searches that are a phrase and its close variants.
For example: In order to use the expression “Web site design”, you should enter the keyword as “web site design”. This way, the ad will appear similar to these options.
- Exact Match – With this type of exact match search, your ad can show up for searches that are an exact phrase, sentence, or term.
For example: If you enter the word web site development, you have to put it like [web site development]. This will ensure that your ad will only appear to users looking for a website.
There is another type of keyword that you must use:
- Negative Keyword that you should use to exclude inappropriate or irrelevant keywords for your business, thus focusing only on those keywords that are most important to your customers, and your business. The negative keyword can be of 3 types – with broad match, phrase match, or an exact match.
As negative keywords, it is advisable to use words generated by user queries based on how they search for information in the search engine and how relevant they are to your business. Of course, it’s always a good idea to use a Google Keyword Planner tool that will show you what to use for better results for your advertising campaigns.
The tip here is: If you start running ads on Google, it’s good to use broad match, in order not to miss the display of your ads. After some time and after analysis, you can change the keyword to phrase or an exact match.
Step 4: USE GOOGLE KEYWORD PLANNER
Before you start advertising, it is very important to analyze the keywords you will use. To do this, you can use both the Google search engine and the Google Keyword Planner tool specifically created by Google.
You can easily find the approximate cost-per-click, as well as the monthly search for the keywords you are thinking of using, as well as other keyword suggestions related to your products /services.
Step 5: SET A TARGET AUDIENCE
Google Ads settings and choice of a target audience are made at the campaign level. The criteria and options on which you can fine-tune the Target Group for your marketing goal and campaign can be:
- Gender
- Age
- Geographic location
- Language
- Parental status
- Income level
The other criteria are the choice of budget and bidding strategy, which we will discuss later.
STEP 6: BUDGET SELECTION
My advice here is when you start your Google Ads campaign, allocate your entire budget (i.e. monthly) to the daily sums you would like to spend on the basis of the research findings that have been made in relation to your market and target group.
Even if the campaign does not meet the expectations at the outset, it’s good to wait a week or two to collect enough data based on ad performance so far. This will allow you to make the campaign easier by observing and analyzing the traffic, thus not losing your entire budget in the first few days (in order to achieve an overnight success), which is not really possible without achieving the right ratio between CPC and geographical coverage.
STEP 7: SELECT A BIDDING STRATEGY
Google has two main types of bidding strategies from which you can choose:
- Manual bid strategy
- Automated bid strategies
Manual bid strategy
The option you have here is Manual CPC or Manual bidding. This is the easiest bidding strategy in Google Ads, with advertisers setting your bids manually at the keyword level. The downside here is that setting up this type of strategy takes more time and requires continuous tracking and changes to the keyword’s bid based on its performance.
The Google Ads Аutomated bidding options are numerous and vary according to the marketing goal you’ve set.
Let’s start with one of the most simple and easy-to-use strategies offered by the Google Ads Platform, namely Maximize Conversions. This is a fully automated bidding strategy, which means that there is no individual bidding for a keyword by advertisers.
Another suitable strategy, especially for generating traffic, is Maximize Clicks. With this strategy, Google will work to get as many clicks as possible while spending the daily budget.
Target CPA (Cost per Acquisition) or Target cost acquisition is a fully automated bidding strategy. Advertisers set a target CPA with Google, and Google sets the buckets in a way that generates as many conversions as possible for that CPA.
These are just some of the bidding strategies you should start with if you are new to advertising on Google Ads.
Among other strategies you can use are Target ROAS, Enhanced Cost per Click, and more.
Well, these were the first 7 tips on how to successfully advertise on Google.
Do not miss Part two of the article with the other 8 Steps for Successful Business Development in the Digital World…
Darina
Senior Digital Marketing Specialist
ExpandX Marketing & Web
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