Determining if Google Ads are going to be right for your business is the first step to growing your business online. Knowing how to run a successful Ads campaign would be the next step.
So, if you have already established that Google Ads is the right fit for your business then you can start mapping out your plan today. If you’re still not quite sure and you’d like to find out, you can get a FREE consultation from one of our Google Ads Consultants.
Here’s our guide on how you can set-up a successful Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) campaign.
Establish your goals & select your keywords
A goal for your business for example might be to grow your sales to $1,000,000 or generate brand awareness for a new service offering. Regardless, the best tools to find out what level of demand there will be is to use Google Keyword planner that you will be able to find selected keywords that will attract buyers and generate revenue for your business.
In addition, you’ll need to understand the keywords you want to use and whether they are the right keywords that are going to drive business for you or not. Ways to check the relevance of keywords include doing a manual search in Google and see what businesses come up in the ads and more importantly the organic section of Google.
Audit your website to for conversions
You may need to rebuild or buy a new website all together if your website is poorly optimised and constructed. Everything from the content on the page, URL structures, main headiness right through to the appropriate use of call to actions. Make sure that your ads are going to match the landing page you are going to send them too. Loads of businesses lose a lot of money on AdWords due to poorly optimised websites.
Selecting your target locations
Using the advanced settings in Google Ads, make sure you are setting up your locations(s) correctly. If you are targeting Australia vs specific parts of Australia not its entirety, e.g. you may be national company but want to exclude the rural and less populated areas of Australia.
If you are targeting capital cities, you can select by radius or on a postcode basis. Both options are different and will also have an effect on your campaign results.
Campaign vs. an ad group
Firstly, you need to identify what campaign type is the right one for your business, as there are now many options including search network, search network with display, display network only, shopping or video. In addition, you’ll need to decide if you are wanting to create a brand-new campaign or just ad an ad group to an existing campaign.
Setting out your business goals at the start will enable you to map out a plan at the beginning rather than having to re-evaluate later on.
You may decide to create a unique campaign for each city or a new campaign for each different service offering. Each method has its pros and cons.
Research
Before drafting your own ads, do your research first and have a look at what your competitors are doing, even start a file to store your competitor’s ads if you find this useful to remember and refer back to later.
This shouldn’t be used so that you can ‘copy’ their ads but more so you know what other people are offering or special offers that might be on the marketing a working well to help get some ideas flowing.
We strongly advise you to come up with a value proposition for your prospects which is going to entice them to take action when landing on your page. Driving traffic but not leads is only useful for branding exercises, which have no clear monetary goal (e.g. engagement campaigns).
Ad-Copy
Great content gets the clicks, great website gets the converts!
Have a think about what your customers’ real problems are and how you can solve them. If you’re not sure of what a great offer would be you may need to have a chat to a sales professional or your top sales person and find out what your customers’ problems are to help you come up with an offer.
Split testing offers can also be helpful if you’re not sure which offer is going to work; however, this will be dependent on your Ads budget. We wouldn’t be recommending split testing on budgets less than $500/month.
Want to know more?
In creating a successful Google Ads campaign there are many more elements to consider, however the purpose of this blog is to help you get started. For any deeper knowledge on starting your Google Ads campaign we recommend that you contact a Google Ads consultant to get you started. Or call Businessary on (03) 9662 9900 for a free consultation.