Google Advertising is one of the best marketing channels your company can take advantage of. Remember that paid advertising allows you to adjust information, keywords, bidding, landing pages and much more on an instant basis.
what stops many businesses from continuing with Google Advertising is the lack of conversions/leads that come through after a few weeks to a month or two of running ads. The thought is with instant traffic to your website this should result in quick leads from day one. This however is not always the case as the account itself needs to i) be set up properly and ii) optimized on a daily basis.
Below Are A Few Steps and Tips on starting, maintaining and optimizing a Google Ad Account:
1) Create The Account: There are three different types of top level ad accounts. a) Grant Accounts which is for charity organizations in which Google will provide up to $10,000 in free advertising but these have restrictions on the accounts b) An MCC account which allows you to have multiple ad accounts in one login (this is usually for agencies running accounts for clients) c) A regular Google Ad account which most businesses will need.
2) Outline Campaigns: Campaigns are the top level of each account and with such you are able to adjust various settings such as bid strategy (Maximize Clicks and Maximize Conversions are the two most widely used). A lot of the time we will create both as a test to see which will work better for generating more traffic and leads then pause the one which is performing worse.
3) Determine Target Area and Keywords: When creating your account you need to figure out where you want to advertise which can be geo-targeted as fine as by postal code along with what phrases you want to run with (services or products of focus).
4) Set Up Conversion Tracking Codes: Setting up the right data and analytics tracking will allow your account to continuously be optimized. Making sure you have the right coding set up on the website traffic is being driven towards will help in the long run. This may include lead forms, product purchases and website calls.
5) Negative Keywords: Adding negative keywords into your account will ensure specific terms are not causing your ads to show up. Negative keywords help to limit wasted costs on your ads to ensure you are spending your budget properly.
6) Daily Optimization: Optimizing your Google Ads account on a daily basis will help make adjustments in real-time. This is important because you are trying to limit wasted budget spend, increase your click through rate percentage, lower your cost per click and increase conversions. Since it is real-time data you can make adjustments, see some results and just a few hours later to a day after see analytics data results and keep adjusting.
As a final note it is important to remember that Google Adwords is a great tool to use in your marketing arsenal. Do not be scared based on budget needs or cost per click variables as with the right optimization and settings you can make all your campaigns profitable.
If you’re interested in any assistance with paid advertising or digital marketing to take your business in Canada or in the USA into the future, partner with us at Analytics & Beyond. You can book your free analysis evaluation right from our website!