Are you struggling to attract prospects to your Google ads? Are the clicks not giving you conversion?

Is creating a profitable Google ad campaign is still a dream for you?

Don’t worry! In this blog, we’ll cover all the essentials that you need for a successful Google ad campaign.

But before moving forward, if you have any questions about Google ads, you can check out our blog — Questions around Google PPC

So, without wasting anymore time, we should get started!

 

10-Step Guide to Creating a Profitable Google AdWords Campaign from Scratch

Have a Clear Marketing Goal in Mind

Ali from Google Ads says “… you’ll want to start with a clear marketing goal in mind, such as driving purchases on your website, Getting visitors to your website, Driving potential customers to take any action on your website, like filling out a form, Getting more phone calls or foot traffic to your business Or driving brand awareness by showing your ad to more potential customers.”

“Typically, you’ll create one campaign for each of your business goals or product categories. For example, if you sell women’s shoes, you could have one campaign for athletic shoes, and another for women’s dress shoes, and so on. Once you know what you want to achieve with your ad campaign, you’ll find it much easier to decide which AdWords features can help get you where you want to go.” — she further adds.

 

Have a Buyer Persona(s) in Mind

“The key to successful online advertising is understanding your potential customer’s needs and personalizing the ads that they see.” — Google Ads

But how to find the right audience?

This is where the AIDAS approach comes into play.

As we said earlier in the blog, there are people who’re just out there on the internet doing research, while there are also those who Google with an intention to buy.

That’s where your targeting comes into play. You need to put yourself in the mind of your prospects, and accordingly, need to:

• identify & separate your audiences based on their intent. 
• identify the keywords that they may Google.
• target them with the best suitable ad

 

For example, if someone is searching for research-based keywords, then a display or video ad introducing your company might be the best approach. This is the customer who is in the Awareness phase.

However, if someone is entering purchase-based keywords, then landing them to your product page is the logical choice.

 

Provide only the relevant & useful information

There are many reasons why an ad copy is poor:

• Ad groups are not laser-focused on a specific keyword theme.
• Sometimes marketers, especially the newbies, copy Ads from one ad group to another without editing the keywords or tailoring it as per the requirements of new ad group.

Remember, the closer the connection between the keyword and your ad copy, the higher the keyword relevance.

Make sure your campaigns & ad groups are compact and contain highly targeted themes.

Begin by ensuring that the top keywords are included in the ad copy. If at all possible, combine these into the headline, body, and display path fields.

 

Use negative keywords

Negative keywords are a way to keep your ad from appearing to individuals who are looking for or browsing content connected to those words.

Negative keywords, like the keywords you bid on, can be assigned at the account, campaign, or ad group level and come in a variety of flavours: broad, phrase, and specific.

If you want to get the most out of negative keywords in your Google Ads and Bing ad accounts, you need to know how these match types function.

 

Target You Ads

Doesn’t matter how good your advertisement is, but in order to achieve your goal, you must display it to the right people.

“Implement all three types of keyword targeting — exact match, phrase match, broad match — into your targeting strategy,” advises Mirkin, online media specialist, Market Mentors. Bid the most for exact match keywords and the least for broad match keywords.” 

Mirkin also suggests you “separate ad groups by keyword type, in addition to category, to keep the campaign well-organized.”

Google Ads offers various ways of targeting your ads.

Audience targeting: Your audience is who you target your ads to. You can now reach people on the basis of:

• Who they are
• Their interests and habits
• What they’re researching lately
• Previous interactions of people with your ads, website, or app may return

Content targeting: You can also reach to the target audience based on:

• Topics: Google Ads examines online content for things like text, language, link structure, and page structure. It then determines the primary themes of each webpage and targets ads depending on your chosen topics.
• Placement: This lets you to target websites on the Display Network that your clients visit. Placement targeting, unlike contextual targeting (automated placements), does not require keywords for targeting. A placement might be a complete website or only a section of it.
• Content keywords: Choose words that are relevant to your product or service in order to reach users who are searching for similar topics. It also allows you to manually target specific demographics or achieve specific goals using a set of keywords. You can, for example, adjust your keywords to suit seasonal interests or to capitalize on a deal.

 

Keep in Mind The Mobile Users

Lets get you through some stats about mobile users:

“Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 54.4 percent of global website traffic, consistently hovering around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017 before consistently surpassing it in 2020.” Says Statista

“The share of mobile eCommerce sales in total eCommerce sales has increased a whopping 39.1 percent from its 52.4 percent market share in 2016 to the current 72.9 percent market share.” Says Oberlo

Now you understand why you can’t ignore mobile users in your Goggle Ad campaign.

 

So you must be wondering how to connect with mobile users effectively?

Don’t worry, we’ll tell you how.

• Create ad copy that appeals to users across devices. So if your CTA is compelling in one device, it should be compelling in others devices as well.
• Use IF functions or ad customizers to highlight any calls to action or offers such as “buy from your mobile phone” or “easy mobile booking” to address mobile users directly.
• Use ad extensions to deliver additional info and provide alternate ways for customers to interact with you. The most frequently used ad extensions are Sitelink, Callout, Call, Structured snippet, Price, Location, Affiliate location, Review, and Review.
• Use tools like remarketing and Customer Match to target mobile users across devices.
• Use mobile URLs to offer mobile users a great on-site experience instead of diverting them to a desktop-specific landing page.
• There are certain keywords that tend to assist, rather than complete, mobile conversions. Hence, your landing pages must take that insight into account and aligned accordingly.

 

Test, Test and Test

There’s no doubt that Google Ads can help increase qualified traffic to your site, but it only works if you optimize your ad campaigns and ensure they offer value. 

But, how to optimize ad campaigns & ad value?

That’s what testing for!

Testing, or A/B testing in marketing terms, is a type of digital experiment where you have a control ad and variations to your ad. 

When these are displayed randomly, Google automatically tracks & records the engagement and presents the analysis to you on the dashboard.

This not only tells you which ad performed the best but also helps you figure out what changes impacted the user behaviour.

This helps you understand your audience better and serve them what they need.

Create Ad Variants in 3 Simple Steps

1. Find and Replace

Find and Replace allows you to find a phrase or word in your text ad copy and replace it for another.

You can also adjust the copy in your ads with Find and Replace, and have the option to match the case.

For testing variants such as “Learn More” or “Read More”, this is a smart option.

2. Update Text

If you are making changes that still require the use of filters, then you should definitely consider the Update Text variation.

3. Swap Headlines

Headlines are the first thing to grab the attention of your target audience. Make sure to experiment with it to find out what CTA location works the best.

 

Track Your Conversion

If you want to see what’s working for you, analyze your conversions.

Jason Otter, senior SEM manager, PCG Digital Marketing says “Being able to see what keywords are triggering a sale or a lead is huge in bid management and optimizing the account to increase ROI,”

What is a Conversion?

“When a customer completes an action that you’ve defined as valuable, these customer actions are called conversions,” says Google Ads Help.

It further adds “…whether they purchased a product, signed up for your newsletter, called your business, or downloaded your app.”

 

What information can you collect from Conversion Tracking?

1. You can find out the keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns that are driving the conversion.
2. It helps you measure your ROI and make informed decisions about the ad budget allocation.
3. Helps you come up with Smart Bidding strategies such as maximize your conversions, target CPA, and achieving better ROAS.
4. You can also track cross-device, cross-browser, and other conversion data.

 

But how does conversion tracking work?

You can track conversion activity with the following kinds of actions:

• Website actions: Purchase, sign-ups, subscriptions and other actions that customers perform on your website.
• Phone calls: It consists of data of Calls that were made directly from your ads/mobile website by clicking the phone number.
• App installs and in-app actions: Installation of apps, purchases or any sort of activity within the apps.
• Import: This includes the activities that begin online but finishes offline. A typical example of it is when a customer clicks an ad and submits a contact form online and later signs a contract by visiting your office physically.
• Local actions: This includes the interactions on an ad that’s specific to a physical location or store.

 

Monitor & Tweak Your Campaigns Is A Must

If you think that your job is over once you set up your Google ad campaign then you’re wrong!

Google Advertisements is about more than just running ads; it’s also about optimizing them. To get the most bang for your buck, you must monitor their performance, test variations, adapt ads to changing situations, and optimize campaigns.

 

But how frequently should you check your Google ad campaign?

Though you can monitor your ads every day, it is recommended that you don’t make changes every day.

Why?

While the daily monitoring keeps you aware of the emerging trends, you need enough data to back them up. This way you can bar extreme circumstances. If not, your will be making changes daily and your ads will go nowhere.

Also, the problem with over-monitoring is that you end up spending a lot of time on it that could be better spent elsewhere.

So we recommend that you should check your Google ads the utmost 3 times a week. If you’re a small business with less ad spend, then you should decrease the frequency.

 

What Should You Look For In Monitoring?

Here are some things to watch out for when you’re Monitoring your Google ads.

Conversion Numbers and Rates

Check if it is aligned to your goals

Large Fluctuations

Ad Click-Through Rates

Ad Test Results

Average Positions and Placements

 

Leverage Google’s Remarketing feature

“A remarketing audience is a list of cookies or mobile-advertising IDs that represents a group of users you want to re-engage because of their likelihood to convert,” says Google Analytics Help

When a person clicks on your ad, this implies that they are showing an interest in your product or service. However, if the action is left uncompleted for any reason, Remarketing helps remind them of what they already need or want.

Remarketing feature allows you to

• Personalize incentives such as offering promo codes or free shipping offers to a customer who has put some items on his cart so he can make the purchase.
• Bring down the cost of advertising as it is cheap to reach the same audience.
• Drive results as 75% of consumers notice retargeted ads.

So how do I get started with Google remarketing?

In your Google ads account, Google assigns you a tag to place on all of your site’s pages. Once placed, these tags will start gathering the data of visitors on a particular user action — such as a mailing list signup or search for a particular product, etc. — that you can use for retargeting.

Conclusion

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how good of an ad copy you make or how much you know your audience, monitoring & constant improvisation will always be an essential part of a successful Google Ad Campaign.