Google Adwords can prove to be an extremely profitable direct marketing weapon, if used right. A lot of people end up losing their shirt when they start campaigns without doing proper homework.
Writing an ad and getting it live without any valid preparation will not take you anywhere, because ultimately your success depends on how well you build your foundation. Therefore, it is very important that you follow the right things to not only increase your ROI, but also to gain momentum as you go along.
Before we jump into the main techniques, let’s first get the basics right. The starting point of any successful Adwords campaign is proper keyword research. Without researching your keywords effectively, your campaign would crumble down like a pack of cards. So keep in mind, that when you’re building your site try and target only those keywords that are cheap and have a high search volume. Some of the good tools that can help you with your research are: Word Tracker and the Google Adwords Tool.
You also need to make sure that the keyword ratio of your site’s content is somewhere around 3-5%. It’s simple: The more relevant and targeted your website is – the higher quality score you get rewarded by Google. So with that, it all starts to make sense: The better quality score you have, the better ad placement you achieve along with a good CTR of click through ratio – and what’s more, you end up paying much less! This is one of the prime reasons why a lot of ads in the top five positions have got a higher CTR and are able to pay less per click than their competitors.
Now that we’ve taken care of the basics, it’s time to learn a few cutting edge strategies that’ll help you go a long way with Google Adwords:
1 ) One of the easiest ways to make sure your ad converts well is to target buying keywords. When you have keywords that are action oriented such as “purchase” and buy”, it’ll automatically filter out all those people who aren’t looking to buy. Let’s face it, you’re paying money for every click and therefore, you only want those people who are ready to buy your product and have their credit card in hand. The rest can safely be ignored. The key here is targeting the right people, and when you add buying keywords, you know you’re in for a profit.
2 ) This one’s a smart tactic to actually get the most out of your Adwords campaign and help you achieve the highest amount of traffic. All you need to do is set your daily “spending limit” 8 to 10 times more than what Google recommends. What will this do? It’ll ensure that your ads are live at all times, without you actually having to spend that much money.
3 ) This is what I call the “Ad Group Exploitation” tactic. In order to apply this effectively, you need to create piercingly targeted ad groups, each one containing a small amount of keywords that are relevant. This can be easily done by breaking up your keywords into small, relevant groups and then creating a whole new ad group for each of these keyword groups.
4 ) When creating your ads, make sure they are packed with your keywords. Create ad variations for every ad group you have. You need to get creative here and play with words and the structure when inserting as many keywords as you can, without making it a junk. Remember to use only those keywords that are in the ad group you’re creating the ads for.
5 ) When you want to get a good ROI, you better grab eye balls. This is one of my favorite techniques it manages to get some really good results if applied right. Since Google gives you permission to insert registered trademark symbols as well as copyright in your ads [™, ©, ® ] – you just need to simply copy such symbols and insert them where your headline ends. Keep in mind that you should have a space between the last word in the headline and the symbol. This tactic helps you grab attention like anything, as it makes your ad stand out amongst the others.
6 ) It’s important to have a title that is highly relevant to your ad. When you’re writing the title for your landing page, make sure you put in all your best, relevant keywords in it. Same goes for your title tags, you need to have the best converting sentence or phrase along with the targeted keywords in them.
7 ) Terminating any non-buyers is critical. How you end your ad matters as much as your ad’s headline. Insert a call to action or your product price in the last line of your ad copy. A good pricing example is: Get Started for Only $27 or Buy at a Discounted Price of $19. Similarly examples for call to action can be: Register Now for Free or Enter Your Email and Get a Free Gift. When you have such direct elements in your ad, the person clicking on it has already shown interest and is therefore “qualified”. When they hit your landing page, they get exactly what they were told. They know what action to take as they were told about it in advance.
8 ) What makes or breaks an Adwords campaign is how you test your ads. This is why it’s important for you to split test all your ads, to choose the winner of them all is. Here’s how it goes: When you are starting a new campaign, you need to have different variations of that ad, which need to be split tested. Make sure you uncheck the “automatically optimize servings for my ads” option. This option works on showing the best ad the most, where as in split testing, we want all the ads to get even impressions. Also, do not allow Google to optimize your ads until you’re done split testing them.
9 ) It is always good to use Google’s traffic estimator to get a fair idea on how you should be spending for clicks. When you’re on it, enter the maximum CPC that was suggested by Google, so that your ads can run all the time while maintaining a high quality score.
10 ) While many experts ask you to turn off the option of displaying ads on the content network. This is true to an extent, because if you had a product that helped people gain muscle and lose fat, you could easily have your ad displayed on websites that deal with muscle building. This will get your highly targeted clicks to your ads. All you need to do is, when you’re starting a new campaign, you start off with “placements” instead of “keywords”. In the next few steps, you’d be able to select the websites you want to target in the content network according to specific demographics such as content, keywords, age, countries, etc. This is a powerful way to reach your target audience and has always been under-utilized.
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