Customer acquisition is always the core of any kind of business, while paid advertising is the quickest and most accurate way to obtain customers.
When entering the paid advertising world, people would first think of google ads and Facebook ads. Google ads is pay-per-click while Facebook ads is pay-per-impression.
For new marketers, learning how to create profitable ads campaign is not an easy thing. Google and Facebook made it very easy for everyone to open an account, but not everyone has been trained for making successful ads campaigns.
Google and Facebook would thank you for spending a lot of money on their ads platforms, but unfortunately not many marketers making the best use of their budgets.
This time we will focus on discussing how do we use Google ads to create a profitable campaign for a small business.
1. What is PPC and how does it work?
PPC means pay-per-click. An ad is shown and will be charged if the ad is clicked. When the ad is click, it would bring the visitor to the website the advertiser preferred.
Search engine advertising is the most popular form of PPC. The PPC ads are shown in the search engine result page in order to gain impression or hopefully a click to sponsored website.
2. How do you create an ad account in google?
Go to https://ads.google.com/ . Create an ad account for your company.
3. What is the goal of your ad?
The goal of your ad is not only about buying clicks and traffic to your site. The ultimate goal of your ad should be bringing in more leads and revenue to your business. Setting a proper goal for your ad campaign is the most important thing in the ad planning stage.
4. How to trace a successful conversion?
You should turn your marketing goal into a form that google could understand. What kind of marketing objective are you targeting for?
A purchase?
A filled lead form?
A phone call?
You need to ask your web developer to add the conversion code into the specific website in order to let google know the page customers arrived is a conversion.
When you choose the bidding strategy, you can consider letting google bid for a successful conversion automatically.
5. Telling Google your target
By inputting a keyword into an ad campaign, google can show ads to those people who search for information by using that keyword.
There are 4 types of keyword matching in google ads: (using marketing course as an example)
- Broad match – marketing course
- Broad match modified – +marketing +course
- Phrase match – “marketing course”
- Exact match – [marketing course]
Exact match gives you the most control while broad match covers most search queries.
If you have a persona of your target customer, you can use “In-market audience” in the audience tab to show ads to consumers who are searching or comparing products and services across Google Display Network and YouTube.
When you have enough data, demographic tab is an interesting place to explore. You can see the performance in different age group, gender, parental status and household income.
Under the campaign setting, you can select the location to target. I would suggest your check under the “Location options”, select “people in or regularly in your targeted locations” instead of the google recommended setting. That would save you a lot of money if you are not in hospitality sector.
6. Ad creation – copywriting
Writing the headline is most important part of an ad. Good copywriting would increase the click-through-rate (CTR) of the ad, hence bringing more traffic to your site. Also, higher CTR would result in higher quality score and cheaper CPC bid.
As you follow the guidelines of google, you would need 3 headlines and 2 descriptions in a text ad. You can put your keyword into the headline and display path, it would bring you higher CTR.
7. Which metrics you need to keep an eye on?
After giving a couple of days for google to run the ads, you would have some data for analysis.
When you enter the tabs like ads or keywords, several metrics are displayed in columns. You can modify the column by clicking the column button.
Please keep an eye on clicks, impressions, CTR and average CPC. Those are metrics of micro conversion that represent whether it could effectively bring traffic to your website.
To determine if our ad campaign is successful, we need to focus on the metrics cost, conversion, cost/conversion and conversion rate. We could use the cost per conversion data to calculate if our ad is profitable.
Keeping a high conversion rate and low cost per conversion is the key. Always optimize for conversion or return on ads spent (ROAS).
8. Granularity – Make thing as small as you can handle
When I first used google ads, I stuffed all the keywords into single ad group. It was easy to setup, but then when I wanted to look into space for optimization, it was very hard for me to distinguish between the performing and not-very-successful keywords.
Here comes granularity. Only putting one keyword (with different match type) once at a time in an ad group, would make things much easier to handle. Each keyword performs in different ad group, so you could control the max CPC separately due to the performance of the keyword.
9. PPC temperature – the right time to call to action
Different types of PPC channels or different types of PPC traffic have different types of intent to convert. Each channel has a different temperature.
PPC temperature of different channel (By Johnathan Dane of KlientBoost in CXL course)
Johnathan Dane from KlientBoost suggested that certain call-to-action only works in high temperature. You can check out The PPC Temperature Scale in Youtube.
Which kinds of call-to-action belong to cold and hot temperature? The following chart gives you some examples.
10. Your greatest ally – Negative keywords
Not everyone is your targeted customers, especially those who only seek for free stuffs on the net and are not willing to pay for valuable contents and profit. By adding negative keywords in your ad campaign, you can eliminate the searcher who is not a good fit to your business.
Negative keywords are words and phrases that tell Google Ads not to show your ads if a search contains those words. You can add negative keywords on ad group level or campaign level.
For some negative keywords ideas, please visit 75 Effective Negative Keywords to Include in Your Google Ads Campaigns.
Great course recommended for online marketers on paid advertising
I have bought tons of online courses. Many of them taught Google ads. I found 2 courses which are most inspiring.
Ultimate Google Ads Training 2020: Profit with Pay Per Click – Isaac Rudansky
https://www.udemy.com/course/the-ultimate-google-adwords-training-course/
Google Ads – Johnathan Dane
https://cxl.com/institute/online-course/google-ads/
I would recommend beginners start from Isaac’s course first as it’s elementary yet very detailed and thorough for newbie marketers.
Once you have basic understanding with google ads, and you have experience on managing ads account, you can take a leap to Johnathan’s course. His course provides you a conceptual understanding on how professional marketers building a google ad which is ready for testing.
Eddie Lee
Marketing Specialist
Synergy Marketing Technology Limited
