Setting up a well-targeted campaign can become easily complicated with all the choices available. Different options work for different business verticals and although the platform tries to walk you through the process it isn’t hard to phrase your ad a bit too general or pick the wrong keywords and end up wasting your advertising budget on an audience that is just looking and will not convert. Here are a few guidelines and tips to keep in mind.
Track Conversions
Set up and track your conversions from the very beginning. Either your goal is a newsletter subscription or making a purchase online make sure you are keeping track. The advantage with digital marketing is that you can easily measure all the results and if something doesn’t work you can immediately change it. Also, make sure that your Analytics and Google Ads accounts are connected. Transparency is key in an industry that is being scrutinized for its practices. The end results will eventually speak for themselves.
Negative Keywords
Specify what words you don’t want your ad coming up for when doing a Google Ads campaign. Some might be irrelevant and some just too broad of a match. We want our campaign to include mostly transactional keywords (users that are ready to buy.) If someone is looking for general information about a service or a specific website they can be included if your purpose is to raise brand awareness and your budget can afford it. We would recommend more accurate targeting and excluding words that don’t convert to increase your ROI.
Although this setting seems simple at first it can be tricky and have your ad show up geographically in other areas that you don’t want to be targeted. The default is “People in, or who show interest in, your targeted locations.” That means the ad will display in places where the users show interest in, so they can actually be conducting that query from another city in a different state. If your focus is local make sure you log in and select your campaign and then on the left sidebar Settings-Locations-Location Options and choose “People in your targeted locations.”
Improve Keyword Quality Score
Keyword quality score is determined by your click-through rate, relevance, landing page quality and your accounts past performance. How exactly that number is calculated and what is the weight of each factor is a closely kept secret at Google but we do know that it’s very important if users click on your ad when they see it. So do your research and if possible run different versions of the ad to see which ones get better results. A better score also means a lower cost for your campaign. The whole purpose is to fetch the most relevant result to the search query.
Another unique attribute of digital advertising is that you can specify your audience with tremendous accuracy, unlike TV or radio commercials. Although the debate is still raging as to whether segmentation is more effective or not we stand behind it as for example nobody would really try to sell pink t-shirts to an all-male audience or auto parts to an all-female one. The campaigns we like to construct and run are focused on who would most likely buy our products. This can only be accomplished if you analyze your data to find patterns.
Avoid Broad Match
There are 3 keyword options here to pick from: broad match, phrase match and exact. Avoid going with a broad match as the outcome would be too general and it will only bring you irrelevant traffic. You might miss your campaign goals and spend your budget insufficiently. Only use this option if you are willing to experiment and want to see what searches send the right users to your website.
