How to Make Successful Google Ads Campaigns

Regardless of the ad format, a successful Google Ads (formerly AdWords) campaign requires know-how and time. Here are some of the best practices to put in place to maximize the performance of your campaigns.

Content

1. Why choose Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns?
2. Clarify your goal
3. Understand the Internet user
4. Keyword strategy
5. Create effective ads
6. Using audiences
7. Conclusion

Why choose Google Ads (AdWords) campaigns?

In 2019, the Search market represented 43% of the digital advertising market. As the world’s leading large search network, Google offers businesses the opportunity to get heavy traffic. Thanks to its different campaign formats, the advertising network makes it possible to reach Internet users at each stage of their navigation. Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube… These numerous sites optimize the chances of conversion.

The aim of SEA, of which Google Ads (Adwords) campaigns are obviously a part, is to obtain rapid results. Unlike SEO whose returns have a much longer time frame, SEA therefore boosts visibility at specific times. In this way, Google Ads campaigns can be used at key times in the life of your business. It can be a period of sales, but also the release of new products or on the occasion of the creation of a new page on your site. Google Ads is a great tool at your disposal. But how do you succeed in your campaigns? Let’s take a closer look at the various recommendations to follow in order to have an effective campaign.

Clarify your #Goal

This is the first thing to establish. Clearly determining your objective will be an opportunity to put in place the best strategy to achieve it. Whether it is for you to get reminders, promote an application, generate inbound contacts or sell products, campaigns meet 3 main objectives.

• Work on your notoriety: to make a new brand visible, highlight a product, or cover the launch of a new service. Cost-per-Mile (CPM) campaigns maximize visibility.
• Generate interest: encourage users to explore your offers, publicize the benefits of your products and services. Campaigns for engagement.
• Provoke action: generate sales or convert online. Campaigns for conversion.

Understand the Internet User

A well-known marketing method, the AIDA model makes it possible to pose the 4 stages through which a consumer passes in order to carry out a sales action. It is used in direct marketing, communication, advertising, but also sales and digital marketing.

Drawing inspiration from this model will be an opportunity to control Internet users’ expectations and respond to them as well as possible.

Aim: The goal here is to get out of the crowd of your competitors and offer an ad that will grab attention.

Interest: Once the attention has been captured, it will then be necessary to engage the user. This will be an opportunity to activate the right levers thanks, in particular, to your personas.

Desire: This step will be an opportunity to develop the desire to own the product. To do this, you will need to demonstrate how the product or service can solve a problem, and tailor the benefits of the product to the customer.

Action: Call-To-Action takes place in order to achieve the final objective and effect a conversion.

As you can see, this model remains a real pillar with regard to, among other things, web marketing. Used wisely, it will mark out the digital communication path and help you understand the expectations of your Internet users.

Keyword Strategy

Working on the keywords of your Google Ads (Adwords) campaigns is essential. First, put yourself in the Internet user’s shoes. Imagine him looking for your services. What words would he use? This is a good way to build a first list of keywords.

How do you find the right keywords?

Indeed, if your list is long, that does not mean that the keywords will perform well.

To check that out, here are some criteria to watch out for.

Search volume: this corresponds to the number of times the request was typed on Google. Too low a volume (unless your offers are part of a niche) will be synonymous with a low audience (therefore a very limited or no distribution of your keywords)

The competition: this is what will (in part) determine the cost per click. As the posting of a keyword on Google Ads is based on an auction system, the more a keyword is requested, the more expensive it will be.

There are also some tools available to help you find the right ones .

Then you have to understand the principle of Google keyword matching.

1.Exact Match: your ad appears if the keyword used is the same, or if it is a close variant such as an accent, singular, plural, small spelling mistakes.

It will be necessary to add at the beginning of the keyword an opening bracket and at the end a closing bracket.

• Example keyword: [4k television]
  • Example of matching search terms: 4K TV, 4K TV
• Exact expression: in this case, your ad appears when Google finds the expression in the user’s request. It can be preceded or followed by other words. You will have to put the keyword between quotes.

2.Phrase Match: your ad will appear from the moment one of your keywords appears.

Be careful because the broad query very often leads to very different queries from what you wanted to target.

• Keyword example: “4k television”
  • Example of matching search terms: cheap television, buy UHD television, how to turn on my 4K television

3. Broad Match Modifier: This system gives you more control over your ad impressions. By adding a “+” in front of your keywords, you specify that these terms must appear in Internet users’ requests.

• Keyword example: + television + 4k
  • Example of matching search terms: buy Thomson 4K television, buy best 4K television online, 130cm 4K television sales.

Negative keywords or negative keywords

Negative keywords allow you to exclude search terms. This technique makes it possible in particular to work on the semantic field of keywords.

What is the semantic field?

The semantic field groups together all the meanings of a word, depending on its context. Thus the strawberry can be a fruit, an instrument of the dental surgeon or a drilling tool.

How to effectively exclude keywords?

To effectively exclude your keywords, you will need to analyze the search terms of Internet users that trigger the display of your ads. To identify the search terms to analyze as a priority, you just need to add the column of the bounce rate from Google Analytics in the statistics of your targeted keywords.

If for a keyword (which has at least 10 clicks) this bounce rate is> 60%, surely there are unwanted search terms. (This analysis is viable provided that the landing page or landing page matches the targeted keyword).

If you identify a keyword in this case, you can check it on the left of the table and click on “search terms”:

This will show you all of the search terms associated with that keyword. In these you will quickly identify search terms that are not of interest to your business.

Example:

You are targeting the exact keyword “4K television” because you are a dealer of new televisions. After one week of broadcasting, you go to the “search terms” section of your campaign, you observe the following search terms:

• buy 4k television
• used 4K television
• how to connect my 4k television

You can therefore see that out of these 3 search terms, at least 2 are not relevant to your activity.

• The first, even if it remains quite broad, is directly related to your activity and the research of the Internet user. He is looking to buy a 4K television and offer it to you.
• The second is a search term that denotes an intention to purchase but for a used product, which you do not offer. Unless you offer refurbished televisions at very low prices, the keyword used is the exact phrase “used” which will allow you to exclude all search terms that include the keyword used .
• The third is a search term that denotes a search for information in no way linked to an intention to purchase (except if the Internet user breaks his TV while trying to connect it). In this case, it would be interesting to add two negative words:
  • ” How? ‘Or’ What “
  • ” connect “

This will allow you to exclude all search terms including “how” or “plug in” that are not intended keywords.

By regularly processing search terms and enriching your negative keywords, you can more accurately meet the needs of Internet users by being displayed only on search terms of interest to your activity.

Create Effective Ads

Writing effective advertising content requires taking into account certain best practices. The goal here is to show users your value while not forgetting that the most important thing is the Internet user and their satisfaction.

The prospect’s needs

This is the first thing you have to answer. Your ads present your products and services, their quality, your site pages … and each of these information must meet a specific need of the Internet user. You must therefore first identify what is of interest to them. Several methods are available to you. You can in particular, thanks to Google Analytics, determine which are the most visited pages of your site, and thus establish the nature of the attention which it pays to your services. Once you have found the right page (landing page for your ad), you will have to write the ad corresponding to the targeted keywords.

First rule, you will need the texts of your ad with the keywords you will target as well as the content of your landing page. It may seem basic, but it is not uncommon to come across landing pages that do not have a direct link with a keyword.

Encourage internet users to take action

Once you have globally determined the content of your ad, you will need to add call-to-action texts to encourage the Internet user to click on your ad. If you sell televisions, prefer “Discover our UHD Televisions” to “Wide range of TV” in title 1 of your ad. In the rest of your ad, you can describe in more detail the elements that differentiate your offer from your competitors. If you lack inspiration on your ad variants, you can cite the number of products available, the best-selling products, the variants available or even the price of the cheapest product (“Televisions from 199 €”).

Use the camel case to be better seen

In order to improve the visibility of your ads, it is important to use the “camel case”, this practice consists of adding a capital letter in front of the first letter of each important word. This generally improves the visibility of your ads compared to that of competitors.

Make the most of the number of characters available

Sometimes you have to rack your brains to find the right wording, but try as much as possible to use the number of characters available for each ad element. For a large format text advertisement, you have, for example, 30 characters for the title 1. Prefer “Discover our 4K Televisions” (28 characters) to “4K TV” (7 characters).

Typical optimized Google Ads ad format:

A clear call-to-action at the start of the announcement, use of the camel case and announcement that transcribes all the advantages of the store with optimized use of the number of characters.

Have a sufficient number of ads in your ad groups

You will need at least 3 ads in each ad group in your campaigns. Indeed, Google will alternate your ads in order to find which one generates the best performance. If there are not enough variants, Google will not be able to alternate them and this will be to the detriment of the performance of your campaigns.

Optimized landing pages

Another important point is to take care of your landing pages. They must meet the expectations of Internet users and be faithful to the title of the ad. In order to maximize your chances of conversion, these must be specifically arranged. A / B testing can be carried out in order to measure the returns according to the text, the form, the visuals …

Important elements also in SEO, be sure to optimize the display of your pages on mobile and especially that their loading time is as low as possible.

Remember that 50% of Internet users leave a site if the loading time of a page lasts more than 3 seconds.

It would be a shame to pay for clicks for Internet users who would leave the site before arriving there …

To do this, you can use Google’s tool to test the load time of a page: PageSpeed ​​Insights. The latter will analyze your page and give you a score out of 100 as well as the optimizations that could be put in place to improve it.

Multi-device ads

The more the years go by, the more diversified the browsing media of Internet users. Today, 67% of them use their mobile to connect and surf the Internet.

Faced with this observation, it is essential to create ads that can adapt to any type of device. These will thus be optimized to meet user expectations. This will allow you to customize your ads ( using IF functions ) to display ads with specific text for mobile users. This would consist of a more refined ad (less space on mobile than on a computer) or encourage Internet users to order on mobile via a promotional code.

Using Audiences

Targeting by audience type lets you show your ads to groups of people who meet specific criteria.

Many targets are available.

While most of them are available in all ad formats, some are exceptions.

• Affinity audiences : target areas of interest, habits.
• Demographics : Use user demographics such as gender or age. (You can use your demographic statistics from Google Analytics to define the best segments).
• Life events : target internet users at important stages of their life.
• Personalized intent audiences : Target users based on their recent purchase intent. This targeting is not available for the Search Network.
• Remarketing : Reach out to internet users who have already interacted with your business.
• Customer Lists : Leverage your CRM data to reach your customers.
• Similar audiences : Use the knowledge of your customers and visitors to reach an audience with the same interests.

Using audiences is one of the means at your disposal to effectively target your ads. Then, you will need to work on your keywords to ensure a good conversion rate.

Conclusion

Many criteria are taken into account in order to succeed in your Google Ads campaign. Sharp targeting and effective keyword strategy, creating a powerful message are among the good methods to employ. The effective monitoring of campaigns , permits, meanwhile, monitor and refine your strategy to achieve a better ROI .

Don’t wait any longer and launch your first campaigns!

In your opinion, what are the most important points of Google Ads Campaign? Write it in the comments. We look forward to your feedback and constructive dialogue with you.