There are many ways to use Google AdWords, but not all of them will get you the results you want. It takes practice and a little bit of trial and error to know what works for your business and what doesn’t. Here’s how to use Google AdWords for better PPC results:
Optimize Your Click-Through-Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who click on your ad when it appears in search results. A high CTR means that people are interested in what you’re offering, while lower numbers mean they aren’t.
To improve your CTR, make sure that your landing page is relevant to the ad text and has a compelling offer for users. For example, if you’re promoting an event ticket sale using the phrase “tickets now on sale” in your ad text, then make sure that’s exactly what visitors see when they arrive at your website–and don’t try selling them anything else!
If possible, also include some sort of strong call-to-action (CTA) at this point so visitors know exactly what action they should take next: whether it’s buying tickets or registering for an email list or whatever else suits their needs best.
Research Competitor Strategies
To research competitor strategies, you need to look at their ads. This can be done by searching for keywords related to your product or service and then looking at the ads that show up on the right-hand side of the page. Once you have found a few ads from competitors, check out what they are doing differently from one another. Are they targeting different demographics? Are they using different keywords? Or do they all seem to be targeting similar audiences?
Once you’ve looked through a few of these search results pages and noticed some trends in terms of how competitors are marketing themselves online via PPC advertising, consider what type of strategy would work best for your business. For example: if all three competitors are targeting similar audiences but using slightly different wording within their ad copy (e..g., “best” vs., “top”), then it might make sense for your company’s ad copy too–or perhaps something even more specific like “best price” or whatever else makes sense based on who your target market is!
Increase Mobile Site Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors in Google AdWords. If your mobile site is slow, it can hurt both your paid and organic search results. To optimize for speed, follow these steps:
- Use a responsive design that adapts to any screen size and device type (phone or tablet).
- Make sure all images are compressed as much as possible without losing quality–this will help load pages faster on slow connections or devices with limited memory.
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to render your page by combining JavaScript files into one file where possible, minifying CSS and JavaScript files using tools like YUI Compressor or UglifyJS2 (JavaScript) or JSCompress (CSS), then putting them all together into one HTML file with a server-side language like PHP or Ruby on Rails (Rails).
Integrate SEO & SEM
SEO and SEM are two sides of the same coin. They’re both important to your website, and they should work together to improve your Google Ads.
Use Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are used to exclude specific search terms from your campaigns. This helps you avoid wasting money on irrelevant traffic, and can improve your ad performance by increasing relevancy for people who are actually searching for what you offer.
For example: Let’s say you sell garden gnomes online and have an AdWords campaign set up for this purpose. If someone searches Google for “garden gnome” but has no intention of buying one from your store, they’ll see the ads in the sidebar of their search results page and click away without purchasing anything–but that won’t be good news for either party involved because neither of them got what they wanted!
To prevent this scenario from happening again, we would recommend adding the keyword phrase “buy garden gnomes” as a negative keyword within AdWords so that only people looking specifically at buying garden gnomes would see these ads (and hopefully convert).
Focus on Some KPIs Over Others
The key to a successful PPC campaign is to focus on the most important KPIs. This can be difficult, as there are many metrics available for you to measure your performance with. However, if you try to track too many KPIs at once, it can become overwhelming and cause your team members’ focus to shift away from what really matters: improving their KPIs and helping the business succeed.
Instead of trying to optimize every single KPI at once, start with one or two that have been underperforming recently–or even one that has never been optimized before! Your goal should be setting up an effective process so that when new campaigns launch in future months/years (or even weeks), they’ll have already been optimized based off of previous data points collected during previous campaigns’ lifespans.
Target Specific Locations
Targeting specific locations is a great way to get more clicks. You can target by location at the ad group level, or even at the keyword level (though we recommend targeting by location at an ad group level first, as it’s much more flexible).
You can choose from city, country and region as well as zip code targeting. For example if you want to target Londoners who live in South Kensington then this would be a great keyword: “south Kensington apartments”.
Consider Taking Recommendations in Google Ads
You can also use Google Ads to find out what other advertisers are doing and how they’re doing it. For example, if you see that one of your competitors is running ads for keywords that you’re not targeting, consider adding those keywords to your campaign. Or if an advertiser has a high CTR but low conversion rate, look at their ad copy and try to emulate it in yours.
Google Ads offers a wealth of data that can be analyzed to improve your campaigns:
- Time spent on site
- Bounce rate (how many people leave after visiting only once)
- Conversion rate (the percentage of visitors who take an action)
The key to success with Google AdWords is to understand your target audience and what they’re looking for in their search results. This means that you need to know your business inside and out, so that you can create ads that resonate with people who may already be familiar with it or could potentially become customers in the future. Once this knowledge base has been established, it will be much easier for you to create effective ad campaigns that are relevant to what people want–and those are always going to perform better than ones which aren’t!
