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Google Ads are one of the best and most effective ways to advertise your business, even with a small budget. If you learn to make the most of Google’s own advertising tools, you can drive a lot of traffic to your website and attract the right kind of customers.
1. Remove duplicate keywords.
If you’re competing against yourself for keywords, you might think it won’t damage your ad performance. However, duplicates can make tracking performance more difficult. Remove duplicates so you can track accurately and get good, useful data from your adverts.
2. Bin on the name of a competitor.
As long as you don’t pretend you are the competing brand or use their name in your advert text, Google allows you to do this, and it can be a useful way to remind searchers that you offer the same service.
3. Let a program do the hard work for you.
With the right tools, Google Ads can be automated, which saves you a lot of the legwork.
4. Keep ad groups small and manageable.
When groups start to get too large, they can hinder your performance, so make sure your ad text and landing pages are highly relevant to the user. A large group can be split into smaller groups, allowing you to create much more personalised content.
5. Look at conversions.
When people convert on your site, check what they typed to find their way there. You might find some useful new keyword terms that are bringing people to your site.
6. Keep an eye on the performance of all your adverts, and remove any that are under performing.
Don’t waste budget on adverts that aren’t working and reinvest it into the ads that are working well.
7. Make sure your landing pages align well with the content of the advert.
If the page isn’t what users are expecting, they’ll click away straight away, which is bad for your site’s bounce rate. If your landing pages work well, they should encourage users to convert, and interact with other pages on your site.
8. Use all available space for text.
Make the most of all the space Google offers you to get your message across. Link to the tailored landing page and write carefully crafted copy.
9. Use ad extensions.
Google offers a few extensions for adverts that allow you to add more links, call out promotions and promote features. If they’re relevant, use them to get extra space and more use.
10. Use location information to target your adverts.
You can choose to display adverts to people in certain geographic areas, which can be very useful to get really precise targeting. If you offer services in a particular area, there’s no point paying to advertise outside of those areas. You can also use it to target seasonally; for example, if you offer cold weather equipment, you can choose to target only areas experiencing bad weather.
11. For ecommerce, use Google shopping.
Upload a list of products to Google, which will allow them to show up when people search for relevant terms. This can be much more effective for getting conversions on products than standard adverts.