How To Launch A Successful Google AdWords Campaign For Your Business

Google AdWords is one of the most developed advertising platforms that enables big and small businesses to present their products and services advertised in front of prospects just in a matter of hours!

If you are familiar with the platform, you already know that there are various targeting options and features that accommodate different types of businesses. This myriad of options and settings can often seem overwhelming and challenging to follow when starting a new marketing campaign, which can quickly waste a large amount of your marketing budget without completing your marketing goals. 

In this article, we will focus on the main seven steps to ensure your business will experience a solid ROI for every dollar you spend on AdWords, today and beyond.

Tip #1: Build an outstanding account structure

A structured AdWords account is a requirement if you want your ad spend to return a profit. The support of a carefully planned account is relevancy. You can experience Cost-Per-Acquisitions (CPAs) drop by 60% solely by adjusting the structure of an AdWords account. Keywords, ads, and ad groups in each campaign should be closely connected. In turn, Google will compensate by lowering advertising costs. 

Tip #2: Start with Search Network campaigns

The Search Network is your mark when it comes to targeting the most relevant prospects for your products and services. Therefore, Search network campaigns need to be your first destination. Contrary to marketing on the Display network, which interrupts your prospects as they browse the web, potential customers on the Search network have already taken initiative by exploring for a solution to their problem and this already qualifies them as leads. They are closing up to the bottom of your marketing funnel, becoming most likely a lead or customer. Starting the Search network also provides you with a better idea of contextual keywords that can be transferred over to the Display network.

Tip #3: Set low daily budgets and cost-per-clicks (CPCs)

When launching your new AdWords campaigns, it’s difficult to define how much traffic your ads will obtain and how quickly you’ll use your budget. The last thing you want to do is waste a few thousand dollars in the first few hours or days without a great number of conversions to show for your ad spend. To prevent this, our recommendation is to set your daily budget to half or even a quarter of the exact daily budget that you have in mind, particularly when you are new to the game. This will allow you to facilitate the campaign while observing how the traffic performs based on your targeting. For the campaigns where you choose manual CPC bidding, we would also recommend beginning with lower CPCs and raising your bids when needed in conformity with the results your keywords present.

Tip #4: Pay attention to your ad copy and images

Ad copy is certainly an essential part of your AdWords campaign. It’s in charge of attracting the right potential customers while dismissing those who aren’t likely to convert to customers. We truly consider that copy is king, therefore our recommendation is to run split-testing for two distinct great ideas in your ad copy. Your target audience will always react better to one of the two big concepts. 

We also recommend tracking your results in a fashion that you can analyze sales results from each ad. You can then apply the leading ad copy through your marketing funnel and develop its success. For ads that operate on the display network, images are really as important as ad copy. The images you pick for your ads need to seize the attention of potential customers to convince them to engage. 

The bottom line here is that your ad image must differentiate you from the rest of all the millions of campaigns out there. Another recommendation is to test natural-looking images against images taken from royalty-free image websites. It’s improbable to identify what image will perform better without testing. 

Tip #5: Perform accurate testing and tracking

Testing and tracking are mandatory if your AdWords campaigns are going to thrive. Usually, when launching a campaign, your initial CPAs are going to be higher than the desired CPAs. Experimenting with different keywords, ads, and bid strategies will help you find the best option to meet your CPA goals. For Google to accurately track conversions, the AdWords conversion tags must be correctly placed on the thank-you pages your prospective customers land on, after taking the desired conversion step on your website. 

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is an excellent method to manage tracking tags. With a user-friendly interface, it helps with tracking Google tags as well as third-party tracking and testing. You could consider GTM as a box where all JavaScript code snippets are collected, for both Google and third-party tracking applications.

GTM includes three parts:

• The main tag that’s added to each page you want to obtain information from.
• Triggers that define when the tag is executed.
• Variables used to obtain and collect information used by tags and triggers.

Additionally, you can also trace conversions for campaigns that are not on the web and these include apps, phones, and offline campaigns

Tip #6: Set up the campaign by the device type

With mobile usage still rising, there’s a great chance a high percentage of your AdWords traffic is coming from mobile devices. Also,  you are not wrong to assume desktop and mobile traffic produce the same results. Our recommendation is to categorize your campaigns by device type. Arranging your campaigns by device type enables you to control desktop traffic independently from mobile traffic. This will permit you to set bids separately, build different funnels, and efficiently track the results by device, ensuring you’re in complete control of your ROI regardless of device type.

Tip  #7: Remember to set up a negative keyword list on the search network

The less narrow the keyword match type on the Search network, the greater the chances that your ad will be triggered by search phrases unrelated to your products and services. An excellent idea is to ensure you’re not receiving clicks from unrelated searches in your campaigns. The “keyword search terms” tab is a great tool to remove these unwanted keywords from your campaigns. Then, you can add these phrases as negative keywords that would prevent your ad from showing in the future when these phrases are used in searches. 

In AdWords, you can create negative keywords in an ad group or campaign level. However, setting one main negative keyword list at a campaign level could cover all of your ad groups inside each campaign. 

To build your negative keyword list, you need to click on the “keywords” tab inside of a specific campaign, and then click on the “negative keywords” tab and they can be added either an ad group level or campaign level by clicking the corresponding red “keywords” button. Bear in mind that negative keywords can also use broad match, broad match modifiers, phrases, and the exact match types to manage the traffic triggered by your ad.

Bottom Line

Your work on your Ads marketing campaign is never finished. Once it’s up and running, you’ll need to continually make adjustments. Keep trying small variations on ad copy, keywords, landing pages, and anything else you can consider to examine what works and what doesn’t. Even a small increase in ROI can make a huge difference in the long term, so keep up the good work.

Implementing these 7 tips above will not only save you a lot of time but will also help avoid wasting your marketing budget, starting today. If you need help launching your AdWords campaign, schedule a call with us!