Five Useful Tips for Creating Effective Google Adwords Campaign

Google Ads is one of the most effective ways to deliver quick and desirable business results. In order to get a better performance than competitors', it is very important for marketers to make the most relevant ads to meet customers' needs and help them to select the best search choice(s). 

Tip One: Decide your campaign goals

Depends on your business type and grow stage, you need to have a clear goal before launching any campaign. Having a clear goal will help you select the most relevant ad format(s) and Google Network(s) to show your ads and also reach potential target customers effectively.

There are three common goals for advertisers:

• Driving website traffic
• Increasing brand awareness
• Boosting sales (driving leads)

Different goals will require creating relevant ad formats in different networks. Google Adwords has two main networks to show your ads:

• Search Network

Your ads can appear throughout sites on the Google Search Network. If you want to reach the right customers who are searching for your products or services,  showing your ads in this network will be a good choice to drive website traffics. When you run your ads on Search Network, your ads will be displayed on the top or the side of Google search result page.

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• Display Network

Display Network contains different ad formats including text, image, rich media, and video ads. Google will match your ad content to relevant websites or placements in order to increase impressions. If you choose to show your ads on the Display Network, your ads could be displayed on relevant websites or on Youtube or on other partner channels. It works better for increasing brand awareness or brand engagement. 

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For advertisers who want to focus on both awareness and website traffics, they can choose to create ads on both Networks. Even though it may require a large budget at the beginning, you can always adjust your budget or stop low-performance ads anytime you want. 

Tip Two: Understand customer buying cycle

The customer buying cycle includes awareness, research, comparison and buy. Understanding the customer buying stage can help you to customize your ad groups and deliver the most relevant results to customers.

For customers who have no clear idea about the products or services,  you can create general keyword lists to match their needs. For example, if a customer searches for shoes, but she has no clue about shoes styles or brands, you can generate common and descriptive keywords such as "shoes","shoes on sale","cheap shoes","designer shoes","Lady's shoes" and etc.

For customers who already knew the product, you can create specific or brand keyword lists to reach them. For example, if a customer wants to buy a Nike shoes, you might want your ads to include more brand keywords such as "Nike shoes", "Nike shoes on sale", "New Nike shoes", or "Nike shoes coupons".

Thus, you have to think like your customer. The more relevant your ads are, the more chance your ads can reach the right customers, and customers are more likely to make a valuable action on your ads.

Tip Three: Create relevant ad content and landing pages

Google evaluate your ads not only based on your bidding amounts but also based on your ad quality score. In general, if your ad content can lead customers to the most relevant landing page, customers are more likely to take valuable actions on your website. 

For example, when I search "nike shoes for women" on Google, the page shows me some relevant product shopping information on the top. Under the Google shopping, it shows a Nike ad which contains my keywords and a relevant destination URL. 

When I click on the ad, it directs me to the Nike Women's product page. The page shows women's shoes with all categories and brief product information. The page loading time is less than 2 seconds, and the page content is highly related to my search. Thus, I feel Nike is a  user-friendly brand.

In order to earn a high Quality Score, you could add relevant keywords on your ads and deliver a great landing page experience to your customers. These will help you not only increase the Ad ranks on the search result page but also reduce your cost.

Tip Four: Use Ad extensions

Ad extensions are listed below your ad, and they could be site links, call button, location map, App download, or review. Use Ad extensions can let customers take quick actions on your ads. 

For example, when I search "order pizza online near me" on Google, it shows me two Domino's Pizza ads on the top of the page. Under each ad, it either includes several relevant site links or includes a location map. These site links will definitely drive clicks and website visits. The location extension can help customers find the nearby Pizza stores and help them make a quick decision.

Moreover, the second ads also show the overall rating from seamless.com. Rating score indicates the customer satisfaction with your product and service. With a higher rating score, customers are more likely to make orders with you. 

Tip Five: Measure Campaign Result

After you run your Google ads, you need to measure your campaign result by reviewing some key metrics such as clicks, click through rate (CTR), impressions, converted clicks, and cost-per-conversion. Then, you can calculate your return on investment (ROI) to see how much net profits you could generate from the ads.

In addition, you could also optimize your current campaign based on the data result. For low- performance keywords, you could add them to the negative keyword lists. Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing to people searching for those irrelevant terms. It will help you reduce the cost. For high-performance keywords, you could increase your bidding amount to be more competitive.

At the end, if you want to make some changes on your campaign but not sure how it works, you could run an experiment and then compare the current campaign result with the new one's result. Then, you can choose either keep the current campaign or update the new one.