What is a Google Ads Campaign?
Google Ads is one of the tools you can use for your Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign. When you refer to a freelancer as “Google Ads Freelancer” you, therefore, could mean “PPC freelancer” or “Paid Advertising Freelancer”. There are many ways to call this type of online marketing, but the goal is always the same: reaching a specific target audience, at the right time, for the right price and drive them to your website. If you want to drive them for views, sales or enquiries is up to you. The main thing is to get the website to them and get them into the website.
PPC can be set in various different ways and with various budgets. It is perfect both for small businesses or for big ones. The most important thing is the person taking care of your campaign. It is really easy to waste money or reach the wrong audience. The process needs to be constantly tracked and checked to be adjusted on the way based on the revenue generated and the people reached.
Why is it important to track and optimise? Because if we start a campaign and let it go for months without checking it, it might be going in the wrong direction and we wouldn’t know it. Google suggests revising the strategy monthly, I personally like to check it every time I can, just to make sure everything is fine and we are reinvesting the right amount of money for the right audience and good results.
One of the most common errors I’ve seen from individuals or professionals is forgetting that we also want the website to keep people reading. Google gives heavyweight to the bounce rate (How many people enter the website and go out without reading through) and the time spent on the website. The first thing to do is always to optimise your pages to make them engaging and worth to be read through.
In this article I want to explain you a little bit more about Google Ads Campaigns.
How does Google Ads work?
As mentioned above, Google Ads is one of the tools for paid advertising. The most famous in the world, to be detailed. It works on a Pay Per Click basis. This means that you place a bid for a keyword you believe is relevant for your product or service and that your audience will be looking for, and it decides which bid to pick and position in position one based on various factors:
- Quality relevance of the keywords you are bidding on;
- Quality of your advertising campaign;
- Size of the keyword bid.
Specifically, the ranking is calculated averaging 2 main ranking factors: CPC (Cost Per Click, the highest bid per keyword) and quality score (this value takes into account the ad relevance, the CTR – Click Through Rate – and the quality of the landing page). In this way, the winners would be able to pay a CPC within their budget. We can describe this process as an auction and you can see it in the graph below.
Is it useful to also go for an SEO retainer?
Of course, this will depend on your business goals. For example, if you’d only like to boost sales quickly, SEO might be something to think about later in time. If, instead, you would like to increase your visibility and your general ranking on Search Engine, PPC would do it for your first boost, but SEO would be needed to maintain your visibility and engage your visitors. One of the most common errors I’ve seen from individuals or professionals is forgetting that we also want the website to keep people reading. Google gives heavyweight to the bounce rate (How many people enter the website and go out without reading through) and the time spent on the website. The first thing to do is always to optimise your pages to make them engaging and worth to be read through.
The steps of the marketing funnel covered by a PPC campaign are normally awareness, consideration, and sales. What we need to do after having promoted our business, is keeping your audience engaged, and loyal for the last part of the customer journey: retention and advocacy (Remember, for many businesses, loyal customers are what saved them during this Global pandemic). SEO can give a huge help with that, a good SEO strategy can help you climb up ranking positions, which means increasing impressions and the likelihood of clicks and conversions. Have a look at my article “What is SEO?” for some more information.
How do I reach the right target audience?
Segmentation is the first rule. Working with Google is really advantageous, Google network has millions of connections throughout the web, and it is able to track its users in many different ways. He considers audiences those having similar interests, intents and demographics.
There are many categories you can choose to address your campaign to.
Initially, you have to have well clear in mind who is your audience, your “Persona“. This is the model of a typical client you’d have. A Persona is created by segmenting your audience. This is a first, simple step to maximise your PPC campaign effect. How old is your audience? What’s their income? What are they interested in? What’s their intent? etc.
So, in a nutshell:
- Set your demographics clear.
- Set your audience interests (Are they interested to a niche market? Or a broader product?)
- Set your audience intent (Do they want to buy? Or just to know a new product?).
- Set your strategy.
Many are the different strategies we can create to get you straight to the right group. This will be depending on your company and your needs, and regardless if you are a niche business or a big business, it comes fundamental to consider the Sales Funnel, and understand where you are located and what is your business goal at this point in time. Have you just launched your business? Do you have a new promotion? Would you like to increase your sales? Or would you only like to let people know that you are around?
All these questions can be answered by allocating you to the right point of the Funnel.
What is a Sales Funnel?
A Sales Funnel is the process of converting visitors into leads and leads into loyal customers. As easy as that, it is strictly connected to the customer journey. This last one is the process of a person during the purchasing process, from the moment of research of the product to the actual purchase.
In the image below I’ve summarised how the Google Marketing Funnel and the customer purchasing journey look like when compared to each other.
As you can see, each of the customer’s intents matches a step of the sales funnel. This means, that when we start our Google Adword campaign we need to have clear in mind what intent do we want to reach and where on the sales funnel we want to position ourselves.
From there, we can create our strategy and our Google Ads.
How do I create the perfect Google Ad?
Many are the factors influencing a Google Ad. Reaching the right target is important, but how do we build it to make sure people will click it?
Rule n. 1: Keywords!
Nope, keywords are not only present in SEO, keywords are pretty much everywhere, especially in search engines. The reason is simple: keywords allow you to understand what people are looking for and when your ad should appear.
Obviously “Keywords” is not enough. There are many questions you should ask yourself, like:
- Is the keyword I am bidding on profitable?
Many tools help us to understand if the keyword is profitable. One of those is SEMRush, which with its “Keyword Magic Tool” tells you what is the search volume of each keyword and what’s its price, called Cost-Per-Click (CPC). - Can I afford this keyword?
Here, everything is based on your budget. As explained above, you’ll need to bid for a keyword, but if your bid is too low your money are going to be wasted rather than invested. So, we’ll need to calculate how what is the maximum amount you can pay for each keyword, this is called “Max CPC” or “Maximum Cost Per Click”. - What are my competitors doing?
It is important to understand what companies like yours are doing. Indeed, this is not to copy their strategy, but to understand what is working and what is not. Why should you waste your money on something you could preview that is not gonna work?
After you decided the keywords which will be part of your campaign, go to the next question:
Why am I better than my competitors?
After you decided what keywords to use, it’s time to get people to click on your ad. What you write in your ad will be fundamental! Show them why you are different from your competitors and invite them to try your product (aka insert call to action words).
Another advice? Create compelling ads. As mentioned above, Google gives a lot of weight to your ads, how they look, how clear they are and what quality they have. If your ads won’t match the quality expected by Google, it won’t rank and, again, your money won’t be worth the effort.
There are many more elements impacting your Google Ads campaign, including seasonality, ROI, Google updates (Yes, it is an incredibly dynamic world) and much more.
Would you like some help? I am just a call away. Use this number +44 7378 147119 or fill up the enquiry below.
0 Comments