5 Essential Google Ads Tips
Stop wasting money on Google ads and start seeing real results. Google ads is an excellent platform that provides a level playing field for many businesses, lowering the barrier to entry for startups while giving more established businesses a way to reach new customers. Here are 5 essential Google ads tips so you can start running effective and efficient campaigns.
Tip #1: Use Negative Keywords To Cut Out The Noise And Ensure That Your Ads Are Showing To Your Customers.
Now what’s a negative keyword? When you’re creating a Google search campaign, you’re thinking of keywords that directly relate to your business. Negative keywords are going to be keywords that, if not used properly, could undermine your entire campaign. To fill this out a little bit, I’ll give an example. One example would be in the roofing industry. If you’re a roofing company and you’re looking to run ads for your business, you might think to target keywords like “roofing near me.” Or maybe even “roofing shingles.” Now these keywords could both be very appropriate for a roofing company’s Google Ads campaign. However, if you’re not utilizing negative keywords, you could show up in search terms such as “roofing jobs near me” or “how to install roofing shingles.” Unless you’re actively advertising an open job position or trying to teach people how to install their roofing shingles These probably aren’t search terms you want to show up for. Another negative keyword that would apply to most Google Search campaigns is “salaries, ” but searches about what people in your field make have virtually nothing to do with your product or service.
Now the last negative keyword I’ll give away is “free,” pun intended. Odds are you’re looking to make money and don’t want to give away your business for free. So excluding searches looking for free services will ensure that your money is being spent on more valuable clicks. However
, you may still want to show in searches like “free estimate,” depending on your industry, and that brings us to our second tip.
Tip #2: Think Critically About Your Campaigns
The Google ads platform offers an incredible amount of targeting options. While some of the obvious ones are keywords and locations, there are many other options available to you to help you optimize your campaigns. This is where thinking critically becomes especially important. If you run a local small business where your hours are 9 to 5, you probably don’t want to be appearing in searches that occur between 2am and 3am. We could be wrong, but more often than not, this just ends up wasting companies’ money. Another example is if you sell reading glasses, you probably have an age bracket in mind that you want to be targeting. Google Ads gives you the option to run your ads on a schedule, as well as to target certain demographics.
If you stop and think critically about your campaigns, you can ensure that your ads are showing at the right time to the right people.
Tip #3: You Do Not Have To Utilize Every Recommendation To Have A Successful Campaign
If you’ve spent any time at all in Google Ads, you know that Google gives your campaign an optimization score. This score ranges from 0 to 100 percent to tell you how well-optimized your campaign actually is. As a subset of the optimization score is Google Recommendations. Google makes these recommendations showing how, if you make these changes to your campaigns, your ads will be in a better position to succeed.
While this sometimes is the case, many times these recommendations aren’t realistic. One recommendation I come across often is to increase your budget. While budget increases can be helpful and may put you in a position to reach more customers, many times I’ve seen recommendations of a budget increase of nearly $6,000 a month. While this may not be much to some mid-sized to larger companies, for a small business working on a $1,000 a month ad spend, it’s simply not feasible. Rest assured, not increasing your budget $6,000 per month won’t hurt your campaign.
Tip #4: Conversion Tracking Is Essential
A lot of small business owners may feel like they don’t have the time to set up conversion tracking, may not know where to find the piece of code they need to set up conversion tracking, or may not know where to install that piece of code. This is where working with a professional can come in handy. Google uses this piece of code to learn who your customers are so that your budget is allocated towards reaching those customers and meeting the end goal of your campaign. Conversion tracking is essential if you truly want to optimize your campaign.
Tip #5: Google Ads Takes Time And Effort.
As you’ve probably learned by now, running a successful Google ads campaign takes more than putting together some ad copy and throwing up some ads in the Google ads platform. It takes attention to detail, daily campaign management & optimization. and aknowledge of the tools that Google Ads provides in order to get the most for your money. While it may be tempting to throw up a campaign and see how it performs, you can be sure that you’re leaving money on the table if you’re not taking advantage of all the tools that Google has to offer.
Canvas Digital Marketing is a local, full service digital marketing agency with over 15 years of experience providing Tyrone, Peachtree City, Fayetteville, and Newnan, GA, with Google Ads services. So if you want to see how we can partner with you to help your business reach the next level, send us an email at chat@canvasdigitalmarketing.com, or send us a message on our Reach Out page.