The Google AdWords world is often overwhelming, especially for those new to digital marketing. There is no denying the power Google has for a business, and Adwords is a crucial component for any digital marketing strategy.
There are many different components to running a Google AdWords campaign. In this beginner’s guide to Google ads, we’ll break down the most important parts of the campaign in four steps and help you get started on Google Adwords.
Step 1: Identify your keywords and look at the competition
As a Google AdWords beginner, the first step of setting up your campaign is doing your research, both internal and competitor. You can flip the order as you see fit, but essentially you need to understand how your brand is perceived. Building on that, you need to know how the competition positions itself.
This will help you identify keywords to focus on and how to differentiate yourself against the competition.
Work with your:
- Customer service team: They will be crucial in spotting what customers love, what customers hate to get an initial sense of keywords.
- Current customers: What keeps customers coming back? Why have they stayed loyal? Talking to existing customers will help narrow down the focus around keywords for your campaign.
- Other departments: Work with cross-functional teams to identify why Google AdWords is vital for your company and propose keyword categories based on your work with the customer service team and current customers.
Once you have a sense of keywords, take some time to step out and look at what competitors are doing. There are many third-party tools available that will help you see how others undertake paid search strategies. This, in turn, enables you to refine your keywords further and become more targeted and focused while adding words you may have missed.
Step 2: Identify your budget
Once you have some broad categories and words established, tools like Google Keyword Planner come into play. Search keywords to get a sense of volume and cost associated with each user click. Google will also automatically suggest relevant terms based on your search.
Ideally, you’re looking for the lowest average bid associated with high monthly searches, but this is just one way to approach it. AdWords are definitely on the pricier side, so identifying your budget based on keywords early will help you avoid headaches over time.
In keeping with Google AdWords for beginners, it’s essential to understand the Google ecosystem.
AdWords is a bidding site at its core, and advertisers must bid for their position and the audience they are trying to reach, and advertisers cannot see how others bid. You then allocate money towards:
- Paying for bids
- Price for each click received
Ultimately, Google goes for the highest bidder with the best quality ad (we’ll explain further on). Otherwise, you’re deprioritized.
Types of bids
Automated bidding:
Using machine learning and automation, Google’s algorithms bid for you. All you’ll need to do is add your campaign objective and your maximum budget.
Manual bidding:
As the name implies, you control how much to spend and adjusting bids as necessary based on your budget.
Quality score:
The quality score dictates how much a brand pays for clicks, based on how relevant is it is for audiences out of a score of 10.
Step 3: Design a landing page
Once you have a budget set and keywords ready to go, you’ll need an effective and relevant landing page where users click to. Google goes for the highest quality ad and landing page, and it is very sensitive to low-quality content and tactics, so it’s important to think about the user’s needs each step of the way if you’re a beginner at Google AdWords.
Your landing page content will depend on your keyword design and keyword match types. Match types are essential as that’s how Google decides on your behalf which keywords are a good fit to display your aid.
Match types include:
- Broad match: Google will search for a very broad category, e.g., dinner plates. It will also search for variations of the category, such as ‘porcelain dinner plates’ or ‘dinner plates shop.’
- Phrase match: Google will search for an exact phrase and show your ad when those two words appear in the same order. For example, the term “dinner plates” will match any instance where those two words are together and display your ad.
- Exact match: Although not 100% exact, exact phrase gives advertisers more control by searching for an exact phrase or a very close variant. For example, you could search for [dinner plates], [dinner plates porcelain] or [plates for dinner].
- Negatives: You will specify any queries or modifiers that you do not want to show up against.
Step 4: Build your campaign and ad
The final step! You’ll now build your campaign and ad with your chosen keywords. The campaign targets based on:
- Location
- Keywords
- Products
- Targets
With targets, you can narrow and make your campaign granular by focusing on
- Gender
- Age
- Parental status
- Income
You’ll then create ad copy that ideally encourages uses to click on your link and go to your landing page. Try to stay relevant, targeted, and think about the quality of the writing. Look at how competitors phrase ads to get some inspiration. Google also offers Expanded Text Ads that offer more text for advertisers and works better for mobile devices.
There are four critical measurements you’ll need to track during the campaign.
These metrics measure how many people clicked on your ad, how much you spent on that click, what the conversion rate was, and what the per-acquisition cost was. Using these metrics, you’ll adjust your campaigns to get you the best return on investment.
If executed correctly, Google AdWords offers a world of potential for transforming your digital marketing efforts. Once you get into the rhythm of writing ad copy, tracking metrics, and optimizing your campaign, you’ll start to see improvements in traffic and engagement. With a solid strategy in place, you’ll be conquering search engineers .in no time with this beginner’s guide to Google AdWords
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