Today were going to give you five tips to improve your ROAS (return on advertising spending) on your Google AdWords™ campaigns.
Fine tuning your ads and campaigns takes time and practice. Many businesses find that they are achieving good levels of Impressions and Clicks, but that somehow the numbers and quality of leads never seem to reflect this apparent success. Worse, as time goes by, not only do the worthless Clicks add to their advertising spending, but also the Quality Scores of their ads diminish.
Here are five Google AdWords best practices that will help you be better than your competitors:
- Remember Mobile Devices
Just a year ago, Google confirmed that there are more searches on smartphones than there are on PCs. Two years ago, another study by Google found that 50% of consumers visit a store within a day of making a local search for the product or services it offers.
Thus, make sure you have ads specifically created to show on mobile devices, be sure to do A/B testing to find the most effective copy, and consider using Google’s new AdWords Price Extensions for mobile devices.
- Look at Competitors
Look at what your competitors are doing. What are they doing right that you could emulate; and what mistakes can you see them making that you could avoid. Are there obvious mistakes in their text that could create ambiguity?
For example, there is company that erects fences around people’s back yards. It recently tried to soft-sell to its target market by creating some “thought leadership” resources on Fencing Education. While they had many hits on their search ads, a proportion of the clicks were from people searching for education on the sport of fencing. Get some of your friends to sense-check your ideas to make sure your efforts will be effective with your target audience.
- Keyword Targeting With Exact & Phrase Matching
Keywords offer the potential for the right customer to find the right provider. At this very moment, there are thousands of customers searching: how can the one that is looking for your product find you? How can you make sure you connect with that person and not one of the others looking for something that only sounds similar to your product?
You should select a large number of relevant keywords and phrases, and then test them. See which ones not only produce Clicks, but ultimately lead to sales. AdWords Best Practices predicates A/B testing your keywords and then optimizing them – picking the best ones – to increase your conversion rates. Also, take the poorly performing keywords that produce high abandonment rates, and add these words to your negative keywords lists.
- Think Geography
Once upon a time, you could buy newspaper advertising space in three or four areas around a city, rather than paying to advertise to the entire city.
Google AdWords is far more granular. You can choose by country, region, city or Zip code; or by radius around your brick and mortar location. Using this feature effectively will get you Clicks from prospective customers only within reasonable driving distance, thus saving you money on worthless Clicks.
- Create Tailored Landing Pages
Back in Tip 2. above, you’ll remember I recommended you look at what your competitors are doing. One of the mistakes that hurts the AdWords ROI of most of them is to have the same landing page for every ad, usually their home page. Let’s say the prospective customer is searching for “crockery” – dinner plates and cups – and is attracted by an ad for free delivery on a spend greater than $99.
When they click on the ad, they anticipate landing on a page showing a selection of cups and plates. Instead, they arrive on a home page showing bedding, curtains and all kinds of homewares, thus having to start searching through that website, or – more likely – abandoning that site and doing a new search. For success, you need to create landing pages that complement your campaign. You might also try A/B testing two landing pages for each campaign to see which one has the greater lead conversion rate.
AdWords is an amazing tool. With some practice, you can increase your return on advertising spending (ROAS) significantly; and if you feel you’re not quite ready to do this kind of optimization, it is still worth talking to AdWords PPC Experts for more advice.
