Google Ads Fundamentals: How to Develop a Successful Google Ads Strategy

 A successful Google Ads campaign is essential to increasing sales and conversions for your company. There are times and places for social media marketing, search engine optimization, and even print advertisements, but search engine marketing (SEM) on Google is the best way to get your products seen right away. Not only is Google the most commonly used search engine worldwide, but it also receives the most visitors of any website.

It is challenging to defend not using Google Ads given the reported 2+ trillion searches performed on Google annually. Google Ads will put you in front of a lot of people to start, but with a good plan, it will also put you in front of the correct people.

The options for targeting are essentially limitless. You can display your advertising in front of just about every kind of consumer you can imagine at every phase of the purchasing process. Google Ads can help you reach the ideal customers regardless of whether your store sells commonly used items and services or whether your offerings are tailored for a specific market.

Finally, you may monitor the effectiveness of your ads, assess your progress, and change your plan as you go to keep within your budget and maximize the return on your advertising investment (ROAS).

In light of the foregoing, let's look at how you might develop a successful approach to maximize the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns.

Join Google Merchant Center, Ads, and Analytics to your website.

You should first make sure to connect your website to Google Analytics, Google Merchant Center, and Google Ads if it isn't already. Retailers can upload or sync product data to Google Merchant Center in order for it to appear in Google Shopping Campaigns and free listings.

Using Google Analytics Pro (or the free version) and Google Listings & Ads from WooCommerce's suite of extensions is the simplest method to accomplish this. By syncing your store with Google's tools, you can list products on Google Shopping, advertise them there, and monitor performance right from your dashboard.

Identify potential audiences.

You should do some pondering before developing your plan. If you don't already know who your target market is and what your company needs to focus on, find out. Consider these pertinent inquiries when determining who your target market is for your products:

• What other goods do they enjoy purchasing?
• What do they enjoy doing?
• What store do they go to?
• Who lives there?
• What do they do for a living?
• How old are they on average?
• Are they mostly men? Female? Both?
• What keywords do they enter?
• Do I want to target both current and prior clients?
• Do you have a list of customer emails I can search through to identify similar kinds of buyers?

Remember that each person's approach will vary depending on what they are selling. Add your own demographic targeting inquiries that you believe are unique to your products to the mix.

Customers might do a name-based search for your products. Or, if they haven't heard of your goods, you could need to reach them by focusing on the subjects they read about.

Let's use the example of a surfboard shaper who specializes in single-fin longboards to illustrate topic targeting. Customers may click on topics like "World's Best Longboarding Destinations" even though they aren't specifically looking for your boards. You've now located a group of people interested in surfing, and more especially, longboarding. This is an excellent chance to get your adverts displayed on specific websites that cater to longboarding enthusiasts.

After these people have seen your advertising, you may keep in touch with them by remarketing and delivering pertinent adverts throughout their browsing experience in an effort to get them to purchase your product.

Don't forget to utilize Google's tools. To assist you in enhancing the performance of your website, Grow My Store offers a complete website evaluation with insightful analysis and personalized recommendations. Google Trends uses both recent and old Google Search data to display the popularity of certain search phrases and topics.

Pick ad formats that will help you achieve your objectives.

Your objectives will determine the kind of advertisements you run and how much money you spend on them. You should at the very least choose whether you want to concentrate on obtaining potential consumers or converting and keeping clients. Although Google delivers advertising in a variety of ways and circumstances, all Google Ad types are pay-per-click (PPC), meaning that you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on it. Some may be more appropriate for your company than others. We'll go over the kinds of adverts you might want to pay attention to below:

Bring in prospective clients

Google ads

Search advertisements are perfect for attracting customers who are actively looking for terms associated with your company. With Search advertisements, you pay to have one of the top results, in a contrast to SEO, where you fight to earn one of the top results naturally. You will be charged for each click on your advertisement. These kinds of search advertisements are an excellent approach to reaching customers right away and obtaining results.

You must choose your keywords prior to launching your first campaign. Although they are more properly referred to as "keyphrases," the term "keywords" gives the impression that they must be distinct words. When compared to generic single-word terms like "longboard," using numerous highly descriptive words like "custom painted freestyle longboard" will yield better results. Although broad, general phrases may drive a lot of traffic, they won't increase revenue. The more specifically you target your keywords, the more probable it is that you will convert.

With these, Google Ads Keyword Planner can be useful. When the time comes to launch your campaign, have this information close at hand.

Shopping ads

Shopping advertisements showcase actual images of your good or service. In addition to offering prices and store details, they also provide your products incredibly high visibility. One of the best ways to increase sales is through the use of simple-to-set-up shopping ads. Shopping advertisements leverage the product data in your Merchant Center in place of keywords to decide how to display your ads in pertinent searches.

By promoting your products across Google networks with automatic bidding and ad placement, Smart Shopping campaigns can make campaign setup and management simpler. With Smart Shopping campaigns, Google creates and presents your product feed in a variety of adverts throughout their network using machine learning. Find out more about campaigns for smart shopping.

Display advertisements

Advertising that uses images and is displayed on a variety of websites is called display ads. They can be very useful for locating clients who are probably interested in your goods but aren't yet aware of them. Utilize them to target website visitors based on their demographics, interests, and the material they are now viewing.

Customer conversion and retention

Remarketing

You may utilize remarketing effectively with any of the ad types mentioned above. With this type of advertising, you can reach customers who have already used your website or mobile app.

You may take things a step further and upload your own list of clients to Google Ads (just make sure they have given their consent, of course). Offering things like free eBooks and guides in exchange for more information will help you discover more about your audience. Compared to the ordinary person, this audience is much more likely to be interested in your services. Therefore, it is worthwhile to set aside a special budget to support them.

Flexible Remarketing

Standard remarketing is one step removed from dynamic remarketing. You can use it to display advertising to repeat visitors that highlight the particular goods or services they have already seen on your website. Create a feed that includes all of your goods and services as well as information on price, specifications, product IDs, and photos. These specifics will be immediately incorporated into dynamic adverts to entice past site visitors back to complete purchases. Notably, you may utilize this strategy to upsell and cross-sell to your current clients.

Remarketing will soon become much more difficult as a result of Apple's new privacy approach, it should be noted. Developers of iOS 14 apps must now follow new guidelines, such as informing users of their data gathering practices and requesting consent before tracking them across multiple apps and websites. However, you will still be able to use alternate methods through PC- and Android-based platforms for the time being.

Create budgets

Based on your objectives, decide what your overall budget will be and how much you are willing to spend each day on each campaign. You might choose to spend as little as $25 per day or as much as $10,000 per day, depending on your sector and the size of your company.

Recognize critical performance indicators (KPIs)

You should also think about your KPIs. If an advertisement receives several clicks but no conversions, is it still successful? For a $60 product, are you willing to pay $50 per click? The following fundamental ad metrics may affect how you assess whether your advertising objectives have been met:

• The total number of times an advertisement was clicked.
• The price per click (CPC) How much each click will cost you
• CTR (click-through rate): the proportion of viewers who clicked the advertisement
• Rate of conversion: The proportion of consumers that clicked on your advertisement and then purchased your product
• CPC: Cost per conversion is the sum of your advertising campaign costs divided by the number of conversions
• Conversions from view-throughs: How many individuals noticed your advertisement but chose not to click on it before ultimately visiting your website and making a purchase

Plan and carry out your campaign (s)

Make sure to segregate your campaigns, advertising, and ad groups based on the objectives and target markets you want to concentrate on the most.

Based on information about ad performance and changes to your business, modify your plan.

In the event that your campaign makes use of Smart Bidding, Google's machine learning will take care of this. Your advertising will automatically discover bids that will produce the maximum value utilizing Google's Maximize Conversion Value algorithm using Google Listings & Ads and a Smart Shopping campaign.

Review your ad performance periodically if you are using a manual bidding procedure for your ads. Adapt your bidding strategy and bids in accordance with your KPI objectives and the how, when, and where that users are seeking.

You should repeatedly present yourself to prospects in stores with lengthy sales cycles. Bid higher on audiences who have visited your website or engaged with your advertisements in the past to help it happen.

Perhaps you have a mobile advertisement that is doing well. To get your mobile device ads seen by more users using smartphones, you can decide to up your offer by, say, 10%. On the other hand, you can lower your bid for advertisements displayed on desktops or tablets if they aren't doing as well but are still generating some clicks.

You should alter your campaigns as your business and audience change in addition to monitoring your KPIs. Consider repeating the process if it has been several years or more since you last defined your market. Use information from previous consumers and research new demographics to revisit your target audience on a regular basis.

Specify the traffic that matters.

It makes sense to use Google Ads to attract the proper customers to your company. Even if there is a small learning curve at first, it is well worth the effort. Your overall reach can be increased by diversifying your advertising tactics, and time-saving automated tools like Smart Shopping allow you to avoid choosing keywords and manually adjusting bids. Additionally, you may tailor your targeting, raise brand awareness, connect with a sizable audience, and maximize your ROI if you're using a strong, well-crafted approach.