Hello again all you vzaar readers, it’s Sami the spring intern at vzaar. I posted an article on the blog last month, talking about how vzaar had started to develop Adwords and SEO Marketing campaigns. This week I’m looking forward to share some more insight with you by suggesting a few useful tips for those of you who are interested in developing an Adwords strategy for advertising your business online.
Be Specific, Stay Focused
First of all I must say it is important for you to be relevant in your marketing strategy ensuring you focus on exactly the product or service you are selling. Providing mixed Google adverts by amalgamating your offers and messages or being too general will ultimately cost you as you’ll generate a lot of clicks from a wide audience. Know your buying audience and pitch to them as if you would face to face. That’s why it may be preferable to stay focused on your niche and the people you usually target. Google mainly rewards relevancy - keep this in mind!
Know Your Keywords
Try to use specific and targeted keywords specific to your business: this is the key to relevancy. Remain as precise as possible in the words you think your customers will use and explore all the combination’s you can think of. Of course some keywords will be more useful than others but you never know when which one will be used and meanwhile keeping some on standby won’t cost you much. Try to think like a buyer. What would they search for. You really have to enter into people’s internet searching habits to guess which keywords and which ads are more likely to getting click-throughs.
Remember you can also choose which negative keywords you don’t want your adverts to be associated with. This helps you avoid a lot of impressions on irrelevant search terms that could easily be eating up your budget.
Ad Design - Look Sharp
When building your adverts be sure to test at least three to four at a time. Google will help display the best performing ad over time which helps. Be sure to emphasize in the ad the keywords associated with the search the buyer has performed. Pick an attractive URL and landing page for the buyer to land on and don’t be afraid to test lots of different variations, themes and styles. Don’t waste characters on unnecessary words or confusing text.
Needless to say study your competitors by watching their ads but be sure not to fall foul of Google’s Adtext policies when it come to punctuation and brand names.
Tools Of The Trade
There are so many tools and resources out there for you to use! Its brilliant. Turn to these as much tools as possible to understand the results and develop your campaigns:
- Google Adwords has it’s own blog with plenty of free useful webinars you can sign up to.
- Google Learning Centre is your one stop shop for all things Adwords
- Conversion Optimizer - make sure you are tracking and measuring your performance against ROI.
- Google Analytics helps you analyse the activity of those that are clicking on your ads.
- Keyword Tool - helps you generate lists of keywords based on or around words you associate with your business or product. Great for tackling the longer tail of searches out there.
Watch The Budget
Your hard earned money can disappear very quickly on Adwords if not properly managed. I set an initial daily budget which helps me manage spend and Google ensures that I do not exceed that. When starting don’t go for broke as you’re better off delivering regular performances and results over time, which you can then download and interpret in your own time, instead of trying to dominate from day one. Then when you have learned what works and what doesn’t you can start to optimize your campaigns and perhaps increase your budget or what you are prepared to pay for a click.
Knowing what you are prepared to pay for a lead, sale or conversion is very important as this will not only define your daily budget but help you understand if your money and time on Adwords is being spent well. There are tools to help you make the most of this by tracking all clicks you generate. Be sure to turn these on.
Patience
When you’re in charge of advertising on Adwords, you can’t afford to let your campaigns run on auto-pilot. You need to provide constant surveillance and reporting on the costs and conversions your work is generating. Sometimes, testing new campaigns or changes in your strategy will require a bit of time before you are able to make the right conclusions. I have been running our strategy for three months now and there is still plenty for me to learn on a daily basis. Plenty of things to tweak. Plenty of ads to retest and rerun. Be patient and don’t forget to monitor and keep a fresh track of every modifications you make to your Adwords campaign.
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