Google has undergone a number of changes in the last year or so, including the shift away from Google Adwords to an all-inclusive Google Ads. You no longer have to go to a number of Google accounts to manage your pay-per-click, video or display ads, IT’S ALL IN ONE PLACE! There are a number of people who are disappointed or aggravated with this shift, but we love it. One place to manage your YouTube video ads, as well as your search & display ads. Now that there are so many options in one place, we thought it best to outline how to maximize your use of Google Ads.  Trying to determine how to use Google more effectively can be difficult. We want to help with a step-by-step guide, so, here you go!

How To Use Google Search Effectively

Pay-Per-Click & Search Ads

Google Search advertising is exactly what it sounds like, it’s how businesses get to the top of Google with an advertisement. Essentially, Google offers you the top positioning if you pay for that space. Similar to a billboard, but instead, it’s on the world’s most popular search engine, with people looking for exactly what your business offers. For businesses who come in to speak with us about their need for instant lead generation, my first statement is “Google Ads.” If you know what you’re doing and understand the fundamental elements in creating an Adwords campaign, it’s the fastest way to get on the top of Google. I’m sure a lot of you are thinking “well, I don’t know the elements of creating an Adwords campaign.” Don’t worry, I’m going to outline a step-by-step process to help you create a successful campaign on your own.

Campaign Goals

The first step to any successful campaign is to determine your goals. It sounds easy, right? Google offers a number of different options, based off of your goal. The first step is to determine your goals. Are you an E-Commerce store looking to generate more sales? Are you trying to build your brand awareness, or increase traffic to your website? Google offers us a detailed analysis of each goal and will adjust your campaign based off of your goal as your campaign generates more insight. Setting up a campaign goal in Google Adwords search network is as easy as 1-2-3. Determine what type of campaign you would like to create.

• Sales
• Leads
• Website Traffic
• Product and Brand Consideration
• Brand Awareness and Reach
• App Promotion

You can also choose to select “Create a campaign without a goal’s guidance. I’m not too sure I would select this for your online marketing AdWords account, but give it a try if you’d like.

Audience & Location

We speak about it in all of our videos and most of our blogs and I’m sure you’re sick of it, but it is VITAL to determine your audience & target personas. Without being able to understand your customer, how are you supposed to target them? Put some serious thought into your customer. What are they searching for? Yes, a phrase-match keyword or broad-match will reach your target, but if you can hone in on exactly what they’re searching for, you can eliminate a significant amount of wasted budget. Determining location should be easy if you’re a local business. There are a few different options to selecting your location. You can choose the following…

• Zip Code
• Location Radius
• Market-DMA
• State
• City
• Country (although, not recommended)

The way we operate when creating campaigns is to determine the locations that have the highest conversion rates on our website. Once we’ve identified those, we look into where the most traffic is being generated from.

Keyword Planner

Google offers advertiser an amazing tool to help you determine which keywords are the most popular for your industry. We all believe that we know the perfect keyword for our business, and sometimes we do, but the planner is essential for any campaign. The Google Keyword Planner will help you determine which keywords have high competition. This is important as you will have to determine a certain bidding strategy to place higher than your competition, but also determine which keywords hold the most value to your business. Once you’ve identified your keywords, begin looking at relevant keywords that might bring you more business. It’s easy to say “Digital Marketing Company” is our most important keywords, but there are a number of other keywords that will most certainly help us drive business to our door. Thankfully, there are many tools out there that will provide you with keyword suggestions that you can use to help drive traffic to your products or services.

Budget & Bidding Strategy

So, you’re ALMOST half way there. You’ve determined your goals, the audience & location as well as the keyword research. Now it’s time to create your budget & bidding strategy. Luckily for you, Google only charges you per click on your ad. With that being said, if you have a small budget, you don’t want to move forward trying to cover an entire state, but instead get very specific about where your target audience is located. Select specific bidding strategies to target more important keywords. Bidding strategies will help identify the match types of your keywords. You can select..

• Broad
• Let’s say we’re targeting “Digital Marketing Company,” Broad match will be shown in cases such as these…
• Digital Marketing Company in Florida that’s good at SEO
• Phrase
• The phrase has to include all of the keywords that you’ve identified, in any order. ie Florida Digital Marketing Company or digital marketing company near me
• Exact
• These ads will only show up if the person types EXACTLY as you have it entered on Google. ie. Digital Marketing Company
• These match types will allow Google to identify when to show your ad based off of the keyword.

If you’re seeing certain cost-per-clicks that are too high, get more detailed. Your impressions will decrease, but so will the cost of each click. Continue to keep track of your budget & bidding as you will begin to see which keywords are converting at a higher rate and adjust accordingly.

Account Structure

Everything that we do when we build campaigns is to create relevant ads for our target audience. Google used to allow people to basically put whatever they wanted to attract customers, but all of that changed when they introduced the Quality Score. Google now ranks each and every keyword in your account. They determine it from the interaction with your ads, your campaign goals as well as the relevancy of the copy in your ads. Ideally, you want to have each topic that falls under the umbrella of your business to have its own individual ad group. Google determines the ranking of your keyword based off of the hyper-relativity of the ads & ad-groups. I don’t want one of our SEO ads appearing for a pay-per-click ad group and a social media keyword. If the keywords don’t align perfectly with the ads and don’t fall under the proper ad-group that is appearing, you’re going to have a low-quality score.

Landing Page Design

Many people seem to overlook this aspect of pay-per-click and Google Ads, but it really is essential. The way I look at landing pages is simple, I don’t want to pay for a click that doesn’t convert. I don’t want to pay for a. click and have that person end up on our blog. I want to determine the most effective landing page that will generate instant leads. Create specific landing pages for the aspect of your business that you are trying to promote. Offer some type of incentive for people to submit their information. Of course, provide value in your landing page, describing your service and why you’re the best at it, but you need to give the person some value to get them to provide you with their name & email address. Below, is an example of our FREE SEO E-Book that helps you get your business ranked on Google. You can download it here! Maybe your offer is a free consultation or a discount off of their first visit. Incentives go a long way. We create E-Books that provide our target audience with a detailed overview of the services we provide. The landing page also needs to be captivating, but you don’t want to put too much out there. We generally eliminate headers and footers from our landing pages, so that the user gets just enough information for them to make an educated decision and submit a lead-generation form. Lastly, ensure that your landing pages have the long-tail keywords incorporated into the copy of your page. It is crucial because Google wants to see its users reaching the correct destination. The most important is installing conversion tracking into your landing page design. When you are spending money on clicks, you want to be able to determine the cost per acquisition (CPA) so that you know when to increase or decrease your budget.

Pay-Per-Click Effectiveness

Google would not generate 95% of its $100 billion dollars from advertising revenue if it didn’t work. Google Ads provides businesses of any size to get to the top of Google and generate instant leads. We strongly believe in Google Ads success which is why we are working to achieve our Google Premiere Partner badge. I personally am Google Certified in both displays & search and love the opportunity (and leads) that it provides us. If you have any questions about Google ads or pay-per-click, visit our PPC page here. I hope you enjoyed your PPC overview. Subscribe to. our blog for more PPC content as well as SEO, Social Media, Branding & Web Design.