Google Advertising is one of the best ways to send more traffic to your site. As long as you bid on the right keywords and get shown on the search results, you’ll have a constant stream of traffic to your website. And when optimized paid ads can produce a 200% ROI, it makes sense to put in the effort to build great ad campaigns.
However, you need to build Google Ads campaigns right if you want to grow your business successfully. Use the guide below to learn how to create an ad campaign on Google the right way.
Table of Contents
Define Your Marketing Goals
Creating a paid advertising strategy is hard when you don’t have a goal. If all you do is send people to your website homepage with a few lines about your company, what do you expect them to do there? You won’t give people helpful information and waste your ad budget getting zero results.
You must have a clear strategy before starting a Google Ads campaign. What do you want people to do when visiting your website? Do you want them to sign up for a list, call your company for more information, or buy something from a product page?
Once you know what you want people to do, you can start building your campaign. You’ll use your end goal to craft your ad messaging and convince people to take the action you want them to take.
Build an Audience Persona
Unfortunately, having a goal isn’t enough prep work to start building your advertising campaign. You need to appeal directly to the people most likely to buy your products. You won’t do this if you create generic messaging that tries to appeal to every person.
You need to learn as much information as possible about your target market. Learn about their interests, demographics, and reasons why they would buy from your company.
Don’t stop with one audience persona, either. You probably have a few demographics that will show interest in what you have to offer. Create as many personas as necessary to prepare for your marketing campaign.
Build a Landing Page
While you can send your ad traffic to your website’s homepage, that isn’t the ideal scenario. Since you have a goal in mind for your ad campaign, the page you send traffic to needs to align with that goal.
Take an email list campaign, for instance. You want to offer value to the people you advertise to that will convince them to sign up. You’ll create a page specific to that goal to persuade people to give you an email.
You’ll also need to optimize your landing page for Google Ads. You’ll get a quality score in the Google Ads center that ranks your page. Get as good of a score as possible if you want to maximize your chance of winning ad spots and reduce your marketing spend.
Target the Right Keywords
The right keywords will make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful Google ad campaign. Generic search terms won’t produce the best results since people aren’t in the mood to take the action you need. You need to find terms that align with your marketing goals.
Say you want to convince someone to purchase a product. People looking for how-to guides that let them handle work themselves won’t covert well. However, you can target people who use buyer-intent search terms to find people who are in the mood to buy.
This type of search targeting is essential to narrowing your marketing campaigns to the ideal customer. You won’t waste your ad dollars on people who will never buy your products after clicking your advertisement.
Set Up Tracking
Of all the Google Ads campaign elements, tracking is one of the most important. Even if you do outstanding research before starting your campaign and create great ads, you probably won’t profit from your initial campaigns.
If you want to make money, you’ll need to gather data and optimize your results. You can do this with website tracking. Scripts like Google Analytics offer every feature you need to monitor your advertising campaigns.
Install tracking scripts on your website and set up goal pages. You can use those goal pages to determine if someone converted and use that information to measure the success of your ads.
Create Multiple Ad Creatives
Sticking with one ad is one of the biggest mistakes you can make when setting up a Google Ads campaign. As mentioned above, your initial campaigns probably won’t make a profit. If you only test one ad at a time, it will take too long to test for profitable campaigns.
Setting up as many ad campaigns as you can manage in the beginning makes more sense. You’ll create multiple variations for each of your audience personas that use different messaging. As time goes on, you’ll gather data about which ads perform the best.
Once you find your winning ads, you’ll pull the losers from your ad campaigns and focus on optimizing the winners. You can perform A/B split testing to test small changes until you get a better conversion rate from those changes.
Now You Know How to Build Google Ads Campaigns
You’re investing a lot of money when marketing businesses online, so you don’t want to waste cash doing things the wrong way. There are tried and true methods that will help build Google Ads campaigns. Now that you know how to do things right, you’re ready to bid on Google Ads keywords and start driving traffic to your website.
Are you interested in learning more about digital marketing tools and strategies that will help you get new customers for your business? Learn more tips by checking out more digital marketing posts on the blog.
