Generally promoted as the answer to your digital marketing problems, many digital marketing specialists seem to think that if you have an Adwords/PPC programme then your business will thrive – and perhaps more importantly they infer that you have to do nothing else except sit back and wait for the results to start rolling in.
However, despite this, once you look at the cold hard results, many customers find that this success is just not there. At Gravity we have decades of digital marketing experience and our work is based results. That means we measure the outputs of our work every step of the way and our clients get to see the results – good, bad or indifferent. We have nowhere to hide.
And it’s perhaps because of this thorough measurement that we have had the opportunity to make sure we are achieving results for our clients – but it’s not a straightforward process and Adwords or PPC is certainly not a digital marketing miracle worker. As with all marketing tools, there needs to be planning – the development of a structured, defined and balanced programme of measureable activities, otherwise you’ll find that your money disappears into the internet ether with nothing to show for it.
Many new clients have come to us with bad experiences, having noticed the successive rise of Google Adwords popularity and, understandably, decided to participate. But having taken a leap of faith, many businesses have reported negligible results and consign the whole experience to the dustbin, saying investing in AdWords is simply throwing good money after bad.
But this experience doesn’t have to be the case. In our experience pay-per-click can still be a highly effective tool in a company’s digital marketing strategy – provided the campaign is properly managed. And that’s the key, ensuring there is a defined and constructive AdWords campaign, as opposed to picking a few words, running with them and paying for them at the end.
So, what do you need to do to have an effective Google advertising campaign? Take the following tips from us, they work.
Choose the right keywords
This might sound like an obvious one but it takes more time and thought that you may initially think! If you want to pay for popular keywords that lots of businesses are fighting over, you will pay more for them. It’s up to you and your digital marketing strategy team to work out how much you are prepared to pay for a more expensive keyword. Clearly, a niche product will be cheaper as the keywords required will be rarer. But, even if you manage to buy some good, cost-effective keywords, you still need to keep on top of your campaign and make sure you’re getting your money’s worth from every marketing penny you spend.
Take the time to design the right landing page
You’ve set up your AdWords account, and your first customer has taken the bait and made that all-important click to land on your site. But this is not enough. What you need to do now is put yourself in the mindset of the person who has got as far as your landing page. It is crucial that you get this part right, and make sure that the website’s opening page, the one which says a big “hello!” to your visitor, answers the queries that led them there in the first place. If, for example, the visitor has responded to an advert for a special offer on a sofa, they don’t want to land on your “about us” page. Give them the experience they have signed up for – believe us, it is only too easy for your prized customer to get impatient at not being able to find what they were looking for, and click onto another site.
Analyse results and react to users
For any advertising campaign to work effectively, you need to spend time analysing results and reacting to engagements by users. We have found, from having spent much of our time getting the best value for money out of AdWords campaigns, that any time you can spend analysing large tables of numbers is always time well spent. It may seem a dull way to spend an afternoon, but trust us when we say that we have found it well worth it.
Check your Google Quality Scores
Quality Score is Google’s way of measuring how relevant your ads are in relation to the keywords you are bidding on. If everything is working well, the visitor’s search will match them with your ad quickly and appropriately; they will then click through and land on the right page of your website, to be shown the correct way to the sales basket.
Always remember that Google is an incredible machine; it has eyes on every move we make when using it to search, and, as a business, it will score your campaigns based on relevancy and quality of experience. Google doesn’t just take your money to advertise your business, its systems actually judge your ads for relevance and quality. A high score means you will pay less per click and earn a better position on the search ranking, while a low one has the opposite effect, by being more costly and achieving lower search results. You have been warned.
Know there are no overnight successes
As with every aspect of business, you should never buy into a new marketing tool and expect it to totally transform your sales without putting time and effort in. Marketing is like a plant, it needs watering and attention to properly grow. It’s no good signing up for AdWords as if you were waving a wand over your marketing and hoping for the best. All advertising needs work, analysis and reaction. That means, when you have properly analysed your customers’ reactions to your ads, you need to reassemble with your marketing team and try to improve their experience in whatever way you can, so that you will achieve better results, a Higher Quality Google score, and, that all important bottom line, more sales.
Know your company’s skills set
If you have digital marketing expertise in-house, use it to work at your AdWords campaign and you will see the results for yourself, however, if you don’t, consider the employing an expert agency to run it for you. It may seem like investing even more money in a campaign whose hard-line sales results you have yet to see, but, if you choose marketers with a proven track record in getting the most out of digital marketing, the results will be more than worth it.
