3 Tips to Plan Successful AdWords Campaign
More and more, our clients are asking for our help using pay-per-click (PPC) ads to get their business higher up on search engine results pages. Let’s face it, organic search engine optimization – while crucial – takes time to produce results. With a successful PPC campaign, you’ll see results right away. If you’re like our other clients, your advertising budget is tight. You need to know that every dollar you spend is justified.
The good news is PPC is cost effective. You set the daily budget and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. However, without good planning, you can quickly find your ads being served to the wrong audiences and end up paying for clicks that never equal more business. With that, we’ve compiled three top tips for planning a successful AdWords campaign so you don’t waste a dollar.
Define Goals
We’re looking for specifics here – tangible, measurable goals. For example, if your business runs an annual contest, you probably have metrics about how many people entered the contest in previous years (each entry being a potential lead). So, a goal for this year, might be to increase contest entries by 10% over last year. Using PPC ads to promote the contest to a targeted audience in your region is a great way to grab more leads.
With your goals in mind, our team can be sure that your ads are targeted to the correct region and written to attract the right people. In this scenario, we would ensure that when a person clicks on the ad, they’re taken directly to your contest entry form. Each time that form is successfully submitted through your website, it’d be tracked as a conversion in AdWords. You get a new lead and we can monitor the campaign’s progress.
Write Personas
I paid for grad school by teaching public speaking and the most important concept of a successful presentation is to know your audience. In this context, I’m referring to your current and potential customers. Writing personas can be as simple or as complex as you like. But even with a high-level understanding of who is buying your products or services, your advertising dollars can go much farther.
Using the contest as an example, let’s say you’re a local hardware store and the contest winner will receive a free John Deere riding mower. One persona might look like this.
Family Man: He is in his early 30s, married and has a young family. He’s living in a starter home and hopes to upgrade in a few years. Curb appeal is important to him.
This person is a perfect target for your ad, right?! He wants a nice lawn. You’re giving away a new riding mower. So, craft ad text that appeals to the Family Man.
You’re probably imagining dozens of customer personas when thinking about your own business. When you’re on a tight budget, writing personas can turn your PPC investment into new business.
Manage Your Campaign
One of the easiest ways to ensure that your PPC campaigns fail, is to set it up and then forget about it. A single keyword change or a modification to your ad text can make a world of difference in your campaign’s success or failure.
Going back to the contest scenario, let’s say that we check conversions and find that your ad’s impressions (the number of times your ad is shown on a search results page) are high, but your conversion rate is dismal. We might review the search terms used to trigger the ad. If we find that people are searching an irrelevant term such as “decorative grasses,” we might add that term to a list of negative keywords (this would stop the ad from showing to people searching for decorative grasses). Then, we might reevaluate the ad copy itself. How can we make it more appealing to the personas you created? These are just two in a long list of ways we might adjust this campaign to improve your results.
The point here is that if you don’t monitor your campaigns on a regular basis, you could be missing these red flags and end up wasting your advertising budget.
Overall, PPC is an inexpensive, quick way to boost traffic to your website that can result in more business. As with every successful project, PPC takes planning. You must have a set of measurable goals, you must know your audience, and then you must monitor your campaigns regularly. If you want to see what PPC ads can do for your business, contact us. We’d love to help!