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Google Ads strategies that will drive traffic and revenue

October 17, 2022

10 mins

Google Ads is an effective online advertising tool that allows businesses to reach new customers and grow. With Google Ads, you can target customers interested in your product, increasing the likelihood that they will buy.

You can set a budget and track the performance of your ad to fine-tune your strategy as needed. Undoubtedly, Google Ads is a must-have tool for any company looking to succeed online.

In this post, we’ll share some Google Ads strategies that will help you get the most out of your ad spend and drive traffic and revenue for your business.

What are Google Ads Strategies?

Your campaign’s setup depends on your business goals and target customer. Here are different Google Ads strategies you can explore:

Google Ads optimized segment targets all your site visitors and app users.
Smart bidding strategies are used for optimized conversions.

- Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) is recommended if you have fewer sales conversions because it will automate your bids for clicks that more or less likely will lead to a sale.
- Target CPA (cost-per-action) adjusts bids in real time based on each impression, maximizing your ROI.
- Target ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) helps you get customers by letting you set a maximum cost-per-click bid and a return on ad spend equal to your goal.

- Similar segments is a targeting option that uses data segments to help you reach out to new potential customers that share characteristics with your existing customers, app users, and web visitors.
- Auto-targeting is for marketers looking to find more customers by increasing the ad’s reach by identifying the most likely to become customers. Auto-targeting will avoid increasing the cost per customer during the campaign.
- Dynamic remarketing helps you generate more leads and sales by encouraging previous website visitors to return and complete what they started on the website.
- Re-engage abandoned shopping carts using the URL of your shopping cart and order confirmation page.
- Converted customers data segment. Customers who purchase from your website may be interested in ordering different products or services.
- Product category segment is where you create a data segment for each product category.
- 30-60-90 day customer segment is where you target customers who purchase from you after 30, 60, or 90 days.
- Responsive display ads. This is where Google uses your images, logos, videos, text descriptions, and headlines to generate different ad combinations for your website, apps, Gmail, Display Campaigns, and YouTube.

Location and language targeting. When deciding on your area targeting, keep in mind that you must be able to serve clients in the locations you choose. Additionally, your site visitors and app users can be multilingual, access your site, or use your app worldwide. Therefore, ensure to target all languages in your ad campaign settings.

Cap Limit is where you limit the frequency of how your site visitors and app users see your ad in a day.

Ad Scheduling is where you specify certain hours or days that your target customers can only see your ads.

How Google Ads strategies can achieve various marketing goals

By selecting the most effective methods and strategies for your company, you can increase sales and achieve a more significant number of potential clients.

Brand awareness

Google Ads is a must-have tool for increasing traffic to your website. However, AdWords can also be used to increase brand awareness.

By targeting them with relevant ads, you can ensure that your brand is top of mind when potential customers are ready to purchase.

Results delivered fast

The dashboard shows you everything you need to know about each campaign, like which ads were clicked, which keywords website visitors used, and how much each click cost — making it easy to track how your campaigns are doing.

Budget control

Google Ads eliminates wasteful spending by putting you in control of your money. You can target keywords, set bids, and limit daily spending. In addition, you only pay when the ad is clicked.

You learn more about your target market

Google Ads gives you valuable information about your customers, including the keywords they use to find your website, their location, their devices, and the times and days they search.

This data can be used to improve your products and services and fine-tune your marketing efforts to avoid wasting money by showing your ad to people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.

It’s essential to set clear objectives when developing a Google Ads strategy. Choosing the most effective approach will be difficult without a clear understanding of what you’re trying to achieve.

How to Create an Effective Google Ads Strategy

With Google Adwords, you can control how much you spend on ads. However, a poorly designed campaign can waste a lot of money. Here’s how you can create an effective Google Adwords strategy:

1. Create your Google Ads account

A Google Ads Manager account enables you to run multiple ad campaigns and monitor them in one dashboard.

2. Define your goal

What do you hope to accomplish with your Google ads? Do you want to generate leads, raise brand awareness, and increase sales? Defining your goal is the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign.

However, designing successful campaigns that accomplish multiple goals is also possible. The key is to develop targeted strategies for each goal and track each campaign’s performance against those objectives.

3. Define your target customer

Creating the perfect strategy is challenging when you don’t know who to target. Define your target customer by asking the following questions:

Who exactly are they? (e.g., gender, age, education, etc.)
What is their function? (e.g., title, company size, industry, general job responsibilities, etc.)
What is a typical day in their lives like? Describe an average day in their life, who they deal with, and what decisions they make.
What are their main concerns? Describe the primary obstacles they are attempting to overcome concerning your products and services.
What do they value the most, and what are their objectives? Explain what they value most when making a purchase decision and what they hope to achieve with each application.
What sources do they use for information? Determine the primary sources they use to gather information for their research and purchasing decisions.
What factors do they consider when choosing a business? List the most important characteristics, such as being a technology leader, having proven experience, being a domain expert, and so on.
What are the most frequently raised objections? List the most common reasons you hear for why your solutions will not meet their needs.

4. Research your competitors

Understanding what your competitor is doing allows you to adjust your strategy and stay ahead of the competition.

Here are some research tips for your competitor:

Take a close look at their ad campaigns first. What kind of messaging do they employ? What keywords are they competing for? What strategies appear to be effective for them?
Examine their ads’ copy and content. What is the tone they use? What are the topics they cover? What type of call to action do they employ?
Find out which keywords they are bidding on. What keywords are they aiming for? What are their SEO marketing strategies?

5. Keyword research

Find keywords relevant to goals/objectives and understand different keyword match types:

Broad match – allows your ad to appear for searches that include close variations of your keyword, even if the searcher does not use the keywords and phrases you set.
Phrase match – keyword phrases, or close variants of your keyword phrases, to reach your target customers without creating a long list of keywords and phrases.
Exact match – This is a keyword that matches the same meaning or same intent as the phrase a user has searched for.

6. Identify negative keywords

A negative keyword is a term you add to your Google Ads campaign or account to prevent your ad from appearing in searches that are irrelevant to your campaign. This will help you save on costs with your PPC strategy.

For example, if you sell dog food, you might add the negative keyword “cat” to your campaign so that your ad does not appear on searches for “cat food.”

7. Develop engaging landing pages/offers

The key to a successful AdWords campaign is your landing page. An enticing offer using keywords on your landing page will hook your target market.

The goal of landing pages is to provide a positive user experience. Therefore, you must investigate what your top competitors offer and create something more unique, different, or better, making your target customer click on your ad.

You will be well on your way to a successful AdWords campaign if you can provide an irresistible offer on your landing page. The goal is for the user to have no choice but to accept your offer.

8. Select the most appropriate campaign type

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to reaching your target audience – whether they’re offline or online. However, understanding different campaign types can help you increase the success rate of your campaign:

Search campaigns – Text ads in search results. You can show ads to people actively searching for your products and services, which boosts sales, leads, and website traffic. Text ads on Google search results let you reach people looking for your products and services.
Display campaigns – Image ads. Helping you reach an audience beyond Google Search. Display ads let you reach a relevant audience while they browse websites, use apps, and Google apps like YouTube.
Video campaigns – This is for Youtube and various websites, creating general awareness for your brand.
Shopping campaigns – Best used by retailers to promote products for their physical and e-commerce stores. The ads will appear on Google Search and Shopping tab.
App campaigns via various channels. Using the info from your app, the ads are optimized for Search, YouTube, Play, Discover, and other sites and applications.
Local campaigns. These campaigns promote your brick-and-mortar store. The ads will appear on Google Search, Maps, YouTube, and Display.
Smart campaigns – Automated campaigns. Enter your company’s information and create ads, and Google will automate the rest.

Note that Google must be able to crawl your website. In addition, your landing pages must include accurate product titles and descriptions so that Googlebot can create relevant ads.

9. Utilize the best bidding strategy based on your objective

Google Ads has different bidding strategies for different kinds of campaigns. Which approach is best for you will depend on which networks your campaign is aimed at:

Target CPA – This strategy lets you control the cost per conversion if you run a campaign focused on conversions. Google then takes this information to set your bids automatically based on your target. Sometimes the actual cost will be more than the target bid, and sometimes it will be less.
Performance Max – Lets you drive the ad’s performance according to your set conversion goals by using Smart Bidding. The ad’s performance is optimized in real-time, leading to more conversions and sales.
Target ROAS – This is excellent for eCommerce companies looking to expand their current marketing initiatives. The performers will be automated, allowing for even better and more effective performance.
Maximize conversions – This bidding strategy can drive as many conversions as possible within your set maximum daily budget.
Maximize conversion value – This bidding strategy operates almost the same as Maximize Conversions. You can decide to set a target ROI and let the algorithm work on it. In this strategy, Google aims to maximize your ROAS for your daily budget by smartly managing your bids as needed to reach your revenue targets.
Enhanced Cost per click – This employs both manual and intelligent bidding techniques. You set a maximum CPC, as with other manual CPC bids, but give Google control to optimize the ad based on the likelihood of a conversion.
Maximize click – A bidding strategy to get you as many clicks as possible for your daily budget. This may be most effective if you have a limited advertising budget or are running ads in a niche with low search volume.
Manual CPC bidding – This gives you greater manual control over your bids and targeting options. However, it can be exhausting if you’re running multiple ad campaigns.
Target impression share – You can specify a maximum CPC bid with Target Impression Share, the highest bid you want Google to place. Remember that other variables, such as the quality score of your ads and ad groups, will impact your ability to reach your impression share goal.
CPM – Pay based on the number of times your ads are shown on Display Network or YouTube.
tCPM – This is used for YouTube and Display Network only. Google will show your ad to a targeted audience to increase your brand awareness. A bidding strategy in which you decide on an average price for every thousand impressions.
VCPM – Viewable CPM is designed for Display Network only. You will only pay for impressions that are considered viewable impressions.

10. Design the ads

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when creating effective Google Ads. Simply look at what your competitors are doing and mimic their strategy.

Of course, you’ll want to spin things, but your ad’s general structure and layout should be similar to what’s already out there. After all, if something isn’t broken, don’t fix it. So instead, consider using your competitor’s insights to adjust your campaigns.

11. A/B testing is a necessary component of any digital marketing campaign

You can learn which version of your ad is more effective at driving conversions by testing different versions of your ad.

A/B testing can test various aspects of your advertisement, such as the headline, copy, images, and call to action. To begin, simply create two versions of your ad, run them simultaneously, and track which one performs better.

12. Use Google Analytics to track campaigns

Establish KPIs for tracking conversions. KPIs measure whether you’re meeting your goals. For example, if you want to increase sales by 50%, your KPI could be quarterly. By setting KPIs, you can track progress and adjust your PPC campaign strategy.

Then, set up Google Ads conversion tracking. This shows which ads convert, which is crucial for campaign decisions because you’d be blind without conversion tracking.

You can track campaigns with Google Analytics. Since GA provides free website traffic data, it can show you what channels drive the most traffic and what countries and devices your visitors are from. In addition, it helps you understand where your site visitors come from and what they do on your app or website.

Next steps for coming up with your strategy

Google Ads can be a highly effective way to increase traffic and revenue for your company. First, however, you must develop a well-thought-out strategy to make the most of this platform.

To develop an effective Google Adwords strategy, understand your business goals and tailor your campaign accordingly. You should also test and tweak your ads to ensure they perform optimally.

If you need assistance getting started, check out Reporting Ninja’s Google Ads reporting tool. Sign up for a free 15-day trial and see if it can help you create a better Google Ads strategy today.

Post written by

Manolo Pereira

Jazz and Marketing at Reporting Ninja

see more posts by this author