Running an AdWords Campaign: 5 Tips for Success
New to online advertising and digital marketing? No worries! Our simple guide to Google AdWords will provide you with the tips you need to find success and grow your business. In this article, you will learn about the importance of understanding your target audience, creating compelling content, setting precise goals, choosing the right keywords, and more.
Google AdWords has helped endless businesses run successful marketing campaigns. Over the years, AdWords has changed from a small platform with a few hundred advertisers to one of the biggest sources of ad revenue around the world. And while this platform can be a great way to build and run advertising campaigns, it can be difficult to do properly. So to help you use AdWords successfully and be smart about your ad spending, here are a few important tips to keep in mind before you start your first campaign.
Know What Your Audience Wants
You're going to waste a lot of money and see little success if you jump right into making an AdWords campaign without fully understanding your target audience and what they want. After all, your audience is who needs to search for the keywords and terms you're using. So take some time to research your audience -- find out which sites they spend the most time on, the kind of language they use on various sites, including when they're making queries in search engines, and even which competitors they show interest in. This way, you can be fully prepared to develop a campaign that will attract your audience.
Create Compelling Advertisements
If you're running an AdWords search advertising campaign, you only have to pay when your advertisements are clicked on. This means you need to create advertisements that are going to attract the right consumers -- otherwise, you're going to waste money if undesirable consumers click on the ads. To make a great text ad through AdWords, make sure you have a catchy headline, some interesting descriptions, and a clear URL. When you create good advertisements, you'll attract consumers and save money by limiting wasting your budget on traffic you don't really want.
Have a Clear Goal in Mind
When it comes to marketing, it can be easy to think of a lot of different tasks you want to accomplish: bring in more traffic, increase conversions, minimize expenses for advertising, build your brand, and so much more. However, it's important to focus on one or just a few goals at a time. If you try to accomplish too much at once, your campaign won't succeed. So before you start your AdWords campaign, determine your goals -- this will help you build your campaign around those goals and give you a better chance of being successful.
Use a Variety of Keywords
Choosing the keywords for your campaign is one of the most difficult steps. You should take your time with this to ensure you're choosing the keywords that will help you attract your target audience. You should come up with a list of keywords and phrases you think your audience will be looking for and use resources, like the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool, to determine similar phrases. From there, you should consider the different match types that will help your advertisements show up in search results pages. For example, broad matches will tell Google your ad can show up for a variety of searches because it's general but an exact match will show only in searches that are the same as the phrase you chose. Using a mixture of match types will help your campaign perform at its best.
Make Changes in Ad Copy
You need to create ad copy when starting your AdWords campaign. However, you shouldn't use the exact same copy every time. If you do this, you won't be able to tell what you should change about it to attract more prospects. Instead, make slight changes in your ad copy. This way, you can test the various changes and see which versions of the copy had the best conversions. This can be extremely beneficial moving forward -- you'll know which versions of the copy perform the best so you can use these versions. So create several versions of your ad copy, as many as your budget will allow, to figure out which copy you should use for the remainder of the campaign.
Hopefully, these simple tips will help you successfully build and run your advertising campaigns. AdWords can take some getting used to, especially if your business is new, but it's worth it in the long-run. So make sure you do plenty of research and go with what seems best for your ad campaigns in order to achieve your marketing goals.