Are you in control of your online advertising?
As a leader during a crisis, there’s so many things demanding our attention. Your Google Ads is one thing that you quickly get in control of. What would a 25% performance improvement mean for your business right now? You need to be confident that your ads only appear in places that complement, rather than damage, your brand. Most brands do not want to be placed next to an image of people dying in the streets and temporary morgues.
Google Ads can be complex. You need someone you can trust
Now is the time to do things differently. For many of us, our Google Ads tick over day by day. Previously known as AdWords, the platform displays your companies advertising across the Google network. There are three main places that Google Ads appear – text when using searching using Google; images when customers browse the web and videos embedded in YouTube content.
Google Ads are campaign-focused. How and how much you are charged on Google is a complex science. You can be charged in different ways – when someone clicks on it, when someone sees it and when someone watches it. Exactly how much each ad costs depends on who else is competing for the same keywords and spaces as your business.
Whether you are doing it yourself, outsourcing to an agency or using Google’s support team, it’s important that your campaign is being actively managed by someone you trust. It can be easy to get caught up in the status quo. Things plateau. The little things get ignored. Errors start to creep in. Outsourcing, a common practice in larger advertising agencies, can mean that things get lost in translation. Online tools, like Google’s Digital Garage, take precious time to master and mistakes can be expensive.
The world has changed. You need to get off Google Ads ‘autopilot’
COVID19 has fundamentally changed how much different ads cost and where they appear. Searchers are behaving differently. They are buying different products and services. Health, packaging, shipping, gift baskets and on-demand media are all in high demand. New competitors have entered the market at the same time others have completely withdrawn their marketing budgets.
We’re driven by what works for our clients
Reflecting on a recent success delivering a 25% performance improvement for a client, here’s our top tips for getting in control of your Google Advertising campaign.
Tip 1: Get the right structure for your Google Ads campaigns
There are a nearly infinite number of ways you could structure a Google Ads campaign. You can structure campaigns for each of your core products or services, for each of your target locations, for top-performing keywords versus test keywords, for exact match keywords versus phrase match keywords, and the list goes on and on.
When we launched the new Google Ads campaign for our client, we had five main campaigns organized by the different types of prospective clients we wanted to attract. Each prospective client had different keywords and we weren’t sure which was going to perform the best.
Tip 2: Optimise your budget over time
The right structure provides the ability to allocate total budget at a granular level. We quickly determined that some of these campaigns were performing better than others so we allocated more of the total ad budget to the top performing campaigns (and reduced the budget for the poor performing campaigns).
Over time we paused two of the five original campaigns and created a new campaign targeting a new audience group that we had identified during our optimisation. That dramatically improved the cost per conversion because we were focusing all our budget on the top-performing campaigns and best converting keywords.
It sounds so simple, but this was a huge factor in the overall account performance.
Tip 3: Optimise your schedule
Different ads perform differently during different times of the day. Typically, when you launch a campaign that is driving phone calls you’re going to only show ads during normal office hours. That’s an easy “cheat” to avoid spending your budget during hours when no one is available to answer the calls.
In our case, our client wanted to drive leads via a webform so it wasn’t obvious which hours to block. Rather than guess, we let the data decide. As we started to collect click and conversion data, we were able to determine which hours were most effective for our campaign. We found weekdays between 5 am to 11 am worked best so we boosted bids during those time slots and lowered bids during other times when performance wasn’t as strong.
Tip 4: Optimise for different devices
We commonly use mobiles, computers and tablets for different purposes. In our client example, we found there was much more search volume for mobile devices versus computers or tablets. However, computers had a much higher conversation rate (10%) in comparison to tablets (5%). Clearly, our bids can’t be the same across all devices if the conversion rates are so different. That’s why we used device optimization to adjust our bids per device to ensure we’re getting the most conversions at the best price for each device. Again, a simple change that had a big impact on how much it costs to acquire each customer.
Tip 5: Optimise your ad extensions
You can increase the success of your advertising campaigns through extensions. They are additional pieces of information that you can add to your ads to make them more visible. The good news is that there’s no additional cost for using them.
Three commonly used extensions are:
Call Out Extensions
These spotlight information within your ads like free shipping, discounts and price matching. As these are not clickable links, we typically use callout extensions for short unique selling points and promotional offers. For example, if you specialise in local area services, or you have a limited time 10% discount offer, then you can promote it using a callout extension.
Call Extensions
These give your customers the ability to call you directly from your Google Ad rather than visiting your website. This works best if your ad is well crafted with a strong call to action. It’s interesting to know that over 60% of searches in Australia are from a mobile device and users are more inclined to click to call than visit a website.
Sitelinks
Sitelinks take people to specific pages on your site such as your contact page, product page or FAQ. When someone clicks or taps on your Google Ads Sitelinks, they go directly to what they want to know or buy. This increases the likelihood that they will buy from you.
Being on Google autopilot is costing you money. We’re here to lift you up
We are experienced marketing pilots that get real results for businesses like yours. Don’t waste time trying to do-it-yourself or risk brand damage with the wrong placement.
Ask us about our unique packages and pricing models.
Hoist is a growth marketing consultancy making business relationships systematic. Our clients are resilient leaders seeking to build pipelines of happy customers. We analyse data, visualise concepts, plan horizons, develop products, control costs, design brands, automate sales and personalise experiences – fast. We prove ideas work, then manage and measure on-going.