Before you set off on your Google AdWords campaign, you need to think about how you are going to gauge its success. You also need clear thoughts on what you want your campaign to achieve. For instance, you may want to primarily increase your ROI (Return on Investment), increase the traffic to your website, increase conversions such as sales or raise brand awareness. Most likely it will be a combination of most of these.
So lets have a brief look at what your AdWords goals may be.
Increase ROI
This is based on your specific advertising goals. ROI is the ratio of your costs to your profits. You can use ROI to compare multiple advertising campaigns to determine how much money you’ve made from each one. Essential if you want to reach your goal.
Increase Traffic
To succeed in increasing web traffic to your site, you will need to concentrate on your Click Through Rate (CTR). To achieve this you need to create ads that are engaging, informative and relevant. Above all, you must monitor your campaign closely to ensure everything is working, as you want. In my next blog we’ll be looking at how to create successful text ads for your campaign.
Monitor your keywords and their performance and replace/remove any that are not performing. As a guideline, if you have a CTR of 1% plus with a quality score of 5 and over, then this suggests that your keyword choice is working well. This can vary though between accounts.
You will be able to see a list in AdWords of all the terms that have triggered your ads. This then, allows you to add these as new keywords. By the same token, if the list shows keywords that are not relevant to your product or services, you can add them as negative keywords so that your budget isn’t wasted.
Brand Awareness
This kind of goal is most useful for businesses that are looking to promote and get people talking about such things as a major new product launch, for instance a new piece of technology, a new clothing range or even a new computer game. The intention here is to try and show your ad to as large an audience as possible in your target area.
Increase Sales and/or Conversions
A conversion happens when your ad is clicked on your site that you consider valuable. This could be a request for more information, a quotation perhaps or (hopefully) a sale. You can increase your conversions by closely monitoring your data and adjusting your campaign based on this data.
Relevancy is also crucial to your conversions and by that I mean that you must make sure the URL that you use in the ad and the one that your interested prospective customer clicks on, is taken to a relevant page of your website. This page should contain everything about the specific product or service that is mentioned in your ad. Failure to do this will result in low conversions and your budget will disappear rapidly.
You must remember that AdWords is all about results, that’s why it’s very important to prioritise and clearly identify the specific goals that you want to achieve with your campaign.
