Do you want to get profitable Adwords ads? Here are 11 tips to follow to optimize your campaigns. Creating and putting online an Adwords advertising campaign is within everyone’s reach. Visit instaon.io for more about Google Ads campaign. Perhaps you already have an Adwords account and active campaigns or are planning to start soon (take advantage of our beginner’s guide to learn how to create your first Adwords step by step campaign). However, you expect your ads to be profitable and that’s where it can quickly become complicated if your campaign is not optimized.

DEFINE OR REDEFINE YOUR MARKETING OBJECTIVES

Before you throw yourself into the Adwords ad, you absolutely have to determine or review your objective. What is it? What is it? Do you want to improve your notoriety, get qualified traffic, increase the number of prospects on your website, boost your sales, encourage Internet users to take a specific action (go to your store, call you, send you an SMS)…? Define precisely your SMART web-marketing objective, i.e. it must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. A small example to make this clearer, you could set yourself the goal of increasing your sales by 15% for the first half of 2018.

STUDY YOUR MARKET AND YOUR COMPETITORS

The study of your market is essential to detect if it is growing, mature, niche… in order to know how you can hope to position yourself. Knowledge will also allow you to know the budget to spend on your Google ads. Indeed, an insurance broker in a competitive sector will have more difficulty obtaining a good positioning of its Adwords ads than a local business. You also need to study your competitors: do they advertise on Google? Do they use ad extensions? What key words or phrases are they targeting? How are their ads written? There are so many questions to analyse your competitors’ advertising to determine your competitive advantages over them.

DETERMINE YOUR PERSONAS

Who are your products or services for? Of course, they do not address the whole world. Imagine that you are a barber in Lognes, you will then only target men living 15-20 km around your business. Defining precisely the targets you want to reach is called segmenting your prospects and for this, you can use the personas method. Before launching your ads on Google (as with any other marketing action), it is mandatory to determine your ideal customer typologies.

MAKE ADEQUATE TARGETING

With Google Adwords, you can deliver your ads to the right people, in the right place at the right time. Indeed, this advertising platform allows you to target by geographical area, language, day and time of broadcast… Let’s go back to my previous example, in this case on Adwords; you would target people in nearby cities or within a 20 km radius around your barber shop. You can also choose the men but this criterion is less precise than on Facebook Ads. Then, you can broadcast your ads during the opening hours of your shop, i.e. from Tuesday to Saturday from 9am to 6pm.

WITHOUT STRUCTURE, THERE IS NO SUCCESS!

Your Google Adwords advertising campaign must be well structured. But what is a good structure? It must include groups of advertisements that correspond to the type of service or product to be promoted. To learn more about how to optimize your structure, consult our guide to learn how to create your first step-by-step Adwords campaign. Below is a fictional example of an Adwords campaign that a fashion store could launch. Its structure is clear; a campaign for shoes and one for clothes, then a group of ads for sneakers and one for sandals…

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE THE BUDGET

Before creating your Google ads, you need to define your monthly budget and then the daily budget when you run your ads. Be aware that there is no ideal budget for AdWords advertising, but a budget that is too low will not allow you to take enough distance to analyse your performance. But in any case, think that the main thing is not the budget invested but the return on investment you get from it. If spending 400€ brings you 1000€, then your campaign is profitable. In addition, you will have to regularly adjust your budget according to the returns.

HAVE A RELEVANT LANDING PAGE

Most of the time, you have to send your AdWords ad to a dedicated landing page on your site. The content of this landing page must be interesting and relevant to your visitors and in line with your Google ad. Indeed, it must offer the same content as your ad in order to correspond to the requests of Internet users. This will give you a better chance of achieving your goal. If you enter “Paris Lyon flight ticket”, you expect to find a page that offers you a ticket for this trip not for a “Paris Lille”.

PROPOSE ATTRACTIVE ADS

It is important that your ads are not only relevant to Internet users but also motivate them to take action.

CHOOSE RELEVANT KEYWORDS

For your Adwords ads to be a success, one of the prerequisites is to have good keywords. Before launching your Google ad campaigns, think about it. Then, when creating your ads, a good targeting method is essential. You must specify it for each of your keywords among the following four: broad query modified broad query, exact expression and exact keyword. We can also say that there is a fifth one with the exclusion of keywords or expressions. We regularly advise you to adjust the targeting method, add and exclude keywords according to the requests you want to position yourself on or not.

MONITOR AND ANALYSE YOUR PERFORMANCE

Monitoring the performance indicators of your Adwords campaigns at least once a week with in-depth analysis is essential. Here are some KPIs or indicators to watch out for:
  • the click rate or CTR (number of clicks/ number of impressions)
  • the cost per click or CPC (expenses / number of clicks)
  • the conversion rate (number of conversions / number of clicks)

OPTIMIZE YOUR AD CAMPAIGNS

Once you have collected these indicators, ask yourself the question: “what are the optimizations to be implemented? For example, if you have a good CTR but your conversion rate is low, you will need to improve your landing page. If the number of impressions is high but the number of clicks is low, then you will need to review your ads (titles, calls to action, extensions…) and/or your budget to make them more attractive and improve your positioning. As we told you earlier, you should regularly monitor the key words and phrases associated with your ad groups to see if they are relevant, then add and exclude them according to the requests you wish to position yourself on or not. Other optimizations are to be implemented: increase /decrease the budget and modify the targeting parameters but I would not expand any further because remember, a few lines above, I told you about it. By following these few tips, you should quickly see the first results of your Adwords campaigns. But if you prefer to be accompanied by our agency, our team will be happy to help you set up your ads on Google and help you optimize them.