1. Set a clear objective
Before you can get specific with your conversion goals, you’ve got to determine your overall business goals and your advertising goals. Once you’re clear on those things, you can narrow in on what your action plan is.
2. Build a great structure
Set things up thoroughly from the beginning, and you’ll be in way better shape to succeed. Take the time to curate everything from campaigns to keywords to ad groups to targeted locations. Your gnome fan site is going to get a lot more traction if it’s showing up for searchers who live in gnome-positive cities.
3. Rack up a high quality score
Quality is the key here. Google assesses every ad’s bid amount, keywords and landing pages, and gives a Quality Score from 1 to 10. The higher the score, the better your rank, and the better the chances of conversion.
In a nutshell, you want to set up your ad to be crystal clear and helpful to the searcher every step of the way.
4. Target long tail keywords
Long tail keywords are super specific and targeted to one business. A generic keyword like “brewery” won’t target people in your neighborhood who are actually looking for a place to “slurp some brewskis,” as they say. Try something with your city and neighborhood, or even your zip or postal code.
5. Make sure your landing page is optimized
The goal here isn’t to just create an ad that someone clicks on but to create an ad someone clicks on…and then actually finds the product or information they were looking for.
Optimize your landing page for conversions by making specific offers that you can follow through with.
6. Don’t spread yourself too thin
Focus on your priorities: the most profitable demographic, market area or product, and go all-in on just a specific keyword.
In other words, you want a SKAG or Single Keyword Ad Group. This is the ideal, ultra-focused way to target the customers you want, if you have a small budget.
With too many keywords in one ad group, you can’t possibly write an ad that caters to every search.
To build your SKAG, look for a medium-traffic, low-competition keyword and identify the intent of the search. In this example, forget your “green tires” and “tiny tires” keywords and just stick with “women’s tires.” Next, highlight that term specifically in your ad headline so the searcher will know they’ve found exactly what they’re looking for, click through, and buy.
Then, take your keyword and modify it with a broad match modifier (+keyword), phrase match (“keyword”), and exact match ([keyword]).
7. Let automation work for you
Maximize your conversions with Smart Bidding and Responsive Search Ads. AI may not be able to come up with a grand advertising strategy for you, but machine learning can help increase or decrease bids on your behalf.
Automation takes into account everything from funnel stage, to relevance, to keywords, to competitors.
Then, it makes sure your bid is increased when your ad has the best chance to succeed—or drops the bid when your competition is set to win so you’re not wasting your precious time and cash.
8. Embrace extensions
From your extensions tab in your Google Ads dashboard, you can add extensions directly to your ad to specify your location, products, features or sales promotions.
With local searches increasingly happening on mobile while people are out on the town, you’ve got to wave the flag that you’re nearby and ready to help.
Toss a phone extension on your ad for your business so people can easily click and call you.
9. Think negative
Google Ads also offers the options to input negative keywords — words that you don’t want to be affiliated with.
Check in on your Search Terms report where you find the irrelevant queries that are leading people to you. Add those keywords to your negative keyword list.
10. Measure everything
How are people finding your site? What pages are popular, and what searches are bringing them there? Your analytics have the data you need to measure success and patterns.
And over on Google Ads itself, you’ll find metrics that suggest why your impressions, click-throughs or costs might have changed.
Take this information, analyze it, and use it to inspire your next great advertising experiment.