Google Ads is an amazing tool for turbo-charging your sales but it only works if you know how to use it to your best advantage. Choosing the right keywords for your ads is crucial to your ads' success.
In this article, we'll teach you how to choose the best keywords for your ad campaign in three simple steps.
1. Use Google Trends to Do Your Research
Google Trends is a free web tool that gives real-time data on what terms people are looking for on Google and YouTube. This current keyword data gives advertisers valuable insights into what keywords are picking up steam, a keyword's long-term popularity, related searches, and other search marketing information.
However, the amount of available data through Google Trends might easily overwhelm you. Knowing the best practices for using this handy tool will allow you to get the most out of it.
When working with Google Trends, select terms that are related to your product, service, or specialty, and then examine how they are doing with your target audience. You may discover that similar keywords are way more popular with your target market, ranking higher and having more search volume.
This way you'll have a much better idea which keywords to use in your ads. In addition to that, Google Trends will make it easier to choose the right time for running each keyword.
2. Analyze Your Target Audience
To choose the optimal keywords for your ad campaign, you should first understand who your customers are, what they are browsing for, and how you would best engage them.
You'd want to know how they will interact with you throughout the buyer's journey. What are they going to ask you from the beginning to the end of the transaction?
Their word choices are indicative of the terms they will use in a Google search, which may or may not be represented in the Google Keywords Planner. It helps to put yourself in their place to know their thoughts and feelings at each stage of the buyer's journey.
3. Use Keyword Modifiers
A keyword modifier is just an additional word or phrase that can be added to a short-tail keyword. As a result, a long-tail keyword with less traffic and total competition than the initial short-tail term but more precision for your target demographic is created. These keywords are simpler to rank for and can place your company in an advantageous position during the customer journey.
Geographical keyword modifiers are ideal for developing keywords that are relevant to a given market. Intent modifiers like "cheap [keyword]" or "urgent [keyword]" might help you to target leads at various stages of the buyer's journey. Similarly, adjectives that describe the precise attributes of your products or services might assist you in narrowing your emphasis on specific groups of prospects who are looking for what your company has to offer.
There are hundreds of thousands of modifiers that may be used to generate keywords, but finding the ideal ones for your business can be difficult. Using the Google Planner will help to some extent but be prepared to spend days on the task.
Did you know that traditional A/B testing doesn't work with Responsive Search Ads (RSA)? In this article, we're going to show you how to A/B test RSAs according to the latest best practices so that you can achieve the best results.
What Is A/B Testing When It Comes to Ads?
Even inexperienced PPC advertisers who have no specific ad testing goals have most likely already done a significant amount of A/B testing by simply adding several ads to an ad group. This way Google can show the ads that perform better more often thanks to the optimized default ad rotation settings.
Advanced advertisers typically select the option to rotate advertising indefinitely and use their own selection method to choose the best and the worst ads. Most of the time, advertisers are more concerned with conversion rate than with CTR. However, concentrating exclusively on conversion rate misses the chance that an ad with a high conversion rate could receive relatively fewer clicks because of a poor CTR, resulting in fewer total conversions for the advertiser. Advertisers gain a better measure of which ad is best at accomplishing one of their goals by combining CTR and conversion rate into a metric called conversions per impression (CTR * conversion rate = conv/imp) (which is to maximize conversions).
Unfortunately, traditional A/B tests don't work for RSAs because they don't usually include impressions as a metric. So, without further ado, let's jump to Responsive Search Ads A/B testing best practices.
1. Include Impressions as a Metric
To be able to measure meaningfully, any A/B ad test, including RSAs, should include impression data, especially impressions volume. Even if two RSAs run on the same days and have been active for the same amount of time, impressions may differ because one is stronger than the other at qualifying itself for more auctions. In all of your evaluations, keep impression volume in mind. In this manner, you'll be able to measure the outcomes more accurately.
2. Use Ad Strength Indicators
As you create new RSAs, Google will offer instant feedback via the Ad Strength indicator. Ad strength is a best practice score that determines the relevancy, amount, and uniqueness of your responsive search ad content before your ads run. According to Google presentations, every improvement in ad strength translates to a 3% increase in clicks. Going from 'poor' to 'average' should result in roughly 3% more clicks, and rising from 'average' to 'good' should result in another 3% more clicks.
3. Use Headline Variations
The Ad Strength indicator considers how many headline and description versions you supply. Because coming up with 15 headlines can be difficult, we considered whether it was worthwhile to include more than a handful of headlines for each RSA.
4. Experiment with Different Ideas
Many ads will not get enough top impressions in a 30-day period to provide performance statistics, but there are still techniques to improve if this is the case for you. Remember that Google permits up to 3 RSAs per ad group, and that specific text can be pinned to different spots in the ad. You can use this to build some useful experiments.
If you only remember only one point from this article, it should be that a basic assumption regarding ad testing must be altered. Impressions are now heavily influenced by the ad itself, rather than just the keywords in an ad group. It's crucial to factor in for this potential variation in impressions when A/B testing RSA advertising and strive to discover the ad that delivers the most incrementality.
Ever wondered why your pay-per-click budget is rapidly dwindling and yet, you have nothing to show for it?
If the answer is yes, you may be the victim of pay-per-click abuse. Let’s look at what pay-per-click abuse is, and the steps you can take to stop it in its tracks.
What is pay-per-click abuse?
Pay-per-click abuse (PPC abuse) is when people or bots repeatedly click on your pay-per-click ad, in an attempt to make you spend your budget much sooner than usual.
It’s sometimes known as click fraud or pay-per-click fraud.
PPC abuse can be caused in many ways, by a range of different people.
Billions of dollars are lost to pay-per-click abuse each year. Not only this, but as PPC abuse artificially amends impression and conversion rates, it means businesses do not get a comprehensive snapshot of their marketing efforts.
Will my pay-per-click platform give my money back if they spot pay-per-click abuse?
In theory yes, but it can be hard to prove that pay-per-click abuse happened.
If a pay-per-click platform like Google Ads, Facebook Advertising or Microsoft Advertising identifies abuse, they will refund you for the clicks, but they don’t always identify fraudulent activity. This is especially true if the PPC abuse is happening on a smaller scale, for example, if a competitor is clicking on your ads.
The best approach is to take matters into your own hands and be proactive when it comes to PPC abuse. However, this can take a lot of time and effort, which can eat into the rest of your pay-per-click marketing efforts.
This is where a platform like Click Report can help.
How Click Report can help protect your business from pay-per-click abuse
Click Report monitors your prospective customers’ ad journey from beginning to end, helping you identify which customers are genuine and which are fake.
We identify each customer that clicks on your ads, from their IP address to the pages they visit and the search terms they use. Even if they change IP addresses, we still know who they are!
If we spot someone carrying out PPC abuse or any other suspicious activity, we will let you know. You can then block them from seeing your ads, saving your business money and meaning genuine people can find out more about your products and services.
Get complete insight into your ad traffic and say goodbye to PPC abuse with Click Report, all for the low price of $29.99 per month.
After all, when you’re spending hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month on pay-per-click advertising, it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind.