Without Some Helpful Tips Google Adwords Can Cost You A Ton Of Money!
One mistake that some rookies make when setting up their Google Adwords account is that they don’t set a daily spending limit. Big mistake! They can end up racking up their entire budget (or more) without any qualified buyers to show for! But don’t worry about that. We’ll give you 5 Helpful Google Adwords Tips to save you money!
Google Adwords Tip #1
Determine What Your Qualified Buyer Would Search For
The very first thing that you should do before you begin your Google Adwords campaign is to have a brainstorming session. Get inside your customers head. Think about what a person with cash in hand would be typing into Google looking for what it is you’re selling.
For example, let’s say that you run a catering business. If you targeted simply “catering” this would be too broad of a term. Paying for clicks from a broad search term like this will give you an extremely small return on investment, if any! You need to be very precise with your keywords as you don’t want everyone clicking on your advertisement, only qualified buyers that want exactly what you’re selling! You could experiment with keyword phrases such as “catering (your city)” or “best catering (your city)”. You also want to minimize the amount of negative searches by specifying negative keywords. These could be words such as “cheap”, “cheapest”, etc as these people are not looking to pay a lot of money. Of course, if you are the cheapest in town that may be a good option for you!
Google Adwords Tip #2
Ad Writing Best Practices
Google Adwords limits you to to a 25 character title, a domain name and 2 lines of 35 characters. The best practice for writing your ads is:
- Catchy Title
- Benefit
- Offer
To the right you’ll see a perfectly written Google ad. A straight forward, to the point title. In some cases a flashier, more attention getting title may be necessary. Followed by their benefit “Fast Local Plumbing Expert”. With that, you quickly know that they are not only fast, but local and also experts. Followed by their offer “1 Hr Response Time In Metro Detroit”. Someone searching Google for a local plumber may have a busted pipe or an emergency situation on their hands so a 1 hour response time would be great if you needed it.
Google Adwords Tip #3
Run Split Testing
Split testing has been a staple of modern advertising since the late 1800’s. Used in Google Adwords, you will become unstoppable. This technique should be used by anyone who is using a Google Adwords campaign. The technique is to create two ads which are similar and run them both at the same time. Google will alternate between the two ads and give you results for each. After a decent testing period has elapsed, say 2-3 weeks. See which ad performed the best and kill off the weaker one. It’s that simple!
You can always use this technique and continue to improve your ad. One, amazing Google Adwords Tip is to take a page out of those sleazy woman’s gossip magazines. They all have crazy headlines which entice even some men to want to pick them up and flip through the articles. Although the titles aren’t long at all they are still attention grabbing. And that’s exactly what you will need with a Google ad. One thing I should mention though is not to overdo the hype, as Google users don’t respond well to hyped up titles. The technique here is to have a Goldilocks type approach where you don’t bore them, or overdo the hype but pique their interest just right.
Of course the split testing will stop you from going overboard because if your headline is causing your ad to do poorly it won’t make it past it’s first testing cycle.
Google Adwords Tip #4
The Peel And Stick Method
When using Google Adwords, you create ad groups based on groups of keywords. Each group of keywords pertains to a certain advertisement. Over time you will see how each specific keyword performs with the ad that you have written. The peel and stick method is very simple. If you notice any of the keywords are performing exceptionally well take it from it’s current ad group “peel and stick” it into an ad group all by itself.
By doing this you will give that keyword a higher CTR (click through rate) because it doesn’t have all of the other lower performing keywords to bring it down. Higher CTR means that you can pay less per click because Google rewards high performing ads! Paying less per click and having a high performing ad means that your savings will compound over time.
Google Adwords Tip #5
Create A Great Landing Page
One mistake that many beginner Adwords users do is to send visitors directly to their home page. Huge mistake! They came to your page from Google after searching for one specific thing and you’re going to make them look for what they wanted!
The solution is to have a targeted landing page for your ad. A landing page is a sales specific page on your website that is convincing and well designed to convert your Google visitors into paying customers. For more tips on that we actually created another blog post entitled How To Design A PPC Landing Page For Optimal Conversions”.
If you are getting tons of clicks from your Google ad but no conversions. Then you know that your ad isn’t the problem, it’s your landing page. Besides doing split-testing on Google ads you can also do them with landing page. Design two pages and put them up against each other to see which one converts the best!
And there you have it. Those are our 5 helpful Google Adwords Tips to help save you some money with your first campaign. Let us know if you have any questions and contact us if you’d like us to create you a landing page or manage your campaign. Thanks for reading!