5 tips for a successful google ads campaign to increase sales

Google Ads can increase your reach and lead to conversions. A strong, well-planned campaign will bring results in days. The key to making it work is developing a targeted strategy that brings the right people to your landing page.

Paid search listings are used to gain traffic and visibility through search engines. While there are a few paid advertising platforms available, Google is the most popular search engine, with over 3.5 billion searches a day.

People are searching Google for something specific. That means they have the intention of purchasing a product or service.

Paid ads target the people who are searching for your product or service. Ads help you connect with those people who already want what your business offers.

You’ll need to create ads that match your target audience, manage your budget, and manage your overall campaigns.

What Is a Google Ads Campaign?

Google Ads is a program used to place ads that display in Google search results pages. Adwords is the main platform for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Google Ads is the best form of search engine advertising. Small companies are able to achieve a higher ranking with Google Ads. It offers many targeting options to define who sees your brand’s ad.

Having a google ad is a must for website sales. Before you start using Google Ads, you need to learn:

• the steps to create a campaign
• the steps to create a specific ad
• how to select the right keywords
• how to set a budget
• how to monitor your results

Before you jump in with your precious advertising dollars, know the basics. You can start with Google’s program How to be successful with Google Ads. You’ll get an overview of how ads work, how to select your target keywords, how to create the right audience, and the types of ads you can use.

This article is not about the basics of setting up your Google Ads campaign. Start with Google’s recommendations. This article focuses on tips to increase success with your Google Ads campaign.
But to be successful with Google Ads you need to take strategic steps to create campaigns and ads that match your product with your target buyers.

Google Ads Success: Strategy + Specificity

A successful Google Ads campaign brings a high return on investment (ROI). Creating a strategy before you start your ad campaign will help you avoid pitfalls and control the money you spend, impressions, and clicks.

Strategy

Design an overall strategy aimed toward achieving ROI success on your advertising dollars.

• Determine your overall budget
• Know why your product sells
• Demographics of your best customers
• Keywords to grab attention
• Type of Google Ads Campaign
• Measurement and analysis goals

Know the details that encourage people to buy.

• daily spend
• cost per click – what you pay for each click
• benefits of your product or service – from why product sells
• landing page design – from colors, to words, to button text
• product page description – the final buy signal

There are several types of audience targeting advertising you can do with Google Ads: display, search, video, and hotel. This article focuses on creating ads for search.

We’ll walk you through five specific actions you should take to make your ads successful…that means profitable.

1. Build a Target Landing Page

Remember the Steven Covey adage, Begin with the end in mind? It couldn’t be more true than with advertising.

If you want conversions (sales) from the people who click on your ad, you need to send them to a place that is targeted to them, speaks their language, and highlights the benefits of your product or service-the thing they clicked to buy.

You pay for each click in Google Ads whether someone buys or not.

So, a landing page rewards their click by showing the benefits they’ll get. Although this is an end step in the ad creation process, this step is crucial to making conversions.

Many businesses skip this step, sending people to their home page. There that person can get sidetracked from their initial intent of buying. They aren’t getting what they originally responded to in your ad.

So before you start your ad campaign, build a place that will satisfy the people who click on your ad. Create an engaging landing page that gives them reasons to buy the product or service in your ad.

PRO TIP: When you create your landing page first, you’ll have a better idea of what you are selling and its benefits to buyers. That knowledge will help you select your target audience and your keywords when you create your ad.

As a result, you will target your Google Ad campaign to gain customers from search to buy by providing clear steps.

2. Research Your Audience

As much as you would like it to be so, not everyone needs or wants your product or service. Google Ads work the best when served to the people who are the most interested in what you have to sell.
Do thorough research and understand your audience before you do anything.

The more targeted the audience for your ad, the more likely they are to buy.

Here are Google’s search audience parameters:

• Affinity: Reach users based on what they’re passionate about and their habits and interests.
• Detailed Demographics: Reach users based on long-term life facts.
• In-market: Reach users based on their recent purchase intent.
• Your data segments: Reach users that have interacted with your business.

After you’ve identified the interests, needs, behaviors, and goals of your audience, you can define who your audience is for a particular campaign or advertising group.

Before you create your ad campaign, know the specifics of your audience. This will help you make wise audience choices for your Google Ads campaign.

3. Set a Specific Goal for Your Ad Campaign

In the same way you narrow your audience to specifics, you want one specific goal for each ad campaign.

Google provides an array of options for advertising. It’s tempting to select several, hoping to reach a wider audience. But you’ll have more success with each campaign if you choose one goal.

You’ll also be able to measure and test results with one goal. That will lead you to greater overall success with long-term advertising.

This will improve the return on investment and return on investment (ROI) of a campaign.

A search campaign gives you three goal options: 

1. Sales – ads targeted to create direct sales of a product or service
2. Leads – ads targeted to generate leads for contacts for sales calls or email campaigns 
3. Website traffic – ads targeted to send people directly to your website to build brand awareness, provide information like articles, or review an entire product line

This article focuses on creating search campaigns for sales. So your campaign goal will be to create sales of a specific product or service.

When you start out with pay-per-click ads you’ll find that being specific will help you monitor the success of each ad and each campaign. Once again, specificity leads to conversions.

4. Test and Test Again

A successful Google Ads campaign is a cycle of minor changes. Once your campaign is up and running, you’ll want to make adjustments.

Try small modifications on ad copy, keywords, landing pages, and other Google Ads elements to see what works and what doesn’t.

Google understands how small modifications can boost ad success and provides two tools to help you modify your ad campaigns. The tools allow you to propose and test changes to your Search and Display Network campaigns.

Use Campaign Drafts to prepare multiple changes to your Google Ad campaign. Campaign Experiments measure Google Ads results to help you understand the impact of your changes before you apply them to a campaign.

PRO TIP: To narrow your target audience, you can use negative keywords. Those are keywords people use but you don’t want your ad to show for those words. While Google suggests keywords for your ad, you need to create your own negative keyword list.

5. Be Patient

The reason Google ads are successful is because Google uses artificial intelligence (AI) to learn about your ad. AI learns things about your ad like:

• Demographics of your target audience responses
• The ratio of impressions to clicks
• Keyword to ad relevancy
• Ad to landing page relevancy
• Website load time
• Historical account performance

For artificial intelligence to learn about your ad, it needs data. Collecting data takes time.

You will be able to update your ads after AI completes this learning process so you get better conversions and a higher-quality score. Then, you will be able to compete with already-established Google Ads.

But don’t jump the gun with your changes. Give Google time to learn how your ad works. The learning period can take two to four weeks.

Typically, changes to keywords, ad groups, or ads will not trigger a learning period. However, if you introduce bulk changes to several of these components, you may restart the learning period to your campaign.

Factors that can reset the learning period:

• Changes to the settings for the bid strategy
• Changes to the conversion actions (updating an existing action or creating a new one)
• Implementation of a new smart bidding strategy
• Significant changes to the campaign’s composition
• Large changes in budget or bid
• Pausing and Enabling Campaign or Ad Groups 

Each time you make an optimization change, you will need to wait for enough data to determine how that change affected your campaign. These changes can take between 1-2 weeks, depending on how large your changes are.

Start with a strong foundation in order not to delay learning. Then wait about a month before you make major changes that reset the learning period.

Be prepared for your ad campaign not to perform as you expect during the learning period.
During the learning process, expect delivery and efficiency to go down. CPCs will rise, cost-per-acquisition will increase, and conversion rates will decrease.

You won’t need to worry. That is just part of the process. You will recuperate all of this as you follow best practices.

Don’t panic. Be patient.

This trend occurs during the learning process: the algorithm needs time to work with the signal and understand what works and drives results.

Research, Target, Strategies, Be Specific

While it’s important to let the Google algorithm learn how your ads work in search, strategic planning will minimize expensive failures and identify the right target for your product or service.

The more you know about your audience—for example, what they like and where they go online—the better you will set parameters for Google. Google will search for those target people and show your ad to them.

Working on the specifics beforehand will help you set a Google Ads Campaign that starts bringing you buyers and then sends you more as it learns more.

If creating a Google Ads campaign seems daunting, Erfolk can help you strategize, customize your audience, help you with keywords and negative keywords, and monitor and test for success.