Before you set up an AdWords campaign, you need to identify the goal you want to achieve. For example, you might want to increase sales, or increase public awareness of your brand. Your goal will shape your entire path to these actions.
Once you’ve identified your advertising goal, you’re ready to specify the following elements:
• Target audience: What do you know about the people you want to attract to your online store? Can you specify a target age, gender, or education level?
• Where do you want to show your ads? Don’t pay for overseas ads if you don’t ship internationally.
• Don’t forget to include negative keywords, which are email list providers in germany terms you want to exclude from your campaign to ensure you’re not spending money on the wrong traffic. For example, if you sell children’s shoes, you might want to exclude “women’s shoes” from your campaign. This will increase relevant traffic to your website.
Making the right choices the first time will help you maximize your return on investment in the long run. But remember, you should regularly review these choices to ensure they remain aligned with your company's goals.
Maintain campaigns by incorporating the tools available to you
Once you’ve established your initial campaigns, maintaining them is critical to continued success. By objectively analyzing your results, it’s easy to identify, and reinvest in, successful campaigns. Consider incorporating these tools and elements into AdWords:
• Create seasonal campaigns: By separating campaigns by season and increasing their priority, you have the flexibility to manage keywords and budgets for specific items without affecting your pre-established advertising.
• Implement custom labels: When you create targeted product groups in a campaign, you can adjust your spending to specific labels instead of the entire campaign.
• Research your competition: What keywords are their most popular ads using? How do their ads compare to yours? Doing market research will help you identify the right keywords and optimize your ads. This can help you increase your visibility and get your business to the top of the page, increase your conversions and make it easier to achieve your goal.
• Use the right ad type: Make sure you’re selecting the right ad type with the right cost, reach, and retention for your target audience and business goals.
• Use ad extensions: Extensions let you include more information than you can fit in a traditional text ad, which can improve your performance and click-through rate, attracting more customers. Use all the advantages and options that Google offers to put more links and more focus in front of searchers!
• Create remarketing lists: Just because a visitor came to your e-commerce site and left without buying anything doesn’t mean it was a lost opportunity. Create a remarketing campaign in AdWords to reconnect with these visitors and re-engage them in your products through ads that automatically offer the products they were searching for the first time or related products.
Taking Google AdWords management to the next level
Success with AdWords requires frequent keyword updates and constant monitoring of ad campaigns. Using a long list of robust tools, AdWords lets you maximize your reach for your spend, gain insights, and optimize your ROI.
But don’t rely on these elements alone. You should also make sure you’re:
Optimizing your website and creating well-defined landing pages: Improved landing pages increase your chances of converting visits into sales or leads, and minimize your cost per click. With the rise of mobile commerce, Google is prioritizing smartphone-friendly websites in its new ranking algorithm.
• Monitoring acquisition cost: Remember that clicks don’t always translate into sales, so make sure your customer acquisition cost isn’t higher than the average purchase. If it is, test and revise your approach and keywords to minimize your customer acquisition cost.
• Increasing your use of relevant “long-tail” keywords: These are the keywords that consumers use later in their buying journey. While this may yield fewer results, it also means lower cost per click. In the long run, the more you understand about your ideal customer, the more you can refine your “long-tail” keywords. Plus, more specific keywords will reduce competition, offering more success and better value.
• Tracking conversions: Don’t overlook the option of implementing tracking code to measure specific actions visitors take after they click on your ads. This could be a click to submit a form on a landing page, or even a phone call to a Google number. This will let you see the true return on your campaigns. By understanding the cost of each conversion, you can better manage your campaigns and plan future investments based on real data.
Grow your business with targeted campaigns and fraud protection solutions
While creating a Google AdWords campaign is simple, running a successful campaign takes time and dedicated effort. Once you understand the full value of Google AdWords, you’ll be prepared to capitalize on current opportunities and capture future ones.
As your ecommerce business evolves, make sure you’re not putting your bottom line at risk from credit card fraud. Integrating a fraud protection solution will help you approve more transactions and protect your online sales from the growing risk of fraud.