Are you spending too much on your Google ads?

• Tweet

Spending money on instant advertising via Google Adwords can be a really good instant way to advertise your business. However, I am often amazed when I go to new customers to learn how much they spend on their adwords campaigns and how little they know about the effectiveness of their campaigns.

Many cannot provide answers to simple questions like:

• How many of these clicks you pay for lead to actual customers?
• Which keywords have the highest conversion rates?
• What is the Return on Investment (ROI) of your ad campaign for particular keywords?
• Which of your ads are performing well?
• Are you measuring goals or conversion rates?

Each month they are provided with a simple report stating how many clicks they got for each keyword and how much they spend.

Getting clicks is easy though!

But do you know how easy it is to get those clicks? All you need to do is to set the budget higher or just let all your ads run on the content network and not on actual searches. Ads on Google search tend to be much more expensive and for a reason. People that search on Google have a specific need or goal for their search. Ads on the content network (these are the ads that get displayed on sites other than Google that discuss topics that relate to your keywords) are usually just clicked on by people browsing a site. So it’s critical to check your conversion rates for particular keywords on regular basis to ensure you are not wasting a lot of your money.

But what exactly is conversion rate?

When you or your ads manager does your ads setup, Google also allows you to assign several goals. These could be:

• Someone made a purchase of your product
• Someone filled in your enquiry or registration form
• Someone subscribed to your newsletter etc.

If someone accomplishes one of these goals, then that is called a conversion. For example:  I search in Google for a beauty facial. I click on one of the ads and after liking what I see, I will fill in the enquiry form to make an appointment. This is a conversion and the reports will show me the exact keyword from which the conversion was made. So a good report will show me that the keyword “beauty facials” had for example a 50% conversion rate. (ie. 50% of all the poeple that found me via the keyword phrase “beauty facial” decided to pursue a particular goal I had setup. I can even give a value to these goals so at the end of the month I can easily calculate how much I spent on all those ads and how much value I got back in return.

So how do I setup my ads then?

You will need to setup your ads in such a way that you can easily measure their effectiveness and adjust them when necessary. Now coming back to what I dicussed earlier: the difference between content targeting and search. It’s very easy to get a lot of clicks from the content targeting network. Many sites (some of which very crappy ones) display these ads and out of interest people may just click on them. However, in my experience content ads for many industries have a very low conversion rate. This means that you are paying for a lot of clicks that actually don’t make you any money at all. (Of course they can be good from a branding prospective).

This is why it does not make any sense to get reports every month just with the number of clicks you had. If you are not measuring your results properly and tracking your ROI, you are probably wasting a lot of your marketing budget.

How can you make sure your ads convert and give a good ROI?

There are a number of things you can do to make sure that you’re not wasting time and money and create ad campaigns that have a high ROI:

1. First you need to do some proper keyword research to ensure you are targeting the right keywords.
2. Then you need to select those keywords that are affordable and are very specific to your market and desired goals(where to get the best facial may be better than what is a facial; the latter would just be looking for information and is not likely to buy).
3. Setup very clear goals with a money value.
4. Create your ads groups and make them very specific to your keywords.
5. Start running the campaign and monitor which keywords and which ads convert well.
6. Then adjust keywords when necessary and elimate the non-performing ones.
7. Carry out some A/B testing for your ads, constantly improving the ad to increase the conversion rate.

Also don’t forget about SEO and good website design

All said and done organic listings in Google (the non sponsored search results) will always convert better than ads. So if you are serious about your online business do not forget about search engine optimisation. In the long term having a well optimised website that is designed to convert visitors into customers will be your most effective marketing tool.

ps. we can manage both your Google ads and your search engine optimisation so contact us if you would like to have more information.