How to Develop a Google Ads Strategy that Sells: 10 Tips & Tactics

Follow this guide to learn how to create a powerful Google Ads strategy. This is a fast and easy way to increase your sales.

Google Ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise your business online. Whether you're a small business owner or a marketer working for a larger organization, Google Ads allows you to target customers precisely. 

The best part of running Google Ads? They let you achieve instant results. Instead of relying on SEO and organic traffic, you can get your brand in front of the right people straight away. 

The only problem is you have to pay for ads, which means you need to run a Google Ads campaign that works. Otherwise, your ROI won’t benefit your business.

And when you start exploring paid ads, there are various types of Google Ads campaigns you can use. 

With options for Google search ads, display, video, and text ads; new features for mobile apps and voice search; and access to real-time data about your ad performance, there's a lot to consider when launching a paid search campaign.

In this guide, we’ll explore the Google Ads platform a bit deeper and reveal some of the best Google Ads tips and tactics you can use.

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads is a digital advertising platform developed by Google. It allows businesses to display ads to people who are searching for specific products or services on Google Search and other Google-affiliated websites. 

Advertisers bid on keywords that they think people searching for their products or services will use, and their ads are displayed alongside search results. When someone clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a fee called a "cost-per-click."

The Google Ads platform allows businesses to create an account, set up their campaigns and ad groups, and choose from different targeting options and bidding strategies.

The platform is very powerful, but it can also be a bit overwhelming for those who aren’t familiar with PPC. We’ll share some tactics to help you get started. 

Using Google Ads to Grow Your Business

Google Ads is an excellent way to grow your business. It's one of the most powerful marketing tools available that lets you get results fast. This is why many SaaS companies use Google Ads as part of their marketing strategy. They even work with SaaS Google Ads agencies to optimize their campaigns and maximize their advertising budget.

When you run search ads on Google, you can reach new customers searching for products or services like yours and help increase sales by showing them exactly what they want to see. You can also use Google Ads as a way of increasing brand awareness and reaching potential customers, and driving traffic to their websites.

The great thing about Google Ads is that you can be extremely specific about who you target. This means only the right people see your ads - which helps you achieve a better ROI.

It’s important that your business creates ads that are highly targeted and relevant. The more specific your ad is to its target audience, the better it will perform. 

Here are some tips and tricks to help you use Google Ads to your advantage.

1. Use Google Sheet's Built-in Ad Planner to Find High-Value Sites and Audiences

Google’s Ad Planner is a valuable tool for discovering high-value sites and audiences. Use it to optimize your Google Ads campaigns by finding new opportunities for audience targeting, including sites with high site traffic and/or profitable audiences.

• Open Google Ads and click “Start Now”
• Click "Find Audiences"
• Select "Places" under "Location," then type in the location you want to target (e.g., "Los Angeles"). Click "Search"
• Now you'll see a list of all places within Los Angeles - you can filter these results by category if necessary.

The built-in planner tool can help you with audience targeting. It’s a free tool that lets you view and compare audience data for your existing ads, keywords, and placements. You can also use it to find new audiences based on demographics like age, gender, parental status, or interests.

2. Keyword Tools

Use the latest keyword tools to build a well-researched list of keywords for your bid requests. 

The first step in optimizing your Google Ads campaigns is creating a well-researched keyword list for each ad group. You can do this by using the following keyword tools:

• Google Keyword Planner - The GKP allows advertisers to enter multiple keywords alongside each other into a single column to compare them side by side—and then choose which ones they want their ads displayed next to! This makes it easy for anyone who doesn't know enough about SEO strategies yet still wants quick results without much hassle involved.
  
• Google Trends - This tool will show you trending queries so you know what people are most interested in at any time. It's also helpful for finding related terms that aren't necessarily synonyms but might be useful for targeting.

Keyword tools can help your business achieve its goals by providing the data necessary to make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns. By using these tools, you can better understand how people search online and what they're looking for—making it easier for you to reach them with relevant marketing content.

3. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are words or phrases you can add to your pay-per-click advertising campaigns to exclude certain search terms from triggering your ads. For example, if you sell red shoes but not blue shoes, you might add "blue" to your negative keyword list.

This will prevent your ad from appearing when someone searches for "blue shoes" but will still allow your ad to show up when someone searches for "red shoes." 

By using negative keywords, you can help to ensure that your ads are more relevant to the people who see them and that you are only paying for clicks from people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

4. Remarketing

Remarketing is a way to reconnect with people who have previously visited your website. It involves adding a snippet of code to your website, called a remarketing tag, which adds visitors to a list. 

You can then create a campaign that targets this list with personalized ads as they visit other websites within the Google Display Network. Remarketing aims to bring these previous visitors back to your website and potentially convert them into customers.

You can create a remarketing list in Google Ads by using the “Audiences” section. When you create an audience, it will appear in the left navigation of your account. You can then use that audience when creating a campaign or ad group.

5. Conversion Optimizer

Check Conversion Optimizer to get a better CPA. This feature automatically optimizes your campaigns to help you get the best return on investment from your ads. If you don't have Conversion Optimizer enabled, we recommend doing so when setting up your campaigns.

Conversion Optimizer can help you get more conversions for your budget by using machine learning to optimize your bids instead of relying on historical data. 

You'll see an estimated cost per click (CPC) for every keyword in Google Ads, and it will also show estimate costs for each or which are high CPC keywords when viewed through Google Ads or Search Partners Manager interfaces. The system will automatically optimize for conversions over time and learn how much each keyword bid increases or decreases the conversion rate.

6. Use Google’s Free Tools

To get the most out of your ad campaigns, it's essential to have a good understanding of how they perform. Google provides free tools that can help you do this.

For example, Campaign Experiments allows you to run A/B tests on your ads to determine which ones perform better and why. You can also try different ad images or copy variations with A/B Testing to see what works best for your audience.

Google Optimize allows advertisers to test landing pages and conversion rates of specific site pages. This tool allows businesses with limited resources to perform large-scale multivariate tests without access to expensive software or human resources needed for manual testing.

7. Start Simple

Several approaches work when creating ads. If you're starting, try basic text ads because they give you more flexibility, are easier to track, and take less time to make than image ads. They also tend to be cheaper than image ads.

Image ads are more engaging but require more effort to create and manage. You'll need to upload images that are high quality and use keywords in the right way. Images can also be expensive since they take up more space on Google's ad network, which means a higher cost per click (CPC) for your business.

8. Google Adwords Express

Get started with Google Ads by using AdWords Express or Smart Campaigns. They require little management, but that also means you have less control over your account settings and performance than you would with other types of campaigns. For example, AdWords Express lets Google automatically set your budget by choosing a daily budget range for your campaign.

Google Ads Express is a simple way to get started with Google Ads. With AdWords Express, you can create a campaign with just one click and then set the budget for your ads (or let Google automatically do it). You don't have to worry about setting up your ads or budgets, making this option perfect for those new to online advertising.

9. Split Testing

Split-test your landing pages to find the best-converting pages for each campaign. Split testing is a powerful way to increase your conversion rates. It can test landing pages, ads, and even keywords.

The best way to use split testing is by starting with one of your existing campaigns—you don't want to waste time creating new campaigns for each experimental campaign. Then pick a few variations of the same ad or landing page and split them evenly across your target audience.

It's okay if you only have enough traffic for two tests; make sure there's a significant difference between the variations to tell which works best! The more people you have in each test group (the "sample size"), the more accurate results will be.

10. Keep Up to Date

Stay informed about all the changes happening in the PPC landscape! Google is constantly changing the way it displays search results. They’ve been doing this for years and have made hundreds of changes to their algorithm since 2000. 

In addition to changing how they display search results and ads, they also change their landing pages—the pages that appear when you click an ad on Google. These changes can have a significant impact on your PPC strategy!

Conclusion

There’s a lot that goes into developing an effective Google Ads strategy. It’s important that you’re open to trying new things, experimenting, and monitoring the results. The more you test and optimize, the more effective your Google Ad campaigns will be. This means delivering a better ROI from each ad campaign you run and driving more revenue for your business.

Photo by Myriam Jessier on Unsplash