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October 28, 2020
You’ve deployed a Google Ads campaign and you’re waiting for the sales to roll in. But to truly determine whether you’re getting your money’s worth with your ad placements, you should have a system in place to determine whether the campaigns are working.
Background: Google Ads bridge the gap between conventional advertisements on traditional media and the virtual world. Simply put, Google Ads can allow entrepreneurs and businesses to showcase their products and services to users who search similar things using the Google search engine.
Through this powerful tool, an advertiser can set up a system to reach out to a specific audience in a defined demographic with similar or related search queries to their product or service. Companies across the globe advertise on Google and generate billions of dollars every year through this business tool.
While you may know to set up an ad campaign, how do you know or track what works or doesn’t on Google Ads? As a marketer, you need to track your marketing progress for campaigns you run on the medium so you can calculate the effect they’ve had. In marketing, if you are not gauging and analyzing your progress, there will be very few gains. To master this, you should employ the use of Google Analytics and infer results and insights from it.
Google Analytics is a separate feature that can help you determine how well your site is doing at any given time. You would need to create an account on it apart from your Google Ads account to access it, and then you can link it to your Google Ads. Once linked, you can get the various data metrics that have been pre-determined by you from the site.
For every campaign you run on Google Ads, there must be some metrics or factors that you need to measure, which is where you'll place your ‘tags.’ Once you have set up your various tags, which in turn prompt data called ‘events,’ you can access users' interactions with these events. Events are just elements on a webpage that a user can engage, e.g. clicks, videos, gifs, banners etc. These need to be moderated and monitored so as to measure your ROI and efforts that have gone into creating the campaign.
Most campaigns run on Google Ads that fail to get the desired results do so due to the following issues.
When you create your campaigns, you’ll define them by selecting keywords that perfectly match with your campaign’s targets and goals. However, Google does not function that way — there are different ways in which they are matched. You should make sure that you share a healthy mix of exact words which can be low in traffic but high in cost, or can be of broad modified meaning, but might carry low cost. However, you may also get in some junk. Overall, it shouldn’t be the amount of money you spend on the accounts that’s the key focus, but instead how carefully you watch and predict the words for which consumers search, and bid on those for a healthy AdWords account.
If your product is niche and not generic, then it is advisable to just invest in keywords which define you rather than words which loosely describe you, or which might have a relevance with your product. If you sell basketball shoes, for instance, you can tag the word ‘basketball.’ If you mention ‘court’ and bid on it, that might get in a lot of other traffic that may not have much relevance, and you may end up paying more for unusable data.
Many times, marketers and management have a clear and distinct disconnect when it comes to campaigns on Google. For the money that you spend on it, you should have clear goals, and clearly defined outlines for the campaign, which will allow you to calculate the success or failure of the project. Sometimes ads take time to flourish, and kneejerk reactions kill a lot of campaigns that might have just required some time.
Your ad is good. Your tagline gets attention. What now after you get potential customers onto your page or website? Most traffic or consumers are lost right after they get to the pages that the links lead to. In many cases, that’s due to ambiguous information, lack of a call to action, and no tangible hooks for the user. Pages have to be interesting and simple so they get the attention of an average internet user, which in these times can often be quite low.
What is your competition doing, and are they doing something better that you should be adopting? Are they offering something more beneficial to the average user? These questions are basics that need to be evaluated every time your campaign and ad are running. This will keep you on our toes and will ensure that your ads remain fresh.
If you run the same campaign and ad for a very long time, Google users can become jaded and start ignoring them. If you offer no new visuals or fresh offers to attract internet users, people do have a tendency to skip your content. Sometimes, your campaign will require minor tweaks, and these tweaks will always keep you relevant and active. You have to listen to what the crowd is saying by virtue of the traffic and the data that is generated, and modify your campaign accordingly. This optimization is required on a fairly regular basis and might require your frequent attention.
You can analyze your results frequently to ensure that you run a healthy AdWords campaign that best serves you and your business. When handled effectively, Google Ads can be among the most convenient and impactful ways to reach your target audience, drive website traffic and generate leads. Remember, your success metrics will be determined by the way you design the ad campaign and its performance – leading to higher revenue and more customers.
Tasnim Ahmed is a content writer at Escalon Business Services who enjoys writing on a multitude of subjects that include finops, peopleops, risk management, entrepreneurship, VC and startup culture. Based in Delhi NCR, she previously contributed to ANI, Qatar Tribune, Marhaba, Havas Worldwide, and curated content for top-notch brands in the PR sphere. On weekends, she loves to explore the city on a motorcycle and binge watch new OTT releases with a plateful of piping hot dumplings!
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