Google Adwords is one of those mar­ket­ing chan­nels that just keeps expanding.

Accord­ing to WebVisible’s sur­vey, over 85% of users use the Inter­net to find local busi­ness­es and make pur­chas­ing deci­sions, while busi­ness­es earn 2$ on aver­age for every 1$ they spend on Google ads.

What does this mean for businesses?

It means Google Adwords is still the most ROI-friend­ly mar­ket­ing plat­form for busi­ness­es. Get­ting to that sweet spot of ROI with Adwords is a bit tricky. If you’re run­ning Ads or think­ing about using them for your busi­ness, I’m going to go over some tips that will help you max­i­mize ROI on them.

1. Think Beyond the Ad

Every­thing that goes into your Google Adwords cam­paign should be opti­mized, but that also goes beyond the ad. This means that you should opti­mize the web­site or the land­ing page where the ad is send­ing your customers.

Sim­ply put, an ad is just a part of your customer’s jour­ney, and to close the deal, they actu­al­ly have to con­vert on your web­site. This means that you should pay the same amount of focus, if not more, to the actu­al land­ing page as well as your ad.

2. Perfect the Copy

The word­ing of your ad is tremen­dous­ly impor­tant and believe it or not, it has a direct impact on the ROI of your ads. This absolute­ly makes sense, because when users search for busi­ness­es, prod­uct or ser­vices, the only infor­ma­tion they have at their dis­pos­al after a Google search is a snip­pet of text. There­fore, it’s very worth­while to make this copy text the best it can pos­si­bly be.

Here are some of the online ser­vices and tools that you can use to cre­ate the per­fect Google ad copy:

  • ClassyEssay — a data­base of writ­ers that can craft your Google ad texts
  • Read­able — to check for read­abil­i­ty of your ad copy
  • Small­SEOTools — a col­lec­tion of tools that you can use to check whether your texts are SEO-friendly
  • TopEs­say­Writ­ing — writ­ing ser­vice for all kinds of needs, includ­ing Google Adwords
  • Free­lancer — a data­base of free­lancers who can help you per­fect the text of your Google ad

3. Ad Quality + Landing Page Relevance

Some­thing that can be detri­men­tal to ROI in your Google Ad cam­paigns is when you get a lot of clicks based on the qual­i­ty of your ad, and then lose all these cus­tomers after they arrive on your land­ing page.

This doesn’t mean that the web­site or the land­ing page is not opti­mized or high-qual­i­ty (which we talked about in the first point), but it often implies that what you out­lined in the ad is not aligned to the actu­al con­tent of your web­site. In oth­er words, cus­tomers don’t find what they were look­ing for: you pay for their ad click, but they don’t convert.

“Your ad is not the final des­ti­na­tion of your customer’s jour­ney; it’s just a cross­roads lead­ing to the next step — the land­ing page. That’s why your land­ing page has to be as rel­e­vant to the ad as pos­si­ble to be able to actu­al­ly cap­ture all those qual­i­fied leads”, says Car­rie Collins, a writer and mar­keter at BeGraded.

Ad Quality + Landing Page Relevance

4. Reduce Your PPC Costs

PPC costs are one of the two com­po­nents of the equa­tion that cal­cu­lates the total ROI. There­fore, next to earn­ing as much as pos­si­ble, you should also aim to invest less to achieve the same results. In the con­text of Google ad cam­paigns, this means low­er­ing your cost-per-click.

You should use the insight you have from your met­rics to low­er the bids for poor-per­form­ing key­words and increase invest­ments for those that per­form well.

Low­er­ing your costs-per-click is most­ly about find­ing the right key­words, which implies find­ing a gold­en mean between com­pet­i­tive key­words and high search vol­ume rates. In oth­er words, you should aim to dis­cov­er key­words that users search for often, but that is not as competitive.

5. Use Retargeting

Remar­ket­ing and retar­get­ing allow you to present ads to users who have already vis­it­ed your web­site. For exam­ple, if some­one aban­dons their cart on your online store or exits your web­site with­out pur­chas­ing, remar­ket­ing can help you re-con­nect to them by show­ing them rel­e­vant ads on dif­fer­ent devices.

Remar­ket­ing is like jet-fuel for increas­ing ROI. It’s one of the most effec­tive ways to land more con­ver­sions with a low­er invest­ment amount. It’s also not con­nect­ed sole­ly to direct sales: with retar­get­ing, you can either increase sales, boost your reg­is­tra­tion rates or increase brand aware­ness, depend­ing on your cam­paign goals.

6. Test, test, test

Find­ing the right for­mu­la to max­i­mize your ROI on Adwords is all about test­ing. Luck­i­ly, Google has its own ad opti­miza­tion and test­ing tools that can help you per­form quick and easy exper­i­ments for low­er funds.

For these pur­pos­es, Google Opti­mize is a tool (obvi­ous­ly handy because it comes straight from Google) that can help you mea­sure and opti­mize the ROI of your cam­paigns. It allows you to per­form A/B test­ing and mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing and deter­mine which of your ads work the best — you can com­pare copy texts, key­words, land­ing pages, and much more.

Conclusion

In a nut­shell, Google Ads are def­i­nite­ly still the num­ber 1 ROI-friend­ly mar­ket­ing plat­form, suit­able for all types of busi­ness­es across all sec­tors and indus­tries. They are espe­cial­ly use­ful and effi­cient for local­ly-based busi­ness­es, who can achieve a high ROI based on low-cost key­words and com­pe­ti­tion and a high search volume.

The best and smartest way to approach the opti­miza­tion of your ad ROI is to per­form test­ing and exper­i­ment­ing with low­er amounts of mon­ey. This way, you can eas­i­ly scale after you receive the results of your exper­i­ments and invest more. If you’re strug­gling with get­ting a pos­i­tive ROI on your ad spend, con­tact a proven agency for assistance.

SOURCE: Medi­um