Turning your Google Ads into profit

Anyone with a mild awareness of IT and online marketing will know that digital marketing is constantly changing and evolving. Many techniques that worked five years ago, not only won’t work anymore, but can also hurt if still used.

In February 2016, Google decided on a major shift in the way it displays its adverts on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), by removing the adverts that used to appear on the right-hand side and increasing the adverts that appear on the top from three to a total of four.

This change means that when a user searches on Google, the first thing they face on the SERP, are the paid text adverts, before getting to the ‘organic’ unpaid results. Furthermore, as a user scrolls down beyond the adverts, they are sometimes faced with Google Maps results and then still further down sometimes even Google reviews, before seeing the ‘traditional’ organic (unpaid) website listings and any marketer will know that the bottom is the last place you want to be.

Being that users tend to click on the first few relevant links they see, this means that for a business to be competitive and capture those users, advertising is no longer an option, it is a necessity. What’s more, research shows that paid search engine adverts are 1.5x more likely to return conversions (such as a purchase), than the unpaid organic listings. The cherry on the cake with pay-per-click ( PPC) Google advertising, your adverts are displayed for free and you only pay when a user clicks on your advert. Since users generally only click on links that interest them, this ensures that your spend is focused on those users who are interested in your offerings and most likely to become your customers. This is a big advantage over traditional advertising.

It is no longer a question that search advertising works, it is a potential oil-field… if you know where to drill and how to drill correctly. The ‘oil-field’ metaphor works very well in the context of search advertising, since success and maximising return on investment (ROI) is all about drilling down keyword lists and scrutinising every de- tail of data, to get the most from your adverts. Striking oil with this form of advertising, requires a skilled digital marketer and great attention to detail.

So how do you strike oil? Let’s cut to the chase, success in search engine marketing (SEM), is achieved first and foremost by performing proper in-depth research before even setting off. Research primarily involves keyword research to identify the search phrases users are writing to search for your services on search engines, and how many times each phrase is searched. This acts as a guide for crafting the structure of the campaign, so that your adverts match the search phrase a user has searched for as closely as possible. Relevancy matters a lot, because the higher the relevancy between your adverts and the search phrase (technically known as the search term), the higher the rate of clicks will be, the higher the conversions and the lower your costs on Google will be.

Lowering the costs of clicks, is the art of optimisation, this is what makes a ‘good’ campaign ‘great’. Lowering the cost of your clicks allows you to achieve more clicks with the same budget, which translates into more conversions at the same cost! Therefore optimisation is crucial as, doing it right can boost your profits by considerable percentages, while failing to give it enough attention can lead to the campaign being inefficient and/or ineffective.

Before we can talk about optimisation secrets, the starting point is to have conversion tracking set up properly. Simply put, conversion tracking tells you how many users have performed a desired action (such as making a purchase) after clicking on your adverts. Hence, without conversion tracking we can’t even measure ROI, let alone maximise it. Beyond that, it is also important to have Google Analytics setup correctly and linked to your Google adverts, this allows insight on how users are behaving on your website after they click on your adverts. All this information then forms the basis for optimisation.

Optimisation is a vast science in itself, however here are some top practices that will greatly improve the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. First and foremost, set your keywords wisely by choosing the right modifiers and “match types” that make sense to searches you seek to target. Beyond that, monitor the “search terms” that are leading to clicks and set negative keywords to disable your adverts showing to users who are not searching to buy your products or services. This prevents spending money on clicks that won’t deliver results.

For the first few weeks at least, keep adverts rotating evenly, this allows you to monitor the performance of each advert, in terms of which adverts are most likely to entice a user to click and which adverts are driving conversions. After knowing this, adverts that are not driving conversions should be switched off, so that the budget spent will be focused on the adverts that are delivering ROI. The same process should be applied to advert groups and keywords. Keywords that don’t convert should have their bid lowered or be removed.

With the progression of the campaign, different advert copies should be tested, as well as keywords and advert groups (if this applies), in order to constantly strive to find the optimal formula. Beyond this point the logic is very simple, if spending €1,000 returns €5,000, spending more will return more, so €5,000 will return €25,000 and so on, up until your targeted market’s capacity to purchase. So yes, you can reap considerable ROI, however there is always a limit, which varies from industry to industry and targeting criteria.