6 simple ways to improve your Google marketing ROI
I recently took a Google Marketing class to learn more about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns. I wasn’t there to learn how to create a campaign—though the refresher on best practices was nice. My main goal was to make sure I was spending my clients’ dollars wisely. Some brands have large budgets and others have very small budgets, but they all want the best return on investment. So, I wondered, how much money does it take to run a really effective Google AdWords campaign?
The answer: You don’t have to spend a lot of money on Google pay-per-click advertising, but you do have to invest the time to make sure you have the right strategy.
Here are 6 ways to create a more successful AdWords campaign:
Target Keywords
Do your research before creating your AdWords campaign and try to isolate the search terms your target audience(s) might use to find health nutrition products like yours. A few things to remember:
1) People rarely type in just one keyword, so think about word sets.
2) Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to find the underlying motivation behind their searches.
3) Consider what your customers’ internal conversations might sound like to determine implicit (unique keywords) and explicit (exact keywords).
You can do a lot of experimenting in Google AdWords, but when you’re getting started it’s not a good idea to dump hundreds of keywords in to see what happens. Start with a handful of important ones, and work outward from there.
Negative Keywords
Be sure to look for “negative” keywords as well—those words that will cause your ad to show up for things you do not offer. An example would be the term, “tennis shoes.” If you are selling running shoes that are not for tennis, using the words “tennis shoes” as a generic term will disappoint customers searching for tennis-worthy footwear. Understanding your terms broad match, exact match and phrase match will be very important in identifying your keywords (See below).
Keyword Matching
You can use keyword matching to control how closely the search term your customer uses must match your keywords to trigger your health nutrition ad. The 4 matching options are Broad Match (most common), Phrase Match, Exact Match and Negative Match.
Broad Match will trigger your ad when any variation of your keyword is used. For instance, if you are selling vitamins, it will trigger for “discount vitamins,” “high quality vitamins,” or even “children’s vitamins.”
Phrase Match triggers your ad only when searches contain an exact phrase. Using the example above, you may only want to have your ad appear when a potential customer types in “high quality vitamins.” This is an effective way to really focus a campaign and test out specific keywords.
Exact Match narrows it down even further. Your ad will trigger only when the search term is exactly the same as your keyword. This would be useful for an extremely specific product description such as “gummy vitamins.”
Negative Match allows you to prevent your ad from coming up for certain search words that might devalue your health nutrition product or brand, such as “cheap” or “discount.”
Headlines Matter
Your headline is just as important to the success of an AdWords campaign as it would be to the success of a print ad or webpage. You have a spilt second to capture your audience’s attention with your headline. After considering what is the most important thing to communicate, you should then determine how to say it using keywords. Don’t reverse this process, or your headline will fall flat. Remember, you can run and test several ads at the same time to see what works best to reach your audience.
Ad Copy
These are the words you use to define the features of your product, show your audience the benefits and offer a payoff. Don’t be afraid to test the order of the features vs the benefits, but make sure there is a call to action.
Different Types of Campaigns
You’ll need to decide where you want your ads to run and which type of ads you want to run.
You can have your health nutrition ad placed on Google Search Network only (This means Google Search, Shopping, Maps and other groups inside of Google), or you can have it run in the Display Network only (This includes websites that show relevant Google ads, Videos, Apps, YouTube, and more), or you can choose a combination of both. You can compare these options here.
Once you have decided where your ad will run, you will need to decide which type of ad to run. The most common type is text ads. You might choose this option if you want to reach customers searching for your specific product or service. More experienced AdWords users may want to add images, rich media, and videos. This is useful if you are trying to create brand awareness across a broad audience.
As you can see, there are a lot of details to consider before running an AdWords campaign, but don’t let that intimidate you. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns have one goal, which is to drive sales. The beauty of these campaigns is that you will see immediate results in your analytics, so if you are not getting the results you want right away, you can alter them until you do.
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like my post Improve Your Health Nutrition Marketing with Clear Communication
Jessica is a competitive athlete and the President of Energize HNM, a health and nutrition marketing agency. Jessica is committed to supporting health brands of every size by helping them define their missions and connect with their customers on a deeper, more meaningful level.