For business owners, thinking about what you want to get out of your business endeavor is often the seed that starts the idea. Is it financial stability? The ability to make your schedule? The chance to do what you love? The opportunity to build something big?
Deciding what is most important to you as you move forward with your new business may seem like a very small part of the startup process, but it is crucial in terms of advertising. With PPC and other forms of direct advertising, your decisions about the shape, size, and reach of your business serve as a rubric for appropriating the bulk of your budget. Your goals, in the end, determine the results. Here’s how.
Your Target Audience Can Be Targeted Better
The better you know your target audience, the more successfully you can customize your campaign to appeal to them. Even with Adwords, you can use creativity to your advantage, such as by writing good ad copy to draw people in, or advertising specials that would appeal to them. You can also keep them interested after the initial click by presenting them with an original, responsive website that keeps them interested. To take it even further, you can get back in front of them after they leave your site with creativeremarketing ads.
Of course, one of the most fundamental ways to optimize your campaign for your audience is to target the correct keywords. This means knowing the trends and buzzwords associated with your industry, and staying relevant by offering the latest version of your product or service. This also means knowing their buying habits, such as when they shop, how much they’ll spend, how long they spend looking around before they buy, and their tendency to be a repeat client.
After you’ve determined your audience profile, you have the ability to get specific about how often your ads appear to them. Ad scheduling will save you from wasting money on clicks during low-traffic times from non-serious buyers, and tracking your search funnel will show you how many clicks it takes to get a potential client to convert.
Being Specific About Your Reach Can Save You Money
How far away from your central location do you want to do business? Adwords offers you a global market if you have the budget, and if you don’t, it’s best to get specific about where you want to advertise — what’s often called your campaign reach.
You have the option to be as specific or as vague as you want to be. Targeting a larger area requires a larger budget, or your ad density will be spread thin for whatever area you choose.
A good way to do it is to start by targeting several major cities, just your region, or just your town. If you’re selling something that appeals to a more rural crowd, maybe you want to show up to people searching from smaller towns. Or maybe your industry is already saturated on the East Coast, and you want to focus your entire budget on the West Coast.
Just make sure you don’t leave anything important out when you set up your geographical targets, or overdo it and block yourself from getting enough sales to make a profit — obviously!
Conversely, you can leave your geographic targeting large and get specific at the keyword level so as not to exclude relevant searches coming from out of your area. For example, if you are a plumber that serves the Denver area, you still want to show to a vacation home owner in Texas when they get a call about a burst pipe in their Denver rental. With national targeting and the exact match keyword “Denver plumbers,” you will still show to the owner in Texas.
You Can Grow If You Want To, Stay Small If You Don’t
I talk to a lot of clients who don’t want to grow too big, even though high growth is attainable if they choose. You have to be realistic about your ability and desire to service the amount of conversions you’re getting.
My advice? Make sure you’re spending enough time satisfying your current clientele before you amp up your campaign reach. In the end, the product or service will speak for itself, and word of mouth is still one of the best ways to advertise.
If you’ve started out by advertising to a small area, make sure you’re effective there before branching out, adding more budget where you know you’ll be effective, and expanding when you can. Don’t start growing too much before you know you’re campaign is running effectively and not wasting any ad spend.
If you’re an E-commerce business and you want to grow, Adwords will be one of the main ways to do this. This is a cool business model because you can fill a high demand, and that means that if you make yourself really visible, you can really capture a lot of business. Put the money in, manage it well, and aim high!
Optimal Page Placement Varies According
Everyone wants to be in the top spot, but maybe that spot isn’t where your ad performs the best. We see that a lot with our clients. We’ve found that the top three spots and the top two on the right hand side of the search results are high-performing spots, and we try to target your ads according to where they’ve gotten the best results in the past.
Perhaps moving from position 4 to position 1 means a 2% boost in your CTR but it could also mean paying 50% more for your click. Do those numbers pencil for your business model? Can you still be profitable at that increased level of cost-per-click? These are questions you need to be asking yourself and your search engine marketing company – another good reason why communication with them is so important!
Do Your Research, Know Your Stuff
So what am I getting at here? Despite all the articles you’ll find online about how to optimize specifically, there’s no one-size-fits-all way to adjust these settings. AdWords is meant to be a flexible structure that allows for many different types of businesses to see success. Whatever you do, don’t read just one article about a setting and then go into your campaign to make those adjustments before fully understanding how it will affect things.
A lot of the success that we see with our clients at Logical Position is a result of the time we spend looking into how the campaign performs under different settings. The longer a campaign runs, the more data there is, and the better the results can be. Another crucial factor is that we know the ins and outs of Google’s different Adwords tools and add-ons, and we know how they can be used best to optimize.
As your advertising ages, stay true to your business goals and make the system work for you. Foresight, creativity, research, and of course, realistic expectations will be your best friends.
