Core principles for successful google ads (2023)
Google ads are a great way to get the right people on your website very fast. But – if you miss the core principles of google ads, it’s just another way to lose money. I have been in both camps and in order to prevent you from bad experiences hand help you to succeed in your online marketing, I decided to give you the most important google ads core principles in a nutshell.
My personal experience with google ads
To be honest – I have not been a fan of google ads for a long time. When we started to build our explainer-video business, we came to a point where we had to pay over €7 for one click and I thought: OK, that’s it. This is not a feasible way to market our services anymore.
But things changed. Our business emerged to become a full service provider of digital marketing solutions. We had to find clever ways to market not only our own services but also products and services of our clients, and we came to a point where we simply had to master google ads.
To be clear: Google ads are not the solution for every business, but in many cases they absolutely make sense, when done right and when core principles are implemented properly.
The three core principles, we are keeping in mind when building google ad campaigns, are:
- Ranking
- Relevance
- Results
Let’s have a closer look at those three principles:
Ranking: Improve the page where your ad leads to
SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are closely related. In other words: A well-executed SEO strategy can complement and enhance the success of your SEA campaigns, leading to a more successful online presence.
Reasons for this are among other things:
1. Keyword Insights
With the help of a SEO strategy on your website, you have the possibility to identify high-performing keywords that are relevant to your individual field. SEO tools and analytics help you with the understanding of user behavior, like identifying the keywords that lead to conversions.
Those insights can help you improve your SEA strategy by targeting the right audience with the right keywords.
2. Improvement of Quality Score
Google uses Quality Score to determine the quality and relevance of your ads. You can positively impact your Quality Score by optimizing your website with high-quality content. This will not only lead to better ad placements, but might also decrease the CPC (costs per click).
3. Competitive Analysis
By using SEO tools you have the possibility to analyze the strategies of your competitors. While planning your google ads campaigns, you can use this information to identify which tactics and keywords work for them.
4. Increased Visibility
While running your google ads campaigns, you should not forget about the long term results. Google ads provides immediate results, but it also comes with a price – while on the other hand, SEO brings you long-term benefits in form of organic (unpaid) google search rankings.
By implementing both SEA and SEO, you have a higher chance of appearing both in paid and organic search results, increasing your overall visibility.
5. Enhanced User Experience
When you optimize your website in terms of SEO, a side effect usually is that also the user experience gets improved – which might lead to higher conversion rates in your SEA campaigns.
How to improve the page where your ad leads to
In order to get better results from Google Adwords, you should start improving your website. Other than still many people think, you don’t need to apply any technical tricks – just make sure to implement excellent texts that provide added value to your target audience and contain the right keywords for an improved google ranking result.
However, you should not completely forget about technical aspects: Especially the speed of your website is of crucial importance for a successful SEO strategy, especially when considering that one of your google ads goals is increasing website traffic. You need to improve the speed of your website? Here is how:
- Don’t upload images larger than necessary.
- Use caching, so your website does not need to be completely reloaded with every visit.
- Chose a hosting provider with a fast server.
By following these simple tips, you can already significantly improve your website. Upon which other two principles was Google Ads built?
Relevance: Delivering the Right Message
The second one of these core principles is relevance. Google Ads connects your business with the right people at the right time. The goal of Google is to show users those ads, that come the closest to the user’s individual google search. Google determines this by the relationship between landing page, keywords and ads.
In order for you to reach your most relevant customers and ultimately drive conversions, it is necessary that you deliver the right message with your ad campaigns. It directly impacts not only the user experience, but also the ad performance, the cost efficiency and therefore the overall effectiveness and success of your google ads campaign. A higher ad relevance leads to a higher Quality Score, which leads to a lower cost-per-click.
To ensure relevance in your google ads campaigns, you should implement the following tips:
1. Create specific ad groups
Make sure that each one of your ad groups is only about one specific service or product. In case you offer several services, you should create a different ad group for each of those services.
This allows you to create ad copy that is highly relevant for the individual customer, with a specific landing page and highly related keywords.
2. Do intense keyword research
In order to run a successful ad campaign, it is essential that you acquire a high understanding of the terms and phrases your target audience uses when it searches for a product or service that you offer.
Include specific keywords that are relevant to your target audience and relate to the precise topic of the specific ad campaign and the landing page. It is important to include variants of those keywords.
3. Write simple but compelling ad copy
Make sure to keep the ad copy simple in order to not overwhelm potential customers with too much information.
Instead, you should focus on the unique characteristics your service or product has to offer and imply why you stand out from competitors. Address directly the intent of your target audience.
In case it is relevant, you can also add ad extensions like location information. This additionally helps you to improve relevance and usefulness of the individual ad. By providing a phone number you can encourage potential customers to take action and call your business.
4. Customize the landing pages
Make sure that the landing page a user lands on after clicking on your ad is directly related to the message the ad delivers. The user expectations should not be disappointed by content that does not fulfill the user’s search intent.
5. Use negative keywords
Adding negative keywords to your Google Ads campaigns filters out irrelevant traffic and therefore helps your ad to reach the most relevant customers.
This means for example, when you sell luxury jewelry, possible negative keywords are “cheap” and “affordable”. Using those words as negative keywords ensures that your ad will not be shown to people searching for inexpensive jewelry. This can be crucial in improving the performance of your ad campaign, as it does not only help you reach your target google audience, but will also increase website traffic.
Results: Measuring Success and Achieving Goals
The last core principle for successful ad campaigns on Google is to monitor the performance of your campaigns. Only by doing this, you can measure whether your campaign strategy is driving enough conversions and compare the success of different strategies with one another.
Always keep in mind that being successful in Google ads is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring, testing and optimization:
1. Use tools to measure success
There are several measurement tools that can be helpful as they monitor among others website performance and user behavior, for example:
- Google Analytics
- Matomo
- Heap Analytics
- Woopra
2. Monitor your goals
It is of crucial importance to set clear goals from the beginning. This helps you to measure the success of your campaigns and can highlight the need to improve certain aspects in your campaign settings.
Examples for clear, measurable goals are increasing website traffic, generating leads and driving online sales.
3. Monitor the key metrics and reports
Don’t forget to regularly monitor the KPIs (key performance indicators) of your Google campaign. These include:
- cost per conversion
- CTR (click-through rate)
- conversion rate
- ROAS (ad return on ad spend)
Furthermore you should regularly check the search term report in order to see which keywords work best in your ad. For achieving the best results, you should constantly work on refining your keywords and negative keyword list.
4. Experiment with targeting options
For the maximum success of your Ads campaign, you should experiment with different targeting options, in order to reach your desired audience more effectively. Play around with options like device type, location and demographics.
5. Manage your budget
Always keep a close eye on your budget allocation. In order to run a successful Google campaign, it is essential to adjust your bids and budgets based on performance data. The campaign should focus on high-performing keywords and ad placements.
By following these 3 core principles, google ads helps you connect with the right people, with the right message, at the right time. Businesses can reach their online potential by implementing the core principles of google ads successfully in their marketing strategies.