When you want to display the right ad for the desired audience, at the right time, Adwords Search campaigns are among the most efficient ways to do so. The more relevant the ad, the more chances of increased performance and sale acceleration for the business that you are in charge of. Let’s look at how you build a Search campaign that yields the desired results!
How does Adwords Search work?
In an Adwords Search campaign, your ad appears above or below the organic results in the search engine and on other websites in the Google network when someone searches for terms that are relevant for the keywords used in Search Campaigns. For example, if someone googles “matcha tea”, ads that are relevant for this search are going to be displayed.
The objective of Search campaigns is to determine the audience to do something (e.g. click, phone call, download an app), and the best part is that you don’t pay when your ad is displayed, you pay for interactions, i.e. when someone clicks on the Adwords Search ad and accesses the website.
It’s efficient to use Search campaigns when you want ads to be seen by persons looking for the product or service offered by the business that you are in charge of. Moreover, a Search campaign is vital if we take into account the fact that 93% of online experiences start with a search on Google.
How do you create a Search campaign?
An Adwords campaign consists in groups containing keywords and at least 2-3 ads. A healthy structure for a campaign reflects the business’ need for sales and uses the structure of the website or the means in which the information is laid out. If the business is an online store, groups can be created based on categories and subcategories of products or pages with the available search filters, taking into account the target audience for the products available for sale online. And then there’s the nucleus of a Search campaign, the Google Adwords concept that started everything– keywords!
How do you set up the Adwords Search campaign?
A part of the objectives of the business strategy become the settings of the Adwords campaign. Answer the following questions: how much are you willing to invest daily or monthly, what are the desired results of the campaign (traffic, more orders, more phone calls or app downloads, etc.). The campaign settings determine its performance, but it’s equally important to understand the preferences, habits and interests of your target audience.
Establish who you are addressing and set up the campaign with your target audience in mind, choosing the location, the devices used, the language spoken by the people and how you want to bid for them. We recommend an automatic starting strategy. When enough data is available, you should change to a strategy that offers enhanced control to the company: in order to maximize conversions, manual bidding or a strategy where you can specify the maximum amount that you want to pay for a conversion, analysing the ROI (Return of Investment) percentage.
How do you choose the keywords?
Choosing the words influences both the cost and the success of the campaign, that are determined by your ability to identify the intentions of your target audience. In order to assist you in this regard, Google offers the Google Keyword Planner – that allows you to identify the keywords with the most searches for various subjects, cost estimates and competition levels. Keywords that cost more are often more profitable, since there are more advertisers bidding on those searches and, therefore, the vertical markets are more developed.
It’s recommended to correlate the keywords based on themes with your own ads in the created group. If the ad answers to all of the keywords, it’s relevant, if not, it could use improvements. You can move words to other groups or you can modify the ads, taking into account the Quality Score, an essential aspect that determines performance, consisting in the relevance between the ad, the clickthrough rate (CTR) and the landing page.
Types of matches for the words used
It’s important to pay attention to the keywords match type, because the campaign’s precision is based on this aspect. If you choose “Exact match”, your ad is displayed when someone googles the exact word or phrase. If you choose “Broad match”, your ad shall be displayed for a larger variety of words than with Exact Match, along with search variations used by people. If you choose “Phrase match”, the ad is displayed when a certain phrase or multiple variations of it are googled. This type of match is ideal at the beginning of the campaign, when you want to understand people’s interests better, but it will also result in a higher bounce rate. A good practice for restricting unwanted searches is adding “Negative match”–type words.
The type of match is chosen based on how general the keywords are and, obviously, based on the available budget. In the case of a generic keyword, defining the product category, a more restrictive type of match works better, whereas, for a specific keyword, we recommend a more permissive match type, in order to identify more unique searches made by people.
How do your write the text ads for Adwords Search?
The creative moment is here: writing the ad, that consists in:
– the first title (max. 30 characters) displaying the name of the product or service
– the second title in the add (also max. 30 characters), describing the benefits that it offers or how it’s different from the competition
– visible URL address (15 characters x 2), name of the domain and webpage
– destination link, the destination page accessed by the person clicking on the ad
– ad description (max. 80 characters), detailing the ad and prompting an action.
We recommend that you also use the keywords in the ad description – this increases its relevance and, implicitly, the clickthrough rate. In addition, we suggest that the ad title be closely connected to the destination page that people access. This can increase the clickthrough rate by 35-40%.
In addition, ads accompanied by extensions increase campaign performance, because people who are interested have more options when interacting with the business: they can call the displayed phone number directly, they can access pages other than the one being promoted, or they can reach the physical location of the business on the map.
Conclusions
Google Adwords is more than an advertising platform, it’s a business channel. There is no universal strategy that can be applied to any Adwords account or Search campaign, because each business has its own particularities and each person has different values. After you start juggling the settings of the Search campaign, you’ll see an increase in results as your capacity to analyse and understand the business, the competition, the market and consumption trends improves … as you begin to analyse and understand every aspect of the behaviour and choices of people using Google, that are constantly shifting.
The measurement of results is the secret to success in company management. Track the number of times your ad is displayed, the number of clicks, the conversion and bounce rate, see how you can increase the Quality Score of the words, why certain ads are more efficient than others, see what search percentage you have compared to other advertisers and so on. And when the investment in Adwords Search starts paying off, don’t stop. Continue developing the account, avoid tactics with negative effects and repeat tactics that spurred growth!
We hope that you found this information useful. In the following episodes, we are going to discuss other types of Adwords campaigns – Display, Remarketing, Gmail and Youtube. See you soon!
