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How to make the most out of a small PPC budget

Advertisers with a small budget need to make sure that they are spending their money effectively and when it comes to PPC this is especially important. For large accounts with a big budget, there are opportunities to take risks and more room for errors. Accounts with small budgets don’t have this wiggle room and so need to get things right from day one. In this article, we’ll look at a few easy wins to make the most out of a small PPC budget.

Schedule your adverts

If you know when your audience is most active, or when people are generally looking for your services, then you should be using the advert scheduling feature. Not only will this let you target your adverts to certain times of day, but it will also let you increase your bids for selected periods to help improve your chances of getting the click.

You can also do the reverse of this and reduce your bid at certain times of the day when you still want to have a search presence, but don’t want to pay top prices for the clicks. Ad scheduling is a useful tool that is available to all advertisers and can really help you maximise your budget.

Use geographical targeting

Chances are that if you have a small budget then you won’t want to be targeting customers nationally. Using geographic targeting is the smart thing to do to help limit the reach of your ad campaign and ensure only people in the local areas will see your ads. You can also use location extensions to show your address and contact number which allows people to get directions to your business, see your opening hours and get in touch.

Geographical targeting also lets you target locations that are valuable or important to your business, even if you are not located in those areas. This can then be combined with dedicated landing pages that help to engage the target audience for that area.

Make the right keyword match

It’s all very well using broad match keywords to help you drive traffic, but in reality, you’d probably be better off with a combination of phrase and exact match keywords. Broad match keywords will spend your budget a lot quicker than the equivalent phrase or exact match variants for the simple reason that they can show your adverts for terms that you are not actively bidding on. Without careful management, broad keywords can ramp up the cost of your campaign and may not lead to an increase in business.

Get negative

No, we don’t mean acting like a stroppy teenager. Using negative keywords you can help to stop your adverts appearing for unwanted search terms. Want an example? Let’s look at the search term “Nike running shoe repairs”, this is probably a search that you don’t want to appear for if you sell brand new Nike trainers. Adding negative keywords should be done on a regular basis, weekly or even daily for low budget accounts to help minimise wasted ad spend.

3 Awesome Google Ads features that you should be using

Google Ads is one of the most powerful marketing platforms and one that is jam-packed full of features to help you get the most from your advertising budget. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the most underused features and how you can use them to improve the performance of your ad campaigns and make your money go further.

Custom intent audiences

In an aim to help give advertisers more control over target audiences and take on platforms such as Facebook, Google has created custom intent audiences. Advertisers can now use in-market keywords and relevant URLs to help create a custom intent audience. Where advertisers want to further expand on their custom audiences there is an option for custom intent audiences to be automatically created using Google’s machine learning technology.

Custom intent audiences are created based on activity across your entire Google marketing channels including search, the display network, YouTube and app campaigns. These changes offer a more customer-focused targeting approach that should help advertiser’s better target their ideal audiences.

Optimised ad rotation

Advert rotation is one of the most effective ways to improve the performance of your advertising campaigns. Using Google’s advanced machine learning technology means that adverts can be rotated based on performance and Google can show the best adverts to searchers based on their intent. In order to take full advantage of this, you should ensure that you have a minimum of 3 adverts in each ad group and that new variations are tested and added on a regular basis.

A lot of advertisers wrongly assume that they can let Google take care of everything for them, and while their machine learning system is very effective it can’t make up for a lack of regular management and maintenance.

Smart bidding

In case you hadn’t noticed the features listed so far in the list focus heavily on machine learning and our third entry is no different. Google has invested heavily in this area and the result is some amazing features that can help advertisers get more from their campaigns. Smart bidding takes information from a range of variables and uses a data-based approach to tailor the bids for each auction based on the advertiser’s campaign targets.

Whether your goals are based on cost per acquisition (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS), smart bidding will help you meet your targets. As with the other features on this list smart bidding works best for advertisers that have a medium to high level of traffic as the machine learning needs a lot of data to be able to work effectively and help businesses to reach their target audience at the right price.

Conclusion

We hope these features will help you get even better performance from your campaigns and use the power of machine learning to help you grow your audience as well as boost your revenue.

All you need to know about keyword matching in Google Ads

Many advertisers who are new to Google Ads don’t know the difference when it comes to keyword matching and which options are likely to work best for them. As well as picking the right keywords to use in your campaign you also need to pick the right match type for your keywords. Failing to get this right could be the difference between seeing a positive return and losing money from your campaign. In this article we’ll take a look at the different keyword match types and when you should be using them.

Broad match

This is the default keyword matching option and means that your adverts can be shown for any search that Google deems to be relevant. Your adverts can show for searches that include your keywords in any order and even for those when your keyword is not used if the meaning is similar. And while broad match keywords can help you get the most traffic possible there is a strong chance that your adverts could be shown for irrelevant searches.

Another disadvantage of broad match is that they tend to have a lower click through rate which can also affect their quality scores and mean that your cost per click prices are higher. If you are planning on using broad match then make sure you include plenty of negative keywords to help prevent your adverts showing for irrelevant searches. Also, remember to regularly review your keyword search term report for further negatives.

Modified broad match

At first glance, the modified broad match appears to be almost identical to a standard broad match keyword but there is one important difference. By using a plus sign immediately before any word in your keyword you can specify that this term must be included in your search. This can help to make sure that key terms are included in your search while helping to limit irrelevant traffic.

Remember that user intent is important so try to incorporate keywords that convey this intent into your account. Like standard broad match, there is plenty of room for error when using modified broad match and you’ll still want to have a large list of negative keywords to help stop irrelevant clicks.

Phrase match

To use phrase match you’ll need to wrap your keyword in quotation marks e.g. “buy blue widgets”. Your advert will only be shown to people who type in your keyword in that order. Your advert will also show if they use longer searches which include your keyword phrase as part of the search term. Phrase match is a great option for those who want to show their adverts for specific queries and related queries that include their target keyword phrase.

As you’d expect phrase match tends to deliver higher click through rates and less impressions than broad match and is normally a good starting point for most advertisers. It offers some of the flexibility of broad match without the limitations of exact match.

Exact match

The strictest keyword option is exact match which gives you total control over what searches your adverts will appear for. Square brackets around the keywords define an exact match term and mean that your keywords will only show up when people enter these exact searches, plurals or common misspellings.

While exact match can be tempting the reality is that it is generally only suitable for a small number of your keyword terms. As your advert won’t show when someone includes any keywords before or after an exact match term they are best suited to keywords that have proven to be of high importance and value.

Conclusion

For most advertisers phrase match keywords are usually the best choice and provide enough flexibility to ensure they show up for a wide range of searches.

Using Google Ads to create a branding campaign

From huge multinational brands such as Apple to small local businesses such as a plumbing company, branding campaigns provide a way to make customers aware of your brand. Unless you own a huge business the chances are that only local customers will know about your business. Branding is all about bringing your business to the attention of potential customers and is something that can really help you attract new customers.

Display Network

One of the best ways to get brand awareness is by running a campaign on Google’s Display Network which allows you to target users with specific interests. With the display network, you have the option of using text, image or video adverts which can really help to make your brand stand out and show the personality of your business.

Of course, you need to do more than just create some pretty images to succeed on the display network which is why you’ll need to understand what the best targeting options are for your business.

Targeting options

Placements – You can use placement targeting to show your adverts on specific websites and even on specific sections of a target website. Options for placement targeting include automatic or manual options and you can even exclude placements where you don’t want your adverts to appear.

Topics – Using topics as your targeting options you’ll be able to show your adverts on websites that are centred around a particular topic. This lets you get a broad reach within your sector and appear on relevant websites that relate to your industry.

Audiences – Audience targeting gives you the ability to reach customers that you have deemed are valuable. This is most commonly used for remarketing e.g. targeting users who have visited your website but not purchased. Google also lets you create audiences who are similar to your current audience which is useful for those looking to use this option for branding campaigns.

Search Network

Most people wrongly assume that the display network is the only place on Google Ads where you can run a branding campaign, but that is not true. The search network can help provide you with brand visibility for terms that you are not able to target with organic campaigns and deliver brand consideration which is not possible using other marketing channels.

As well as key search terms you can also bid on competitor brand names and terms to help get your business in front of more potential customers. This is a good strategy for smaller businesses who offer a similar service or product to larger and better-established brands.

Conclusion

If you are looking to get your business in front of more potential customers and build awareness, then Google Ads provides you with the tools you need to achieve these goals. And thanks to the ability to measure the performance you can easily track the success of your branding campaigns.

Simple ways to make your Google Ads adverts better

There are many ways to improve the performance of your Google Ads campaign but perhaps some of the simplest focus on making your adverts better than those of your competitors. In this article, we’ll look at some simple ways for improving your adverts, and what’s more, they could help win you more customers. So let’s get started.

Make the most of available ad text

Gone are the days when you were limited to a short headline and two separate description lines. Now you can have two headlines each up to 30 characters in length as well as a longer combined description that’s up to 80 characters in length. This means you have more space than ever before to get across your marketing message and win over your customers.

The example below from Samsung shows how to effectively use the double headline feature as well as a benefit led longer description line. It also features callout extensions and sitelinks but more on those in our next section.

Utilise relevant ad extensions

If you’re not using ad extensions in your campaigns then you are definitely losing out to your competitors. Extensions give you a way to extend the functionality of your adverts and provide additional information. They’ve been proven to improve click through rates by around 10 – 15% on average.

Some of the most common ad extensions that you may want to show include:

Callout extensions – these let you highlight information about your products or services that may be useful to your customers.
Sitelink extensions – are used for displaying links to additional pages, products or services on your website and help your customers find what they want quickly.
Call extensions – a necessity for mobile traffic, call extensions let customers place a call to your business directly from your advert.
Location extensions – for any business with a physical location then a location extension can provide additional details such as your location and give customers directions to get to your business.

As well as improving your click through rates ad extensions will help to give you a better ad rank which means that your adverts are more likely to outrank those of your competitors.

Align your adverts to your landing pages

It’s all well and good making the best adverts possible but you need to make sure that you are matching the messaging you use in your adverts to your landing pages. This is one of the biggest mistakes that new advertisers make by directing traffic to the homepage of their website instead of the most relevant page on their websites.

One of the best ways to improve the experience further is by creating dedicated landing pages for your Google Ads campaigns. Focus on designing landing pages that are aligned with the needs of your customers. Match the message that you have used on the adverts to that of your landing page to keep visitors engaged.

Top tips for reaching new customers with Google Ads

Whether you’re an established business or are a brand new start-up, Google Ads is a fantastic platform that can help you reach new customers. Not only can you pinpoint your adverts to reach your target audience, but you can also schedule adverts for the times that make sense for your business. In this article, we’ll look at some of the top tips for creating a campaign with the goals of reaching new customers.

Location, location, location

Mobile phones have brought about a massive revolution and given customers the ability to find what they need no matter where they are. One of the most popular searches used by mobile users is “near me” to find shops, bars, restaurants and services that are physically nearby. With Google Ads, you have the ability to target users within specific locations and even show them where your business is located using ad extensions.

You can include your business address in your adverts by connecting your Google My Business account with your Google Ads account and then selecting this as an ad extension in your campaigns. Don’t forget to also add a call extension so customers can easily call your business, directly from your advert.

Mobile-friendly

Wouldn’t it be great if you could tailor your bids to users of mobile devices? Or how about the ability to create adverts that are completely tailored to mobile users? Well with Google Ads that’s exactly what you can do. From ad scheduling and bidding to setting up unique, mobile-friendly adverts, Google Ads gives you a range of options to help you better target mobile users.

For businesses with a mobile app you also have the ability to run a range of targeted app campaigns to give people the option of downloading your app. This can be done through an ad extension or through the dedicated universal app campaign which lets you target users on search, Google Play, YouTube and across the display network.

Retargeting

It’s not just new customers that can be valuable to your business people that have already visited your website can be the perfect people to target with your advertising. Using Google’s retargeting options you can create audiences based on on-site behaviour to entice potential customers back to your website. For instance, if you have an ecommerce website then you may want to create an audience that targets anyone who has added a product to their basket but not purchased.

Using retargeting you can choose to offer a discount code to everyone who has previously visited your website and not converted. You can also tie retargeting in with dynamic adverts to show them offers based on the products they viewed on your website. Retargeting is an advanced way to target customers and gives you a better chance of converting potential customers.

Are you using these features in your Google Ads campaign?

Google Ads is a wonderful advertising platform and one that is packed full of features. But are you making the most of all these features to get the performance that you deserve? In this article we’ll look at some of the most underused Google Ads features and why you should be using them.

Ad variations

Do you want to save time and test advert variations at scale? Then Google’s ad variation feature is what you should be using. Not only does it let you quickly and easily test text changes but you can also choose whether to apply these changes if they outperform the originals. This lets advertisers set up variations in bulk and extremely quickly.

If you are looking to make big time savings and test multiple variations of your adverts to see which perform the best for your business then you need to be using ad variations. Even if you don’t have thousands of adverts this feature still offers considerable time savings and will help get you into the habit of testing different versions of your adverts.

Experiments

Did you know that you can run various experiments from within Google Ads directly, and here’s the important bit, if they are successful you can have them replace your current campaign. To do this you’ll need to create a draft campaign and make the changes that you’d like to test. Remember to limit the changes you make as if there is an improvement you’ll want to know why. Some examples could include testing a new landing page, trying a new bid strategy or testing new advert copy.

Using campaign experiments you can set the timeframe for your experiment as well as controlling your budget mix and allocating a set amount of traffic and budget to the experiment. So if the change is risky you may want to start with a small portion of the budget going to the experiment.

Once the experiment is over you’ll be able to see how it performed and have the option of converting this into a live campaign and pausing the original.

Gmail adverts

If you’re looking for a way to engage with your customers across multiple touchpoints then you need to take a look at Gmail ads. They are particularly useful for advertisers who use remarketing campaigns as they give you the opportunity to put your brand in front of your customers at every opportunity.

Because people are used to receiving promotional deals through to their email they are generally more receptive to marketing messages while checking their email. The advertising also is a lot less intrusive then other channels and on Gmail is limited to a single advert.

The biggest paid search trends of 2017

Last year saw some big changes in paid search advertising and while previous years have been all about mobile, in 2017 we saw AI becoming a major part of paid search. We all know how much work Google has been doing on artificial intelligence and machine learning so it came as no surprise when this technical know-how started to infiltrate all things paid search. So let’s take a look at some of the biggest paid search trends of 2017.

Advert split testing

Gone are the days of having to manually split test adverts and come up with new ad copy text variations because Google is now pushing advertisers towards the optimise ad rotation option that lets the machines decide on the best advert to show to the person searching. It’s recommended to have at least 3 text adverts in each ad group and the system will even automatically create additional text adverts for approval where they feel performance could be improved.

Audience targeting

While keywords remain at the heart of the Google Ads and paid search ecosystem there has been a rise in audience targeting being used to make marketing more personalised and targeted. This comes from growing competition by platforms such as Facebook which offer a lot more options when it comes to audience-based targeting. This means that campaign types such as Dynamic Search Ads and Display campaigns are seeing much more audience targeting options to help bring them on a par with Facebook.

Local searches

Thanks to mobile devices, voice and digital assistants, local searches continued to grow in 2017. Local searches now account for approximately one-third of mobile searches according to figures by Google. We expect this trend to continue in the year ahead as more and more customers look to connect with businesses that are local to them and visit a shop to satisfy the here and now need.

Google shopping

Retailers continue to use Google Shopping as a way to market their products on the search engines but there is competition. Amazon is perhaps one of the biggest and best known retail platforms in the world and it is now offering a whole host of ad offerings for merchants on its own website. There are also possibilities for future ad serving to customers using voice searches powered by Amazon Alexa. This should lead to some interesting developments in the year ahead as we see shopping adverts continue to evolve.

Google rolling out promotion extensions in time for Christmas

There’s a barrage of new features coming to Google Ads to help advertisers get their advertising campaigns ready for Black Friday and the Christmas online sales rush. Promotion extensions have been tested in Google Ads for about a year but they are finally rolling out globally to all advertisers using the new Google Ads interface.

Promotion extensions help advertisers to create special offers and discounts without needing to create brand new adverts. These are particularly useful for seasonal sales as the promotion extensions can include a percentage off, a promotion code and a validity period. There are also 12 occasions to select from including Black Friday and Back-to-School, to help your adverts stand out even more.

Ad Variations

It’s not just ad promotions that will help you reach your target audience. The new ad variations feature lets you test text advert changes across your whole account at scale. Using ad variations you can test out new headlines across all your adverts to promote seasonal events, special offers or lightning sales.

Let’s just say that you want to promote a winter sale by having this displayed in your headline, with ad variations it’s really easy. You just create a new ad variation where you change Headline 1 for all your ad groups and campaigns or select the ones that you’d like to apply the changes to.

Once you’ve made the changes you’ll be able to measure the performance and see results as soon as they’re statistically significant. It’s not just seasonal promotions and events that ad variations can be used for. These also offer a great way to create new adverts in bulk to test new headlines that could help your business.

All of these changes are aimed to make the new Google Ads experience more appealing to advertisers and get more people to switch over to the new interface. If you haven’t yet made the switch then now could be the time to start getting used to the new interface if only to access the new features.

The importance of quality score in Google Ads

For many businesses, Google Ads offers an opportunity to reach new customers and effectively market their businesses online. Not only can advertisers target the exact keyphrases that they want to be found for, they can also show the most relevant text and direct customers to the right page on their site. It’s no wonder that Google Ads is such a popular platform with businesses looking to drive more traffic to their sites.

In PPC it’s important to balance the amount you pay for your clicks with the returns that you get from your website. If you’re paying too much for your traffic then you could end up in a position where you are seeing a negative return on your investment. One of the simplest ways to make sure you’re paying as little as possible for your clicks is to concentrate on improving your keyword quality score.

Google’s description of quality score is “quality score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages.” Quality score is determined by three factors which are: click-through rate, relevancy and landing page. Measured on a scale from 1 to 10 the higher your quality score the better your adverts are likely to perform and the lower your click costs. Luckily for most advertisers, there are things that you can do to improve your keyword quality scores.

Advert relevancy – Your adverts need to be relevant to the keywords that you are targeting. Having one advert for all your different keywords is a sign that you have some work to do. Ideally, you should split your campaign into highly relevant ad groups with each one containing closely matched keywords. You can then use these keywords in your advert to help make the adverts more relevant to your search terms.

Click through rate – The higher your advert positioning and the more relevant your advert the better your click-through rate. One way to increase your advert positioning is by bidding more on your keywords but if you can make your adverts and keywords more relevant then you’ll also get better advert positioning. A bid increase should only be used as a short-term option while you work to improve your keyword quality scores.

Landing page – Another important factor is how relevant your landing page is to your advert and keywords. Let’s say that you are targeting keywords related to “Nike running shoes” but are sending these visitors to your website homepage, this will result in you getting a below average landing page quality score. Simply changing your landing page to a filtered results page that shows all of your Nike running shoes will improve the relevancy and your landing page score. The more relevant the page is to your keywords and adverts the higher your quality score will be.

Not only is quality score a great way to help reduce your click costs but it will also help you get more from your advertising spend as you focus on making your adverts more relevant for your customers.