- 1. Take a moment to think about your account structure
- 2. The home page of your website doesn’t have to be your landing page for all ads
- 3. Don’t forget about mobile ads
- 4. Use Ad Extensions to increase your CTR
- 5. Grow your campaign if it’s profitable
- 6. Enable Conversion tracking with values
- 7. Have numbers in your ads
Many beginners of PPC and Google Ads conclude that PPC is a waste of money, and they stop using it because they are spending money without a return.
Before getting into the PPC tips part, and since this article is mainly for newbies to PPC, I thought it’s better to state that PPC is not a waste of money; on the contrary, it is a fast way to get customers and make sales online which tends to convert better than any other tool (except for SEO).
So, if you are using PPC but not making any money, don’t give up; try to get educated on optimizing your campaigns for a better ROI. The following ppc tips will certainly guide you in the right direction.
1. Take a moment to think about your account structure
Many beginners to AdWords tend to create one campaign and one ad group and throw everything in there. That’s not a good practice, and while explaining everything in this post is difficult, your AdWords account should mimic your website’s structure.
This means that if you have four product categories, then in your account, you can have one campaign with four ad groups (one for each product). Furthermore, if you target more than one country and language, e.g., English and Spanish, you need to have two campaigns, one for each language.
If you are like most people and have everything in one ad group, hire a professional to set up the campaigns more efficiently or review the guidelines provided by the Google Ads team.
2. The home page of your website doesn’t have to be your landing page for all ads
When creating an AdWords ad, you are asked to provide the URL people will visit once they click on the ad. Most people enter their websites' home page, but this is not necessarily correct. It is more appropriate to redirect users to a page with more information about the products/services advertised in the ads.
For example, if you sell engagement rings, you should redirect users to the engagement rings page of your website, which has the different types of rings you sell, rather than the home page, which has a list of all the products you are selling.
3. Don’t forget about mobile ads
In my e-commerce tips article, I mentioned that as a seller, you should not forget about mobile devices, even if you are not expecting to make any sales directly from mobile devices. The same is true for advertisers.
You should have ads targeted to mobile devices, with a reduction in the bid compared to desktops, even if you are not expecting to make sales from mobile devices. The reason is simple: it is statistically proven that many people start searching for products and services on their mobile phones and then continue to their desktops.
4. Use Ad Extensions to increase your CTR
Ad extensions make your ads more clickable by adding more items in the ad copy, such as direct links to your site’s product pages or contact us page, an extra line highlighting your best advantages, and more.
Ad Extensions are easy to set up and can significantly improve your CTR. Visit the ad extensions page for more details on how to implement them.
5. Grow your campaign if it’s profitable
That’s a basic tip, but you should only grow your campaigns if they are profitable. PPC, in general, is an easy way to spend a lot of money without realizing it, so it is important to track the performance of your campaign and add more funds and budget only if you are making a profit.
If you are not making any profits, your first action should be to optimize your campaign, make it profitable, and then spend more money.
6. Enable Conversion tracking with values
This is related to the above. What is important is to have conversion tracking in your campaign, not only to track the number of conversions but also the conversion value. This is sometimes a bit tricky to set up, but it will certainly help you identify whether a campaign is profitable or not.
If you have difficulty setting up conversion tracking with conversion value, you can always hire someone from upwork.com to do it for you at a very low cost.
7. Have numbers in your ads
By numbers, I don’t mean random numbers but offers, prices, and discounts. Ads that highlight special offers by giving exact numbers, such as ‘45% off retail prices’ or ‘hosting packages from $9.99,’ perform better than ads without any references to numbers.
What else is missing from the list of PPC tips for beginners to AdWords?
