As a child, when I eagerly opened the doors of an advent calendar during the Christmas season, nowadays, I open my clients’ advertising account dashboards with the same enthusiasm. From my perspective, digital marketing and Google advertising are much like a Kinder Advent Calendar. Sometimes, you find those delicious milk chocolate pieces, symbolizing significant sales, and other times, you come across those chocolate pieces with nuts, indicating slightly smaller sales. The only difference is that now, I have significant control over these “treats” I receive each morning.

The following text elaborates on the factors I’ve found crucial for achieving sales figures up to 70 times greater than the advertising budgets using Google search ads. By applying and adapting these tips to your Google advertising, I guarantee that you’ll excel at initiating transactions in the search engine!

Keyword Research

It all starts with defining the keywords for your own website. These are the search terms that, when used, make your ad appear on Google for potential customers to see. When selecting keywords, it’s essential to use terms that your customers search for and that best correspond to the products or services you offer. In the end, choosing keywords isn’t overly difficult; common sense gets you a long way. For instance, if you own an online store selling dog food, you can start hunting for keywords related to the term “dog food.” The number of keywords can vary greatly based on the breadth of your offerings and the volume of terms that are worth using for advertising. If you want to test the search volume of different search terms or even conduct comprehensive keyword research, here are a few useful tools listed below.

List of handy tools for finding keywords for Google advertising:

• Semrush (For advanced keyword researchers, paid)
• Uber Suggest (Suitable for beginners, provides good data, requires registration after a few searches, but it’s free)
• Google Trends (Free, no registration required)

When it’s time to add keywords to your ad group, there are a few things to consider. You can categorize your own keywords based on how readily you want them to trigger your ad, for example, in conjunction with a closely related search term. The categorization of keywords also plays a role in the results of your advertising. At the beginning, it’s wise to keep the search terms relatively broad and observe which terms start generating converting traffic to your site. So, if you’re launching your first campaigns, it’s good to start with Broad Match keywords that seek a somewhat looser match in terms of relevance to maximize reach.

Here are five different types of search terms listed:

• Broad match (broadest reach, largest audience)
• Modified Broad match (slightly narrower reach)
• Phrase match (average reach)
• Exact match (most precise and narrow reach)
• Negative match (if you want to exclude certain search terms)

Conversion Tracking and Goals

When your list of keywords is ready, it’s time to turn your attention to Google Ads. Just as with all other digital advertising results, Google Ads results need to be tracked. For Google advertising, your website should already have Google Analytics tracking in place, with conversions defined. The easiest way is to bring pre-defined conversions from Analytics to your Google Ads account by linking the accounts together. Once the linking is set up between Ads and Analytics, you can track the sales generated by Google advertising through pre-defined conversions.

Keyword Ads and A/B Testing

This might be the easiest part – creating the ads. The only challenging factor in Google keyword ads is the limited text space. Traditional search ads on Google have only about 90 characters of space in the headline to sell your products or services to the searcher. The best tip for ad text is to keep it simple and clear, aligning well with the page’s content and the used keyword. So, for example, if the triggering keyword for your ad is “dog food,” the same word should clearly appear in the ad and on the landing page.

A handy method for enhancing text content in Google advertising is A/B testing. In A/B testing, you practically put two different elements against each other and compare the results they produce. For instance, if you want to test which element in your text ad leads to more converting traffic, using the brand name in the ad versus using product names.

It’s a good idea to create several ads to approach your target audience from different angles. However, it’s crucial to keep in mind what aspects you’re measuring and what you aim to achieve. Responsive search ads are also worth trying – you can even incorporate the best-performing elements from your ads into them. The idea behind responsive search ads is that they select the most successful headlines you input and update ads accordingly.

Google Merchant

If your goal is to increase sales for your online store, I highly recommend creating a Google Shopping campaign to complement your other Google advertising efforts using Google Merchant Center. A Google Shopping campaign displays your online store’s products in search results with small images. If you know that your customers search for products on Google using specific product names or brands, or if your products generate a lot of searches, then this campaign format can be highly beneficial for you.

Exploring New Keywords

After a few weeks or months of running your Google advertising campaign and gathering data on the keywords you’ve been using, Google will start suggesting new keyword ideas that you can add to your other campaigns. However, I’ve found it effective to create a separate campaign for these new keyword suggestions to make it easier to track their results. In this new campaign, try to keep the ads as similar as possible to your other keyword campaigns, so you can clearly see if these new keywords provide any additional support to your Google advertising.

Website and Google Advertising

Finally, a crucial point to consider is your website and its conversion-friendliness. Google advertising serves as an excellent way to drive interested individuals to your website, but your site’s main task is to provide the solution that your customers were searching for on Google. Matching the content of your website with the keywords and ads, along with having clear and easily achievable conversion actions, can significantly improve the results of your advertising. If your goal is to receive quote requests, investing in a well-designed landing page is essential. For e-commerce, a clear and easily navigable product range and checkout system are the most important elements.