GOOGLE AD HACKS
Google ads are still one of the best platforms that you can use to
grow your business, primarily because it lets you reach the right
people when they’re looking for whatever it is that you’re selling.
When they’re actively searching for keywords related to your
content, your product, your services, you can be right there. But a
lot of people find it difficult to make their campaigns scale and
become profitable. So, what should you do?
The first thing I want you to do is create in-depth remarketing
audiences. Did you know that the clickthrough rate for
remarketing is roughly 10 times higher than traditional
advertising and cost-per-click (CPC) costs are roughly two to 100
times less? That’s a huge difference. Now all these remarketing
aspects are super important, but adding detailed targeting to
marketing efforts makes it much better in terms of spend and
conversions. In other words, you’ll get a better bang for the buck.
So set up campaigns for people who have already been to your
site more than once. This is an audience that is already interested
in your products or services. So when you target them, they have
already got to know you and are much more likely to convert.
The next thing I want you to do is focus your efforts on long-tail
keywords. When it comes to generalized keywords, they’re very
competitive because everyday marketers want to go after them
because they have a high search volume. But they don’t always
drive the highest quality of traffic. A lot of marketers are making
the mistake of going after these keywords; however, the money is
in the long-tail. For example: the keyword “diet plan” has a SEO
difficulty score of 52 and a paid difficulty score of 70, with a cost
per click of $4.35 and a keyword volume of roughly 40,500
searches per month. A long-tail version like “diet plan that’s low
carb” has an SEO difficulty of 21 and a paid difficulty of 42, with
a cost per click of $1.58. The keyword volume is only 12,100
searches per month, but somebody searching with that phrase is
looking for a specific diet plan, so they’re much more likely to
convert. You’re probably thinking “Hey, ‘diet plan’ has a much
higher search volume so I want to go after that,” but what you’ll
find is you’re going to get a lot of irrelevant clicks that don’t
convert. By going after specific long-tail phrases, you tend to
generate more sales, and in many cases, those viewers have a
lower cost per click even though it can make you more money.
The next thing is you shouldn’t be afraid of using exclusions.
Exclusions are a great way to find a hyper focused audience that
is more likely to convert and give you a bigger bang for the buck.
Say your audience doesn’t fall into the category of people with
high income. You can exclude people with higher income. It really
is that simple. There are a lot of different targeting elements with
Google ads—and also Facebook ads—so don’t be afraid to use
them because they’re your friend. It allows you to spend your
money with people who are more likely to convert into customers
than people who aren’t.
The next thing I want you to do is test different locations.
Creating audiences based on location is one of the easiest ways to
create a segment. You would be surprised by how many people
just use the default settings, but this is a big mistake. Now, there
are three ways that you can target location in an ad campaign.
One, you can go after location-based keywords. Two, you can
geotarget to a radius on your ad segment. Three, you can do both.
You should try all three approaches to see which generates the
most sales. When you do that, you’ll weed out a lot of people that
were never the right customer for you in the first place.
Next, I want you to add extensions to your app. Adding
extensions is one of the most surefire ways to get more clicks
because they take up more real estate and lead to more surfs.
There are many different ways that you can add extensions to
your site. You can have more information about specific pages on
your site, or you can list products, prices, sales, phone numbers—
the list goes on and on.
ACCORDING TO GOOGLE, ADDING
EXTENSIONS CAN INCREASE
CLICKTHROUGHS BY ROUGHLY 10% TO 15%.
Next, I want you to implement UTM tracking. Tracking
campaigns and their performance is incredibly essential to
running an ad campaign strategy. If you’re not tracking the
performance, how do you know what’s working and what’s not?
Using UTM codes is a great and easy way to keep track of what’s
doing well and what’s not. If you don’t know how to code, don’t
worry. Using Google’s URL Builder tool, you can literally create
UTM codes for a page in less than 30 seconds. You can easily
track the performance of any of your campaigns in Google
Analytics. You don’t even need to be a developer to do this.
Finally, I want you to start running ads on your competitors’
keywords. This is one of the simplest and most practical ways
that you can get a really good ROI. Using tools like Ubersuggest,
you can see all the keywords your competitors are ranking for
and are getting traffic for. You can also put your competitors’
brand names into Ubersuggest and it will tell you the search
volume. Going after competitor brand name is a really easy way
to generate more sales. Now, when you’re doing this, you have got
to think about trademark, so you may not be able to put your
competitor’s name within your copy. But that doesn’t mean that
you can’t drive sales. This is why everyone’s bidding on brand
names—it’s a quick way to get sales. If someone is searching for
these keywords and landing on a competitor’s website, chances
are they’re super targeted and they may like what you’re selling as
well.
Neil Patel is a New York Times best-selling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer
on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he
created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. He was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur
under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the
United Nations. NeilPatel.com