Google Ads can be a great way of advertising your website for new leads and traffic (especially if your SEO positioning has faltered recently) whilst being completely in control of the day-to-day budget and spend. If you’re looking to minimise the cost per conversion in your Google Ads, then there’s no better place to start than selecting the correct keywords. Afterall, if you’re not bidding on the correct keywords, then there’s little chance of you reaching your ideal audience and therefore unlikely to be converting efficiently.
Establish relevant keywords
Targeting ads with relevant keywords may sound obvious but it’s something that a lot of companies often make mistakes in. One of the most common ways this happens is by automatically applying Google’s recommended keywords to your ad campaigns without checking them first. By doing this, you could be bidding on terms which have little or no relevance to your company. For example, for someone selling car parts, Google may recommend bidding on a search term for consumers to buy brand new cars. This means that you’ll not be attracting your intended audience and you’ll be losing your valuable budget needlessly.
Another common error is if you’re a local or national company but advertising on keywords (or even audiences for that matter) in international countries. Suffice to say, it’s not worthwhile advertising to an audience in Australia if you’re only UK or US based.
Decide pricing strategy
Next you should decide on your pricing strategy for your campaign. If you have a limited cost-per-click in mind, then perhaps choose keywords where the bidding is low. If you have a limit of £1 per click but the keyword you’re bidding on has an average of £3, then you may find that you don’t get as much traffic as you’d like for the duration of the campaign.
For example, you could target a competitive search term such as ‘short term loans’ however as there’ll be many companies bidding on this search term, you could decide to go for something cheaper per click, but at less search volume. This cost per click bidding does vary with trends. So the price for a search term which perhaps didn’t receive as much traffic at the beginning of the year such as ‘fashionable face masks’ could now double (or even more!) due to the number of new advertisers all bidding on this term with the current worldwide pandemic.
Look for obscurer keywords
Although you’ll probably have a list of keywords by now that you know is relevant to your organisation, there’s also likely to be a ton of keywords out there that you’ve not even considered which are just as relevant. There are some great keyword finder tools out there and Answer The Public is generally considered to be amongst the best for finding new keywords and phrases in addition to Google’s on keyword planner tool – you might even find terms which your competitors aren’t bidding on!
Conclusion
Google Ads can be an effective method for gaining strong traffic to your website with a promising chance of conversion. However, it’s unlikely to be enough to just simply switch on the ads with no optimisation. Having a suitable keyword strategy is the first step in ensuring you’re getting the most out of your ad spend and maximising potential traffic.
