How To Increase Your Chance Of Success With Adwords

First you need to know what you actually want from your campaign, what is the objective…

Your Adwords/Bing – or any other paid campaign cannot get you enquiries alone. It is just a part of your entire sales funnel.

So when considering a paid campaign what is the main outcome you are looking for;

Traffic – do you just want more traffic to your site?

Enquiries – contact forms or emails?

Phone calls – fancy having your clients call up and asking for your service?

 

Your Paid campaign can get traffic to your site but your website has to get them over the line! Before you spend money on paid advertising make sure your website can convert traffic in to leads.

It goes without saying but make sure your contact forms, emails and phone numbers all work!

 

Public Service Announcement

Do not under any circumstances pay for traffic to your site unless you have a good profit margin on your product or service.

For example;

Let’s say for example the profit margin on your service/product is £90 it absolutely does not make sense to pay anywhere near that for a lead that isn’t even guaranteed to convert!

What if you only convert one lead in three? You’ve spent £270 for a job that you only made £90 on – this gets even worse if you’re a service because you have to consider man hours!

On the flip side, if you have a recurring revenue base you can afford to spend more money to acquire the customer if you keep them on board long term. My local Gym can justifiably in a worst case scenario spend £60-£90 per signup because the owner knows that on average the good enquiries convert and stay for at least three months then the cost of acquisition has been paid and

There are also many companies that acquire their customers at a loss (loss leader) because they know that they will make money from the client on the back end (with up-sells/cross sells etc)

Think about how much you make per customer and how much you can realistically spend in order to acquire new customers. There are times when paid marketing just isn’t suitable and you should be willing to walk away if the numbers do not make sense.

Before your campaign goes live;

  1. Get tracking in place as discussed earlier a really important part of marketing is ensuring that what can be monitored and measured is! that way you can optimise while knowing what is bringing the enquiries.
  2. Set your budget accordingly – there are no guarantees with marketing when you start, you do not know what works and you don’t know the return on investment that you can expect. In the beginning with any new form of marketing you should be willing to invest your budget with no expectation or strict need to have an immediate return on investment.
  3. Pick your location settings correctly – if you are a service and can only provide that within a certain location it makes sense to only advertise your service within that area. If you sell products this still does apply – make sure that you can post/ship to areas you’re advertising too! You do not want to pay for the lead If you can’t service the enquiry
  4. Scheduling just like locations you want to make sure of a few things when deciding your schedule for your campaign. Are there hours where you cannot service your clients and they require immediate service? Do not advertise during the hours you that you can’t help your potential customers. In exactly the same way if you know that there are some hours of the day that your business gets enquiries (of if you’re an office and don’t work weekends) it is definitely worth considering not showing on weekends!
  5. Keyword selection – if you have a limited budget and you have to focus on the keywords that are most likely to get you an enquiry. An example being if you sell brown mens brogues it makes sense to focus on keywords like “mens brown brogues”, “brown brogues” or “mens brogues” rather than “mens shoes”. Once your campaign provides a sufficient return or you aren’t getting much traffic through to your site you can start to broaden it out with more keywords
  6. Negative keywords can be just as important as your positive keyword choice. Campaign budget can quickly be wasted if negative keywords are not in place to ensure that your ads are not being shown in circumstances where they shouldn’t.
  7. Send people to the page that most answers their question! If your business solves multiple problems you’re going to have different ad groups that show different ads to answer different search queries.

If you’re struggling to get to grips with what you need to do then feel free to get in touch

if you have any questions or if you think there’s more information required let us know.