Without a doubt, Google Ads are one of the best and quickest ways to reach potential customers. They can be used by businesses big and small and offer a huge range of advertising options. Whether you want to launch a new brand, increase the number of enquiries to your business or boost sales, there’s a Google Ads campaign that will fit the bill.

The platform is easy to use; you can set up an account and launch a campaign in a matter of minutes. But rushing into running Google ads can also be the quickest way to waste your marketing budget. Without some careful planning, it’s all too easy to attract the wrong type of website visitors, for the clicks that you're paying for to be irrelevant to your business or for your ads to linger way down in the search listings. 

To help you get a great return on your ad spend from the very beginning, here are 7 questions to ask yourself before starting a Google Ads campaign.

1.    What are your goals?

Your choice of goal or campaign objective will impact on everything from which types of ads you should be running to what you include in your ads themselves. Depending on your goal, you may decide that it’s more appropriate to run text ads solely on the Search Network to reach people directly searching for your product or service, or to run text ads, banner ads on the Display Network and Google Shopping Ads, or a different combination entirely. If your aim is to raise brand awareness, you would probably be looking at a very different set of ads, keywords and campaign type to a business hoping to boost sales. 

2.    Is your landing page good enough?

Your landing page makes a big difference to the performance of your ads. Google’s algorithms look for a close relationship between keyword, ad and landing page when determining the quality of your ad. Along with your bid, this plays an important part in determining how often and where your ad is shown in the search listings. Ideally, your landing page should be quick to load, include information that ties in with the keywords you want to include in your ads and be easy to navigate. 

3.    Who are your audience?

The beauty of Google Search Ads is that you’re already reaching people who have an interest in your product or service. Just by typing in a phrase that aligns with your keywords, people are already setting themselves apart as a qualified lead. However, sometimes it helps to narrow down your audience even further. For example, you may only want to target men or women, or to focus on a specific age group. You can do all this within Google Ads. 

If you’re planning to run ads on the Google Display Network and on YouTube, you’ll have access to a much broader range of targeting options. These range from interest-based targeting to in-market audiences of people actively researching products and services like yours to people who have previously interacted with your website, and more. 

4.    What search terms are your customers typing into Google?

It’s crucial to do your research before starting a PPC campaign. Keywords are (ahem) a key part of this. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, SEMrush and SpyFu enable advertisers to discover what terms people are searching for right now. They can even give you data showing trends over time and an idea of the potential cost. Choosing the right keywords and match type makes all the difference between a successful and a not-so-successful campaign.

5.    Where and when do you want your ads to show?

It’s worth thinking really hard about where your customers are likely to be. There’s no point wasting money targeting a UK-wide audience if you’re running training courses in your local town. Doing this helps your budget to work harder at reaching the most relevant people for your business. Google lets you target small areas, even down to broad postcode level. You can also exclude areas that you don’t want to target. 

It’s also possible to only run your ads at certain times of the day or on certain days of the week - all things worth thinking about before pressing go on your campaigns.

6.    How do you want your ads to look? 

Ad copy is one of, if not the, most important parts of any PPC campaign. It’s vital to get it right to encourage your ideal prospect to take action, whilst at the same time putting off those who won’t convert into a valuable customer. So it’s crucial to think about the tone of voice of your ads, the call to action (what do you want them to do after seeing your ad?) and to test out different headlines and descriptions. 

The same applies to display ads. Different sizes and designs of banner ads can be more successful than others and it’s always worth testing alternative formats like Google’s Responsive Display Ads.

7.    Do you have tags for remarketing and monitoring conversions set up?

Finally, setting up remarketing and conversion tags before your get started opens up a whole host of options down the track. To be able to retarget people who have previously visited your website, your tag needs to have recorded a certain number of visits so it makes sense to get it installed as soon as possible. Conversions include actions like email list sign-ups, contact me buttons, phone calls, purchases and so on. This data is super valuable when trying to work out what’s working well, and what needs changing.  

At ib3 we can help you work through these questions. As a full-service agency, we can offer specialist advice on everything from landing page design and content to the design of banner ads to ad copy that calls out to your ideal customer to the management and optimisation of the Google Ads campaigns themselves.

Call us on 01732 449970 or email info@ib3.uk today to see how we can help you.

rebecca@ib3.uk