Know Your AdWord MetricsAs with any marketing campaign, knowing your numbers when you begin a Google AdWords campaign can maximize the effectiveness of your spending. In a high-speed information market bombarded by advertisements and calls to action, your campaign needs a solid foundation, strict limitations, and measurable goals in order to be truly effective. Set these metrics in place as a framework for the operation of your campaign and start counting conversions as soon as your ad goes live.
Keyword Targeting, not Keyword Spamming
Quality is king. You’re paying Google for every click on every keyword in your advertisement. With bidding for keywords running into double digits of whole dollars, your marketing costs can quickly skyrocket. Choose your keywords carefully, selecting those phrases and words most accurately reflective of your product and most likely to lead to quality conversions. Driving generic traffic to your site only benefits Google; your goal is to drive paying customers to your site. With your keyword phrases set, you can begin to shape the type of traffic you want to attract.
Act Local, Advertise Local
The global reach of Internet distribution blows the ceiling off of your potential audience, but traffic must be convertible to be actionable. Use Google’s own tools to restrict the reach of your advertisement to those geographic locations that actually possess the ability and the likelihood to convert clicks into customers. For most small businesses, a comfortable travel zone provides an accurate guideline for driving physical transactions at your point of sale. Operations with a broader reach or lower distribution costs run the risk of soliciting actionable traffic with disproportionately low conversion rates due solely to geographic barriers. Customised landing pages help focus your traffic on those aspects of your business most relevant to the customer’s location.
Stay On Budget
AdWord campaigns have the ability to burn through their budgets quickly if a keyword suddenly becomes viral. Strict spending limits do run the risk of losing potential impressions, but they also keep your cost of customer acquisition under control. Qualified leads increase the value of every click-through advertisement by generating revenue directly attributable to the campaign. Unqualified or low-quality leads may not generate any revenue at all, but still incur the cost of an impression for clicking on your ad. Traditional marketing campaigns often set goals based on exposure time; a profitable Google AdWords campaign requires a tight focus on the conversion rate versus the cost of acquisition.
