Advertising on Google Ads (formerly AdWords) can be scary, anyone who has tried this will know that your advertising budget can very quickly disappear, but not necessarily give any results!
Driving traffic to your website is the easy bit and pay-per-click (ppc) is a great way to do this, as you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. However, I know from experience that volume doesn't mean quality, it is important to pick your keywords carefully to drive quality leads not quantity.
Keyword research takes time and the words you choose will vary depending on the purpose of your campaign, is it to build brand awareness, get people to sign up to your mailing list or to make sales?
There are plenty of tools online to help with keyword research, Google's own free tool is inside Google Ads, so you need to create a campaign to access, don't forget to pause your campaign so you don't start spending money!
If you're looking to increase sales, then you need keywords which reflect customers who are looking to buy rather than browsing. You will no doubt find that these keywords cost more to bid on, but the conversion rate should be much higher too.
Another key part of your research is something called 'negative keywords', these are words that you definitely don't want Google to use, without adding these you can drive irrelevant traffic to your website and waste money from your budget.
Google Ads offers several options to determine how Google should use your keywords, Broad Match, Broad Match Modified, Phrase Match and Exact Match. Without a good understanding about how Google uses these options, in determining how and when your advert appears in search results, even after careful keyword research your budget can quickly disappear.
Even when you've got to grips with setting up your Google Ads, you won't be able to determine the return our your investment and tweak your campaign as well as you should, without setting goals in your website analytics. Advertising campaigns and analytics go hand in hand and enables you to determine the level of success that you achieved. Good analytics will help you tweak your advertising campaign over time to make it as productive and profitable as possible.
Whether you're a novice and scared of Google Ads or disappointed with your current campaign I'd be happy to help.
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