To run successful ads, you need to first understand your market, and what your target audience come looking for in the marketplace.
Google is where people go to find products; services; answers and solutions. If my refrigerator goes out in my house, likely I am going to hop onto Google Space to go find the best repairman in my town to come fix it up.
To run successful marketing campaigns on Google, you need to be on your best behavior and adhere to the search engine’s best practices.
Failure to adhere to Google ads’ best practices has a lot of negative outcomes first your ad campaign will witness poor ROI and very poor ranking on the Google SERP and that takes you down to the bottom of the market where your competitors triumph while trampling you underfoot.
In this article, I will teach you all you need to know about Google ads‘ best practices, the paths to follow through and take your marketing efforts to the sky.
Google Ads Best Practices for Marketers
You want to help your business grow, right? The insights and strategies within these guides form the foundation for successful Google Ads campaigns.
They are based on Google’s internal data and have been thoroughly vetted by the people who built Google Ads.
#1. Improve your campaign performance
Reviewing your marketing campaign performance and thinking about how you can improve leads to a successful marketing experience.
With digital marketing, you have the data and appropriate tools to measure marketing campaign metrics, set conversion goals, and improve your campaigns for better performance, all in real time.
To get the most out of your campaigns, it’s important that you continually keep an eye on your marketing campaigns.
This way, you can assess if your ad campaign is performing for you and then make modifications to improve performance if necessary.
Campaign performance metrics track how a campaign is doing against its assigned marketing goal. First, determine the campaign’s goal, and then outline which metrics are suitable.
How to Improve Performance
#1. Ensure Your Content Is Ready Before You Launch
#2. Set Up Your Marketing Campaigns for Success
#3. Improve Performance through Thumbnails and Titles
#4. Track Your Campaign Performance
#5. Target Highly Engaged Audiences
#6. Increase Click Volume
#7. Improve Top Performing Campaign Items
#8. Optimize Campaign Item Elements
#2. Drive growth with measurement
Not long ago, marketing teams relied on just a handful of metrics to analyze campaigns and measure performance: income, expenses, and profit.
Then, the internet snowballed, ushering everyone into the information age. The rapid boost in technology, product development, and data-collection approaches created a feeding frenzy of sorts.
Marketers and growth teams began capturing and measuring anything and everything they could lay their hands on.
Their intentions were good, they thought if they collected every piece of data available, and then behold, those metrics would reveal what was and wasn’t working in the products.
When it comes to measuring product growth metrics, more isn’t always better. Having too many measuring metrics is as bad as having none at all.
Imagine the time and resources it would take to track this much data. Plus, some of the information could be old or outdated.
Other metrics might be readily accessible but ultimately lack relevance and practicality. In the end, you are data-rich but insight-poor, not a good position to be in.
Rather than chasing down any metric in sight, consider centering your product growth strategy and energy on a singular guiding metric.
Just as sailors leveraged the North Star located directly above the Earth’s northern celestial pole to navigate oceans, you can use a North Star metric to marshal your team around the top-line goal of product growth.
Of course, the sales, product, and marketing teams can still have their own subgoals and metrics to pursue.
But having that North Star shining brightly overhead keeps everyone in line, moving in the same general direction.
Because a North Star metric is focused on comprehensive product growth, there’s a built-in level of team-wide transparency and camaraderie not found in another team-specific enterprise.
However, what makes a North Star metric such a powerful measure of success is its natural relationship with users.
By definition, a North Star metric is the number that best mirrors the value your product delivers to users.
Therefore, your teams will always be aligned and working together to grow your product and brand
#3. Explore insights and tools
You have certainly heard of this little thing called Google. Perhaps you already know where 3.5 billion searches for information are made per day, if you didn’t, then know now that they are done on Google.
But Google is much more than just a search engine, so much more.
Below are helpful insights and tools for business:
#1. Google My Business: Google My Business is a tool that helps you to manage and optimize your Business Profile on Google.
#2. Google+ Business Pages: Google+ offers marketers the opportunity to create a business page to promote their business, or a specific product they have in mind.
#3. Google Search Central: Search Console tools help you measure your website’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your website shine in Google Search results.
#4. Google Suite-Docs, Sheets, Forms, and Slides: Create and collaborate on internet documents in real-time and from any device.
#5. Google AdWords: Get in front of customers when they are searching for businesses like yours on Google Search and Maps.
#6. Google AdWords Keyword Planner: If you are looking to boost your organic SEO, you will want to do some keyword research first.
Keyword research helps you identify keywords to target as you are creating a website and blog content, focusing your SEO and content creation efforts so you can get found by the right searchers in the engine.
#7. DoubleClick Search by Google: A search platform that enables agencies and advertisers to create, manage, report on, and improve search campaigns across multiple engines.
#8. Google Trends: Google Trends tells marketers what people are searching for, in real time. You leverage this insight to measure search interest in a particular topic, in a particular location, and at a particular time.
#9. Google Drive: Create and share your content online and access your documents from anywhere. Manage documents, presentations, spreadsheets, surveys, and more all in one easy-to-use tool.
#10. Google Alerts: Google Alerts allows you to monitor the web for mentions of particular keywords or phrases.
Once set up, you will receive either email alerts or results through RSS whenever these phrases have been mentioned online.
For example, you can sign up to get notified whenever someone mentions your brand, products, executives, or your competition.
#11. Google News: Capitalizing on the popularity of a news story to boost your sales and marketing success, is a powerful way to piggyback off the success of a news story that is already getting traction.
If you are interested in taking advantage of newsjacking in your content marketing strategy, use Google News to search for and identify news useful to your industry with good newsjacking prospects.
#12. Google Voice: In an era when people leverage their phones to surf the web, it’s only natural that we leverage the web to manage our phone conversations as well.
Google Voice allows you to do just that — making it easy to manage multiple phone lines, create personalized voicemail messages depending on who is calling, and easily transcribe voicemail messages.
This also allows you to measure how relevant a phone number is on your site. If you include this number on a Contact Us page, for example, you can gain insight into the needs and behavior of users who visit your website.
#13. Google Calendar: Google Calendar helps you stay in charge of your plans – at work, at home,
and everywhere in between.
#14. Google Analytics: How many of your site visitors are brand new versus returning? How long are people spending on your website? Does your web have a high bounce rate?
All of these critical analytical questions can be answered by Google Analytics, Google’s free site analytics product.
Google Analytics can give you better insight into your website traffic and help you understand how people are finding and navigating your website.
#15. Google FeedBurner: FeedBurner allows you to send subscribers a daily digest of new content from your blog, and a new title, so a new post, link, or change to the published date will trigger the email delivery.
Conclusion
Repeatedly keeping up with Google ads changes can often be seen as a cumbersome, nearly impossible task. It is understandable to feel intimidated by the experts in your industry always reminding you that if you are using the same tactics year in and year out, then you stand the risk of being left behind on some major opportunities.
I understand this and it is the motivation behind this article, this blog post is written to make your life a little easier by summing up the major updates and Google ads best practices required to give you a smooth sail through your Google ads strategy in 2023.
