The 4 steps to create a profitable Google Ads campaign!

Google Ads, an essential lever for recruiting prospects!

Do you have a company with an offer or service to offer and your results are not yet up to your expectations?   If your answer is yes, then you’ve come to the right place!  In this article, we will cover the 4 main steps to launch a successful Google Ads campaign without wasting all your budget unnecessarily.  Indeed, with Google Ads, you have many targeting options and parameters, which makes it difficult to set up a profitable advertising campaign.  You are therefore likely to make many mistakes if you start without a minimum of prior knowledge.  Google Ads is above all a growth lever for small and large companies that want to advertise their products and services to their potential prospects.  Certainly not to create a money pit with no return on investment!

SEA in a nutshell 

 

SEA stands for “Search Engine Advertising”, basically it is paid referencing which is the opposite of SEO, more commonly called natural (and free) referencing.  But can we really speak of opposition? Either way, we digress…  When a user types a certain keyword into Google, he gets paid and natural results.  Did you know that 50% of Internet users cannot tell the difference between these two types of results ?

By doing SEA, you get qualified traffic and not tourists !

You attract the right people because they have typed expressions that you have pre-selected for their interest, provided you have set up your campaign well, of course.  You can also choose to make text ads (Search), image ads (Display) and even video ads on Youtube. There is something for everyone, Google Ads even being complementary to other networks such as Facebook Ads for example. They can be displayed either directly on Google or on associated site networks, i.e. sites that allow advertisements as a means of monetization.  hen you only pay when one of your prospects clicks on your ad, so it’s called cost per click (or PPC) depending on the bid you set, but we’ll talk about that a bit later.  The SEA is one of the 5 growth levers of the free program at Growther.  Interested? Let’s start with the first step.

Creation of the account and placement of the tracking tag

 

If you want to launch a campaign on Google Ads, you absolutely must have a Gmail account.  After creating it, you just need to go directly to Google Ads.  You will have to give basic information such as your contact details, your means of payment, the exact url of your site, but also tracking tags (beacons).

 

Why install tracking tags?

Because adding a tracking tag is essential if you want to optimize your campaign and improve your conversion rate.  Installing a tag is quite simple: it is a tag to put in the source code of your site  on the confirmation page (purchase confirmation or registration for example). Each time the tag is triggered, it will count a conversion.

Use Google Tag Manager

 

GTM is a tool from Google (free) to centralize and simplify the management of your tags. You can simply create your triggers (order / add basket / lead confirmation…) and your tags (Google Ads Tag but also the Facebook or Snapchat Pixel, Pinterest… if necessary). Alternatively, you can simply use Google Ads’ built-in system to measure conversions in Tools > Conversions and then adding a new conversion: Thanks to the tag installed on your site, you will be able to create and feed audiences (Google Ads > Tools and settings > Shared library > Audience management).  You also have a tutorial  on how to set up Google Ads retargeting campaigns. Create a first audience with all the visitors to your site and a second more qualified one (visitors to the shopping cart page for example).  You will be able to use these audiences with dedicated and appropriate campaigns.  Even if you don’t use them right away, create your audiences early enough to allow them time to fill up (depending on your site traffic).

 

Define the semantic field

As you have understood, you need to know what words your target is using.  This step is very important. If you rely on your intuition or logic, you risk missing out on profitable keywords.  A typical example is the keyword “Pay slip” which can also be called “Pay slip” / Payslip / … If you rely on your business knowledge, you will use the keywords used internally in the company… But in reality, your prospects may use other expressions. For example with SEMrush  you can get an estimate of the search volume on each expression, the level of competition, the CPC estimate…

• Payslip: 27,100 searches/month

 

• Payslip 8100, salary slip 9900, payslip 880…

To help you discover the words used by your potential customers, read comments on forums and reviews left by your competitors. Then, analyze them using the Google Ads keyword planning tool or paid tools (SEM rush, Ubersuggest, etc.).  The ideal is to select at least 20 to 30 keywords on which to position yourself and corresponding to the semantic field of your theme.  Some of your keywords will be exact phrases (“keyword” or [keyword]), broad match, or even related keywords. You can group them by theme, product, service, offer, etc.  Also remember to exclude certain keywords like “free” or “used” to avoid attracting unprofitable traffic. The person who uses this type of word probably won’t buy.  But also, if you sell “fabric backpacks”, you can exclude the word “leather backpack” for example.

Do you have your keyword list? Perfect !

You can even use some of them to write your advertising text! This will improve the relevance of your ad, but also your costs.  Google Keyword Planner is integrated with Google Ads (Planning > Keyword Planner). Google Keyword Planner can help you find keyword ideas with each time the volume of searches and the competition positioned. But there are more powerful tools, like SEMrush, which allow you to identify your competitors’ advertisements. Here is an illustration of keyword ideas with Ubersuggest (less powerful than SEMrush, but cheaper):

 

=> Prefer keywords in “Exact phrase”

Google Ads offers you to position yourself on different keyword formats: broad match (keyword) or exact expression (“keyword”) or even exact keyword ([keyword]). We advise you to configure your keywords in “Exact phrase” when launching your campaigns to position yourself on quality searches without expanding too much either. Next step, the launch of your campaign.

Launching a Simple Campaign

 

To set up your Google Ads campaign , start by setting it up by choosing your daily budget. We advise you to choose small amounts such as €5 or €10 during your test phase.  Next, define your targeting criteria that we saw above, such as geographical location, language, the network on which you want to display your advertising.

Start with campaigns running on the search network.

Indeed, customers will be more interested in your offer (they are in an active research process) than on the display network (not necessarily in a research process, because you display an advertisement on a thematic site while the person does not is not looking for a solution).

Then, create 3 to 4 ads (including a responsive one), composed of keywords and words that elicit action, the famous “call to action”.  The keywords and ads in each of your campaigns are ideally strongly linked. You can also choose your type of bidding, automatic or manual (if you prefer manual bidding, start with lower costs per click and increase them according to the results to control your expenses).  However, we advise you to start with automatic bids (the algorithm will optimize the bid according to the chosen strategy). But to get a good conversion rate, you must optimize your campaigns.

 

=> Add extensions

Ad extensions are required for a high quality score, so don’t overlook extensions when creating ads.

Extensions of teasers (text), links (redirects to doorway pages) or call (phone number) are easy to set up and can bring in many clicks.

 

=> Take inspiration from your competitors 

To create the perfect ads, you can look at what your competitors are doing. Just do a search on Google to see their announcements or use tools like SEMRush to learn more about their strategy.  Similarly, you can buy the names of products, brands… of your competitors. For example, if you were Nike, you can appear on the searches of people who type Adidas in order to divert some of their prospects to your offers!

 

=> Do not display your ads on mobile  

 

Google Ads displays your ads on mobile and tablet by default. But for involving products, for B2B purchases… clicks on tablet and mobile are often less efficient than on PC. You must therefore first display your ads exclusively on Desktop (PC), and put -100% on mobile and tablet in your campaign.

Thereafter, you can create a campaign or a dedicated group for display on Mobile / Tablet, with a different bid strategy.

 

Campaign Optimization

 

To optimize a campaign, you need to do some testing. The test part is undoubtedly the most important part of your advertising campaign.  And how to analyze your tests?  Partly thanks to the tracking tags you installed in step one. 

We remind you that for Google to effectively track conversions, these must be placed correctly on your pages and with the right triggers.

They will help you select your “conversion” strategy, but also improve your “quality score”, ie the relevance of your ad. 

You will thus be able to identify the winning advertising text, know what type of audience converts best, the most profitable keywords and also create a remarketing audience (people who have already visited your site).

You will also be able to know if your landing page is optimized for your objectives and adapt it if necessary.

 

=> Use Google Ads Editor

This free software offered by Google Ads allows you to quickly modify your campaigns (adding keywords, changing the bid for all or certain keywords, etc.).

This is the essential software to save time!

 

The advantage is to be able to modify the auctions on the fly according to their performance (clicks, etc.)

 

=> Create micro-conversions

To feed the algorithm and allow it to optimize (especially at the beginning), you can create micro-conversions with your tags (as seen in step 1).So you can start by challenging the algorithm on “basket additions” or “initiated payments”, and not just finalized sales.

 

 Launch your remarketing campaigns

We saw it in the first step: it is important to create audiences but it is even better to use them.  Create search campaigns using appropriate texts (highlighting a promo with a validity period, for example) or display campaigns (with the products seen, for example) on these audiences.  So you will have a second chance to sell to people who have come to your site, but who have not bought anything.

 

Check the effectiveness of automatic conversion optimization

Google has a system that will automatically increase your CPC (cost per click). When it believes that it will lead to a good conversion (thanks to its algorithm). This system can be very effective, but it tends to increase the CPC very significantly. For example, you set a CPC at €2, Google Ads can charge you a CPC at €12 in order to put you ahead of your competitors. This can be extremely powerful on keywords, but very expensive for expensive keywords that convert little… and therefore exhaust your daily budget in a few clicks.

Therefore, you need to check the conversion of this “boost” of clicks.

If necessary disable this strategy to see the before / after in terms of performance.

To do this, select a campaign, click on “Edit”, and then “Edit bid strategy”:

You can then come back to the target CPA, the CPC, maximize the conversion…

In conclusion, creating a profitable Google Ads campaign is (almost) simple!

 

We have come to the end of this article. You now know the 4 main steps to follow to launch a profitable Google Ads campaign.

If you have difficulty with one or more of these steps, Growther can help you, visit our site