Advanced Strategies for Google Advertising Success

Google Ads has unmatched potential to get your brand in front of new audiences and boost your results. Once you’re familiar with the basics, you can delve into more advanced strategies to boost your results.

Join us as we explore how you can implement advanced strategies to achieve success with Google Advertising.

Mastering Ad Targeting To Reach Your Target Audience

Types of Ad targeting

Targeting your ads to the right people can help you achieve the CTR (Click-through rate) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) you’re looking for. Google Ads offers a variety of targeting options, including:

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Demographic targeting

Demographic ad targeting involves tailoring ads and content to specific demographic segments of a population. Demographics are characteristics and traits of a population, such as age, gender, income, education, marital status, occupation, and more.

By understanding the demographics of their target audience, advertisers can create more targeted and relevant campaigns to reach the right people.

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Geographic targeting

Geographic targeting, also known as geotargeting, allows you to show ads to your audience based on their geographical location.? Using geographic targeting, you can make the most of your ad budget and avoid wasting money targeting customers who are outside the area you serve.

Geographic targeting also allows you to personalise the user experience (UX) by relating your ads to local events or even using particular language that resonates with your audience.

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Behavioural targeting

Behavioural targeting delivers personalised ads to users based on their online behaviour and interactions. This approach relies on the collection and analysis of user data to understand their browsing habits, interests, and other online activities.

Through behavioural targeting, you can show relevant ads that match the users’ interests and preferences, increasing the chances of them engaging with your ad.

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Contextual targeting

Contextual targeting is a digital advertising strategy that involves displaying ads to users based on the content they are currently viewing or the context of the webpage they are on. Compared to behavioural targeting, which focuses on the user's past behaviour and preferences, contextual targeting is based on the immediate context of the content being consumed.

Advertisements are matched to the topic or theme of the webpage, ensuring that they are relevant to the user's current interests.

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Device targeting

Using device targeting, you can target your ads to users based on the device they’re using. Google Ads offers three options: desktop, mobile, and tablet. You can also further refine your reach by targeting specific operating systems. For example, if your product is only relevant to iPhone, you might choose to exclude ads on other operating systems.

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Reaching your target audience with Google Ads

You can further refine your target audience by utilising negative keywords. These are keywords that prevent your ad from being triggered by a certain word or phrase, preventing them from being shown to anyone searching for that phrase. In doing so, negative keywords help you exclude irrelevant traffic and reduce your average CPC.

Google Ads also offers numerous tools to help you optimise your campaigns and effectively reach your target audience. Quality Score is a diagnostic tool designed to give you an insight into how your ad quality compares to other advertisers. Using your Quality Score, you can identify areas for improvement in your ads, landing pages, or keyword selection.

Ad Extensions: Boosting Click-Through Rates and Conversions

Ad extensions are additional pieces of information that can be added to Google Ads to make them more informative and engaging. They usually appear below the main ad copy and provide more information about your business, product, or service.

Ads with extensions usually have higher click-through rates as users are more likely to engage with them. By offering more information about your business, ad extensions also enhance the user experience and help foster trust in your brand.

Ad extensions also increase the visibility of your ads on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Without extensions, Google Ads are just a few lines of text, which isn’t particularly compelling and can be easily missed. Ad extensions significantly expand the size of your ads, making them more likely to catch the eye of someone scrolling past.

Google’s algorithm prioritises ads with relevant, useful extensions, so the presence of these will help you rank higher on SERPs. With Google Ad extensions, you can also boost the performance of your Google Ads and improve your ROI (Return on Investment) at no extra cost.

Conversion Tracking: Maximising ROI with Data-driven Insights

Conversions are any meaningful actions your audience takes after seeing your ad. Conversion tracking allows you to see which ads are driving the most conversions, allowing you to data-driven adjustments to your keywords, budget, bid strategies, and optimise your campaigns to maximise profits and save money.

Common conversion actions include clicks to specific pages, form fills, and calls to your business. Google Ads allows you to track five main conversion actions:

?1. Website actions

These are the most well-known conversions and include actions such as purchases, button clicks, form fills, and more.

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2. Phone calls

This type of conversion action tracks calls to your business that originate from Google Ads.

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3. App installs and in-app conversions

These conversions are only relevant to businesses that are advertising an ad, and their purpose is to count app downloads and other actions that happen within an app.

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4. Imported or offline conversions

These conversions happen offline (e.g., over the phone or in person) but may have originated from an ad.

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5. Local conversions

Local conversions occur whenever someone completes an action specific to an advertiser’s physical location during or after interacting with an ad. These conversions include clicks to call, viewing a menu, or getting directions.

Winning Back Lost Visitors and Boosting Conversions

One of the most effective retargeting strategies is to target customers who have already made a purchase from you with upselling or cross-selling strategies. You can use your remarketing list to engage with customers who have already completed a conversion.

You might also choose to accelerate your ad delivery, where your remarketing ad will be shown as quickly as possible before your budget runs out. However, it’s important to note that showing your ad to potential customers too often may make them tired of your brand.

With ad scheduling, you can control when your ads are displayed to target audiences. This allows you to show your ads at times when your audience is most likely to be responsive, such as during business hours.

Another way you can effectively boost your retargeting strategy is to focus your efforts on websites that show results. If you’re advertising on websites that aren’t getting you any conversions, it might be time to exclude them and try your luck with other sites.

You can use Google Ads’ conversion tracking feature to evaluate your performance on different sites and determine which ones are getting the results you want and which aren’t.

Advanced A/B Testing for Google Ads

A/B testing involves running two versions of the same campaign simultaneously and analysing the results to determine which performs the best. Your A and B versions will be demoed to different versions of the same audience. Ideally, you should A/B test every element of your Google Ad, including your copy, ad creatives, audience targeting, and bidding strategy.

Once the campaign is over, you can see which version drove the most conversions to your site and use these insights to create a campaign that resonates with your audience.

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Ready to get the most out of your Google Ads campaigns? Get in touch with us at [email protected] to find out how our Search Engine Marketing (SEM) experts can create tailored campaigns that deliver real results.