How to Structure Your Google Ads?

Some Basics for Beginners

If you have never ever worked on Google Ads platform then the most important step for you is to behave a clear understanding of your objectives first and foremost.

Over the years I have worked on hundreds of campaigns and this is the most common mistake that most of the brand custodian make. Most of them are not clear in their objectives.

In my experience, from what I have seen more than 60% of the brands out there will draft a brief which will be confusing for any digital media manager or planner working in their department or their agency.

Why?

Because most of them will want to focus on more than one objective.

They aim to increase video views or impressions, getting website visitors, increasing sales and increasing or maintaining CTR or Conversion Rate of their campaign.

I am not saying Google's platform cannot help you achieve all these above KPIs but whenever you are planning a campaign you should focus on your objective of that campaign. Below are the types of campaign you can do from Google's platform but you should know how you can use each of those objectives, when and whom do you want to target?

The platform gives you a tremendous opportunity when you know how to use it correctly. Of course, Google Ads platform can help you gain visibility/reach and it can also help you to get leads or conversions.

If you want to target people who are already searching for you or a solution that you are offering as a service, even if organically you are not there on the first SERP you can be there by using paid search ads.

Again it is a process and after setting your objectives to run ads on Google you need to understand your category, competition and consumer's journey.

Some of the research that Google can quickly help to kick start any campaign is Keyword Planner. (You can click on settings and under Planning's head you will see Keyword Planner.

I am sure you have a clear idea of what you do and who your audience is but you should have a look at what people are actually searching and what are the volumes of those keywords. You will be surprised to find brand new keywords which you never even thought of or has some potential to convert. It can help you with estimated bids that you can set. (The bids and volume are not 100% accurate but will give you an indicator of what is actually happening out there.

You can directly add these keywords to your list and import it. You will be able to see the past trend of those keywords and see if there are any seasonality factor for that category. You can Geographically define your audience as well as filter by Language. These keyword ideas are what we call the root keywords for your Ad Groups within the Google Ad Campaign.

Similarly, you can use Display Planner that generates ideas for all the ways you can target on the Display Network. You can use your display campaign to bring a new audience to your site and build site visitors, you can show your ads across the website with your preferred targeting and ad variation.

You can target users based on their demographics, affinity, their online activity like actively looking for a car or planning a birthday or you can also retarget users around the web or even target users who are similar to your audience.

You can even target users on the basis of Keywords, Topics and Placements.

Which means you can target audiences on mobile apps, websites, YouTube channels.

You can target specific YouTube videos or website in here too, but make sure they have opted into the Google Adsense program which allows publishers/creators to have ads on their properties that you can then target.

Pro tip: You have the option to put filters in your targeting as well where you can only show ads to a certain demographic group or interest but I will recommend when you are starting off please don't put too many filters in your campaign because it will minimize your reach and you will not be able to understand what is happening with your campaign.

You can use external research tools to find more expansion opportunities, like which brand new keywords that y'all currently don’t have in your account, or new display placements or inspiration for the ad targeting that you might use as well.

Tools like Spyfu or SEMRush for keywords and What Runs Where competitive research for Display.

You need to know which ad objective and message you should use at what stage of the campaign and to which audience. For that, you need to understand the concept of Temperature.

PPC Temperatures

The temperature of CTA (call-to-action) has to match the intent temperature of the audience you are targeting. Which means you need to show the right message to the right audience at the right time of their consumer journey with the right CTA.

You cannot blindly run your campaign and be satisfied with all the impressions or clicks you are getting from your campaigns. I mean whenever a visitor is bouncing off from your website.

So it’s really important to understand the difference between which audience is anticipated to convert and what’s not expected to convert because you will be wasting your money when you will be paying for clicks that don’t end in results.

For any campaign you will have 3 types of audiences:

Cold Audience: These people don’t know you and they’re not actively looking for what you offer.

Warm Audience: They’re looking for what you offer but not sure if you’re their solution.

Hot visitors: They’re searching for your brand name and want to do business with you.

When your new paid channels aren’t working it’s because you’re not matching your CTA with their temperature.

So the fastest way to gain PPC traction is by lowering the “ask” of what you want the visitor to do.

All keywords have different conversion rates, but different sales rates too

Awareness - How to engage my users?

Interest - Consideration: actionable social media marketing tactics

Consideration - Action: sign up for a growth/digital marketing course

You cannot just randomly ask your audience to purchase your products but you need to understand at what stage of consumer journey are they on. You can check out Google's courses on CXL.