The Google Ad Grant a/c is an incredibly useful tool. However, using it effectively can take a lot of time and energy. Since charities often have limited time and resources here are my top 5 tips to save time and improve results for any PPC activity you use to support your online Christmas Campaign.
(1) Set a clear, realistic objective with a specific target
People using the Google Search Network are actively considering undertaking an action, or are in the pursuit of information. Your campaign should also have some kind of action or event as its macro conversion. Do you want people to call you? Do you want Newsletter sign ups? Do you want Donations?
The most successful campaigns on the Google Search Network are the ones where the objective of the organisation serving the ad exactly matches the objective of the individual seeing the ad. You need to be very clear about the specific action you want your campaign to deliver, and you need to have a target number of results for the campaign to deliver. By spending time at the beginning ensuring you have a realistic and specific target you will save time by avoiding starting unrealistic campaigns.
(2) Record your campaign performance
By setting targets and measuring performance at the end of your campaign you will be able to see what sort of return your time and energy delivered, this is extremely important for organisations with limited resources. It will also create historical data that will be very useful in improving the performance of any future campaigns, or in assessing whether or not they are worth undertaking.
(3) Create a remarketing list early (RLSA)
For many websites around 90% of first time visitors to the website will leave without performing the action desired by the owner of the website. By starting your campaign early and creating remarketing lists you should be able to improve the performance of your campaign. Remarketing lists need a minimum number of members, which is why you need to start populating the list as early as possible. It is best practice to have a cookie disclaimer on your site, your visitors have a right to know you use cookies.
(4) A/B test your ads and improve them, check your Search Terms & Keywords and improve them, this takes time but will improve performance
Although the Google Ad Grant a/c does not let you properly auto-rotate and A/B tests your ads you can do it in practice by creating more than one ad in each adgroup. If one ad shows a much higher CTR, remove the worse performing ad and create a new variant, or remove the poorer performing variant.
+broad +match +modifier is probably the most useful match type for keywords in a Google Grant adwords account, in terms of balancing the performance of the account with the time spent managing it. It is narrower than the standard broad match type, so that helps quality score, but it is also broad enough that you will start seeing useful keywords appear in your Search Term results. If these have good CTR or conversions add them to your keyword lists.
(5) Landing Page experience, quality & activity
The landing page is the final critical part of the equation. With over half of searches on mobile devices and over 70% of searches on 3G or slower you need to make sure your page is optimised for mobile. The quickest and easiest fix if your page load speed is slow, is to keep the file size of your landing page images as small as possible.
The landing page must also be the precise page on your site where the user will perform the desired action. If you have done all of the above it will help your chances of success in your Christmas campaign, and hopefully saved you some time. Best of luck.
Upcoming Adwords for Christmas Lecture with Irishcharitylab.org
To get even more out of your Christmas Adwords activities join myself and Jean O'Brien from Irishcharitylab.org for our Adwords for Xmas seminar. This seminar will cover:
Setting realistic objectives
Creating donation campaigns
Creating campaigns that sell Christmas products
Landing pages
Remarketing
How to measure your campaigns
Q&A and Discussion