Starting a Local Business AdWords Campaign

A local business AdWords Campaign is a great way to reach your audience through the power of search engines.

You can target your Ads to reach people at the exact moment they are searching for what your local business offers. AdWords campaigns offer qualified leads that increase your chance of converting them into a sale.

So, where do you start with a local business AdWords Campaign?

1) Set Clear Goals and Track Everything

Before starting a local business AdWords campaign you need to set your benchmarks. These goals will help you to determine if your AdWords Campaign is achieving what you expect it to. Set yourself a budget, work out how many sales you need to cover that budget and begin your keyword research to determine your cost-per-click.

2) Perform In-depth Keyword Research

Keywords are the lifeblood of an AdWords Campaign. The right keywords, and the wrong ones, can make or break how effective your campaign will be. Take the time to research thoroughly. It will be worth it in the long run.

Look at your current product and services pages. The chances are the majority of you main keywords will be here. Look at your main competitor’s pages for any additional keywords. Make a list of all these main keywords.

Then think of the key modifiers that your customers might be using to find your business. Then think of the words that might be related to the action you want them to take. These key modifiers can be things like [your suburb] + [main keyword] or [description] + [main keyword]. For example Best Green Summer Dress – ‘Summer Dresses’ would be the main keyword with ‘Best’ and ‘Green’ being the key modifiers.

Use Google’s Keyword Tool to determine the search volume for these keywords with the key modifiers. This will determine whether people are actually searching for those terms. It will also show you related keywords that may help you to figure out further keywords to use. There’s no point in using keywords that no one is searching for.

If you’re struggling to come up with keyword ideas. Use your main keyword, type it into Google search, scroll to the bottom of the page to see related searches. This will often include key modifiers or related keywords.

Look at your competition that is using AdWords Campaign to boost their business. Get an idea if they are constantly using it if so it can be a great indicator as to whether AdWords will help you drive more business.

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3) Revisit Your Goals

Now you have a selection of keywords, use the Google Keyword Planner to figure out your cost-per-click. This is how much it cost each time someone clicks on your Ad. Keep in mind that every time someone clicks on your Ad doesn’t mean it will convert into a sale. As you track your clicks vs conversion you’ll be able to work out a more sustainable AdWords campaign, but when starting out go off a conversion rate of 1%. If you convert more great, but always go with the worse case scenario.

What is your Return on Investment (ROI)?

If a click costs you $10 and you have a 1% conversion that means it takes 100 clicks to get 1 sales costing you $1000. You want to make sure that your product or services covers the cost of those 100 clicks. If it doesn’t, you need to look at how you rework you website content to convert more of your clicks or find a way to create a more targeted AdWord Campaign for a lower cost-per-click.

4) Make Sure Your AdWords Campaign Uses Negative Keywords

The use of negative keywords in your AdWords campaign is just as important as your main keywords. Negative keywords are the keywords you set for search terms that you don’t want your Ad to appear on.

These negative keywords will help to lower the number of click from irrelevant searches – people who may be looking for something loosely related to your industry but aren’t actively looking to buy or carry out whatever action you’d like them too. This not only increases your conversion rate but saves you wasting money on clicks that don’t get you any closer to a sale.

Negative keywords in combination with your selected keywords allow you to actively control who is viewing your ads. It gives you greater control over reaching your ideal customers and reaching your marketing goals.

5) Track and Measure Results

You’ve already set your goals. You’ve done a rough calculation to see if your campaign will be viable. Now you need to put this into action and track everything to make sure your results are genuine. Make sure that the traffic from your Ads to your website is being tracked.

Although you may be reaching your number of clicks, how many are taking action once on your site? Track your landing pages to see what customers are doing once they have clicked on your Ad. Are they leaving straight away? It could be an indicator that the keywords in your AdWords campaign are targeting the wrong people or you may need to change your call to actions or the placements of your sales buttons aren’t in the optimal place.

Give it time to the track the results. AdWords are constantly in flux due to a number of factors, you might see clicks on your Ads drop for one reason or another. You can’t go off only one week. This may be a good indicator but you need to look at a longer testing period to determine whether or not an AdWords campaign is a viable long term marketing option for your business.

6) Split Test Your AdWords Campaign

There’s more than one way to achieve your goals with an AdWords Campaign. Don’t simply rely on the same text for different Ad Groups. Test wording and layouts. Rearrange the order. Try one with a price and one without. Maybe one with a strong call to action and another with something less forceful.

AdWords Marketing isn’t meant to be set and forget. Testing and reworking your Ads to get the best results is a must. Otherwise, you’ll never reach your goals. A simple change can greatly increase you conversion rate.

Testing and reworking you Google Ads can also allow you to get better results, reducing your cost-per-click while gaining better engagement for your desired audience.

However, you don’t want to be making changes to you campaign every hour. Give it time, to collect data and make informed decisions. This allows you to judge which keywords are performing and where the best improvements can be made. Ideally, you should look at making slight changes to your AdWords Campaign every week with a full audit every month or two weeks depending on the performance results.

7) Is Your Business Mobile Ready?

Lastly, make sure your Ads and website a responsive for different mobile devices. The growing use of mobile devices for search means that if your not mobile ready you’re missing out on a large segment of your target audience. If you site or Ad are hard to view on mobile devices your target audience won’t take action.

If you know your target audience will be searching for you on Mobile you can set different AdWords Campaigns to target mobile devices specifically. Google have introduced a great feature that mobile Ads can have a one-click call to your number directly rather than having them go to a landing page. They click on your Ad and their mobile device will call your number.

If you’re not targeting mobile devices you’re losing out on qualified leads.

AdWords are a constantly changing beast. Morphing and adapting to market fluctuations and the external factors of the world. Fine tuning your AdWords campaign and customising it to get the best results are key to running a successful AdWords Campaign. You can’t be content to let your Ads sit there. If you do, you’re simply flushing money down the drain.