Google Adwords is key to the success of many online businesses.

With some patience and careful investment in time and money you can deliver highly-targeted leads, much more reliably and immediately than from any other marketing avenue.

In this article we are going to look at ten key reasons why your business should be benefiting from Google Adwords right now.

1. It Gets Immediate Results.

If you are looking for traffic right now, then Google Adwords is a great way of getting it. Your ads can be approved and running in just a few hours, so you get an instant kickstart to any promotional campaign.

The immediate nature of Adwords also means that you can get some quick split-testing data under your belt. Having initial campaign visitor data, especially to a new and untested landing page or site, means you can develop changes to your sales funnel more rapidly.

2. A Well Set-Up Account Guarantees Good ROI.

An Adwords account can be linked with Google analytics to deliver even more detailed information on how your ad campaign is performing. You can use this enhanced data both to squeeze extra performance out of your campaign and to guarantee that you are making money with every cent you spend on Adwords.

AdWords Linked With Google Analytics Goes A Long Way

It can be especially useful to use this maximized dataset if you run an ecommerce operation. Tracking codes can be added into your products to deliver information on the paths taken to every sale – and every abandoned cart. With this data, you can generate a precise ROI calculation as well, and adjust your Adwords bids accordingly.

Make sure you use the ecommerce tracking code from a linked Analytics account for this purpose rather than the default tracking in Adwords. The Analytics code delivers more detailed information.

Another part of maximizing your ROI in Adwords is to avoid key beginner mistakes that will drain your budget for little return. The top three are:

  1. Not entering negative keywords, or monitoring the terms searched for and clicked. Not doing this can mean your ads are being seen by and clicked by people who may not be relevant enough traffic to convert.
  2. Not making sure your keywords are exact match, especially to start off with. If you leave your keywords as broad match, then you will find your ads display for all sorts of loosely related searches. Start with exact match and broaden, or add additional keywords, as your campaign develops.
  3. Not using the search term within the advert text. When someone searches, they are looking for something very specific, so ensure your advert matches their need, not what you think reads well. Failing to do this will lead to lower quality click traffic and higher costs per click.

3. AdWords Can Complement Your Organic Search Placement.

Most businesses cannot cover all the bases in terms of generating great search rankings. There simply isn’t the time or money to rank well for every single term they would like. So there needs to be a trade off between what you need to rank for, and what you want to rank for.

AdWords can be a vital tool to fill in the gaps between what you need to rank for as a minimum, through your SEO work, and what you would like to rank for. By clearly understanding the keywords and related terms your industry uses, you can create an Ad campaign that will closely link with your organic search optimization work. Once defined you can create tightly-targeted landing page campaigns and funnels that Adwords traffic is pushed through to give conversion boosts.

4. Adapt Your Listing to the Searcher’s Query with Dynamic Search Ads.

Once you have a quality, optimized keyword list, Dynamic Search Ads can turbocharge your campaign performance. Dynamic Search Ads will display the searchers keyword as its ad title, causing the title to be bold and generally improving click through rate substantially.

Be careful, though — if your keyword list is too broad, this ad style can result in even more un-qualified traffic. If this is the case, you will see an immediate increase in bounce rate on your landing page.

If used correctly, Dynamic Search Ads can be a quick and easy win, immediately improving the performance of any campaign.

5. Add Rich Snippets to your Listing with Ad Extensions.

Ad Extensions are the paid search equivalent of Rich Snippets, designed to give the searcher a more informative and targeted experience. These additional details that show up with your ad can include things like links to site pages other than the one relevant to the search term, your contact information, reviews, or a link to your local Google+ business listing.

The local business listing part is important to note. To maximize the opportunity for more clicks that Rich Snippets can bring, you need to ensure you have a Google+ business page and that it contains great quality information. If you do not already have a Google business, or local business page in your Google+ account then you are not maximising your potential for Dynamic Search, nor your organic ranking.

6. Measure And Maximize Phone Conversions Using Call Extensions.

Another of the Ad Extensions, Call Extensions, known as Click To Call on mobile devices, encourages potential customers to call you immediately on viewing your advert, by displaying a phone number in it. If phone contact is important to your business, then taking advantage of Call Extensions could really benefit you.

Call Extensions Can Be Very Beneficial

To activate Call Extensions, you simply enter a phone number in your Adwords account. That number will then be displayed at the bottom of your adverts. This can be great for increasing the chances of an interested person simply picking up the phone straight away based on the strength of you advert text.

You can track conversions by using the free forwarding service provided by Google adwords. Each forward to your number will then show in your stats as a click of that type. You can also see how many clicks were on the ad headline, compared to the phone number using the conversion tracking options in your account.

7. Discover the Keywords Your Visitors Are Actually Using.

Clearly a strategy to push people towards paid advertising, Google has now removed organic keyword information from Google Analytics accounts. This means you can only guess at how people are searching to find your site.

Within Adwords however it is possible to still see the terms people are using to get to your site. This can sometimes be a bit of a shock, especially when you see how many non-buying terms are costing you clicks.

So keep on top of the keywords being used by viewing them every day. You can then quickly exclude those which are irrelevant but costing you money, and also spot opportunities that you can use to target through your organic search optimization plan.

8. Expand Your Listing Beyond the Search Page with Remarketing.

But it is an incredibly targeted way of wringing every last piece of conversion potential out of your existing ad-generated site visitors.

Remarketing allows you to target people who visited your site within a certain amount of time.

Those visitors can then be targeted for more advertising once they have left your site. Using your Adwords account you can target them for further advertising when they visit other sites in the Google content network.

Remarketing becomes an even more laser-targeted weapon when it is combined with goal funnels set up in Google Analytics. You can analyze goal funnels to spot opportunities for Remarketing. This can be an amazing tool for ecommerce sites because you can target people who abandoned a shopping cart. Getting even deeper into this, you can use Remarketing to target segments of your customers who did things like open promotional emails, or look at a specific category of products.

Note that you can only set up goal-based Remarketing using the code from Analytics. If you use the Remarketing code downloaded from an Adwords account, it only allows you to set up Remarketing lists based on page visits.

Once set-up, your Remarketing list can be tailored to suit your exact needs. You choose the time period over which the exited user will see your ads, where they will see them and how often.

It is vital to remember that the idea of Remarketing is to get your brand back in their face, but without saying “I Know What You Did Last Summer”.

Be subtle and use a different approach to blasting your ads at them on every site they visit that displays Google Ads. You may have experienced this yourself – it can be a bit unsettling and make you NOT want to click if you see repeated adverts for the exact product you just looked at.

9. Schedule Your Ads To Target The Times When People Want To Find You.

Adwords allows you to schedule exactly when and where your adverts will be displayed. This can be a great tool to minimize the effect of casual, or non-targeted searchers impacting on your advertising budget.

You Can Choose When Your Adverts Are Displayed

If you want your adverts to display during east coast USA business hours, you can do that. If you want to exclude your adverts being shown at weekends, you can do that.

Mixed with geographic targeting, this will give your advert the best chance of being seen and clicked only by the right people.

10. Adwords Is Still King.

Although Google’s main rival, Bing, has gained some ground in terms of search traffic and advertising revenue, Google and their 70% market share still dominates in terms of getting a rapid return on your investment.

On top of that, there are so many online communities and expert sites dedicated to Adwords, that you can always get great information in comparison to trying to use another ad platform.

Adwords should be your first choice for your paid advertising campaigns. Only when you have maximised the data and funnels and wrung every last lead out of Adwords should you really consider using another platform in tandem.

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