Google’s paid search is an invaluable part of the marketing mix. On Google alone, 3.5 billion searches are made daily. People are likely searching for your product on a daily basis, and, of course, you want your website to show up in those search results when a potential customer is looking for you. While SEO is an important service to ensure your website is showing organically, it can take months to see results. Google Search ads put your site in front of relevant searches immediately. As a Pittsburgh web design and marketing company, we’ve compiled a guide to help you with Google Adwords. 

Types of Google Searches

A Pittsburgh web design company breaks down types of searches

All of those 3.5 billion daily searches can be segmented into three categories: navigational, informational, and transactional. With each category comes different tactics for marketing. After you’ve created a website with a Pittsburgh web design company, you’ll want your site to show up for these searches.  

• Navigational searches. With navigational searches, people are most generally looking for a specific website. This would occur when someone searches in the Google search bar rather than the browser’s navigation bar. The top navigational searches on Google, for example, are “facebook” and “youtube,” so those people are likely looking for those websites. To successfully target navigational searches, you should be bidding on your branded keywords and variations of what people may search for you. Ideally, SEO efforts will push your website to the top organic search results, but by bidding on your branded keywords, you’ll be sure to have a result to your page at the very top to compliment your organic search results. This way, the search engine result page gives the person searching more options to click on your website. 
• Informational searches. Quite literally, informational searches are search queries looking for more information on something. The user intent is usually to find a how to, a step-by-step guide, or more information on a specific topic. The searcher usually is not looking for a specific site or to make a transaction, so it’s not typical to bid on this type of search query. Instead, you’ll want to focus more on SEO efforts here where it relates to your product. For example, if you sell shoes, you may want to write a step-by-step guide on how to clean and care for your shoes. 
• Transactional searches. For transactional searches, the person searching is either looking for a specific product or brand or a general product. These searches are more likely to lead to a purchase, or the searcher is going to make a purchase soon. These queries as they relate to your business are the best keywords to bid on for selling a product and are likely to deliver the highest ROI. 

Building a Google Search Campaign

Tips on building a successful google search campaign

A Google Search campaign consists of a campaign, ad sets, and ads. When starting a new campaign in Google Ads, you’ll see many options for goals you can select. Different goals are optimized for different types of advertising campaigns (display, video, shopping, etc.), but for search, the goals narrow down to sales, leads, and website traffic goals. You can also opt to create a campaign without a goal. You’ll have to select a goal that most aligns with what you want to accomplish on Google Ads. 

• Sales goal. The sales goal is intended to drive sales or conversions with features to initiate the start of a purchase. 
• Leads goal. This goal is meant to help encourage customers to sign up for a newsletter or provide contact information in some way. 
• Website traffic goal. Selecting the website traffic goal helps drive people to your website by helping researching customers find the type of products they’re searching for. 

Once you have your goal chosen, choose your location, your budget, and your bidding strategy. 

Adding Ad Extensions

The importance of ad extensions in your search campaign

Ad extensions expand your ad to provide additional information to your potential customers, allowing for greater visibility and more prominence on the search engine result page. Adding ad extensions can help you increase your clickthrough rate on your ads by up to 15%. Ad extensions aren’t always guaranteed to show up with your ads, but when your ad’s position and rank is high enough, the extensions will show. You can choose from many different extensions, including callout extensions, sitelink extensions, and click to call extensions. 

Creating Ad Groups

Tips on ad groups for your Google Search Campaign

No matter how large or small your Google Search campaign is, you’ll want to be sure your ad groups are highly organized. For each ad group in a campaign, center it around a theme of your products or services. If you have multiple sets of products, you’ll want to create separate ad groups for each. For example, if you sell clothing, you may want to separate your ad groups based on the different types of clothing you sell. If you want to segment your themes based on location or budget, you’ll need to create a separate campaign—all of the ad groups in one campaign will follow the same segmentation. 

Planning out your keywords

Finding the best keywords for your campaign

After you plan out your ad groups, you’ll need to add keywords to the appropriate ad group you’re building. If you’re at a loss of where to start, Google has a Keyword Planner tool to help you get started. The Keyword Planner can help you discover new keywords, see monthly search volume, determine the cost of your campaign, and create new campaigns. You’ll start with keyword ideas you already have or a website so that Google can recommend keywords. Once you have a good group of keywords with appropriate search volume, you’ll have to choose keyword matching options. Your options are broad match, broad match modified, phrase match, and exact match. 

• Broad match. Broad match keywords include no special symbols around your keywords. Your ads will show on searches with close variations of your keyword, relevant searches, and relevant variations, but your keyword doesn’t have to be present in the search query. 
• Broad match modified (+keyword). Broad match modified keywords include a “+” in front of each word in your keyword phrase. Your ad will show on searches that include terms with the same meaning and may include additional words between the terms. 
• Phrase match (“keyword”). Phrase match keywords have quotation marks around the entire phrase. Your ad will show on queries that match the phrase and could include additional words before or after but never in between. 
• Exact match ([keyword]). With exact match, you’ll include brackets around the entire keyword phrase. Your ads will show on exact matches of the term or for terms with close variations of that exact term with the same meaning. 

Creating ads for your search campaign

Discover the different ad types you can use to grow your brand

After you’ve created your ad groups, you’ll have to create your ads that will run with your ad campaign. Any web design or marketing company will recommend that all search campaigns have at least two expanded text ads and at least one responsive search ad. 

• Expanded text ads. When creating an expanded text ad, you’ll be prompted to fill out three headline fields (one of which is optional but recommended), two description fields, the URL which the ad will take the user to, and two optional path fields. 
• Responsive search ads. For the user, a responsive search ad looks just like an expanded text ad in presentation, but the setup is a little bit different. For this ad, you’ll add up to 15 headlines and up to 4 descriptions. Your headlines and descriptions will show up in any order depending on the users search term. You’ll want to include as many of your keywords in your headlines as possible. Like the expanded text ads, you’ll enter a URL to take the user to and can add two optional path fields. 

Optimizing your Google Search Ads

Tips from a web design company on how to best optimize ads

After your ads are up and running, performance is the next step in monitoring your ads. Depending on your goal for your ads, some metrics may be more important than others, but overall, you should monitor your impressions, clicks, click-through rate, cost, cost-per-click, and any conversions you’re tracking.  After you spend some time monitoring your ads’ performance, you can optimize your campaign further. 

• Add negative keywords. If your ads are showing based on search terms that aren’t relevant to your business, you can add negative keywords to your campaign so that your ads don’t show to irrelevant searches. 
• Change the copy in your ads to help improve your CTR. One way to improve your CTR is to improve the copy on your ads. Try highlighting what makes your business unique, adding promotions you’re running, and use strong calls-to-action in your ads. 

Running Google Ads for your company may seem complex, but the more you experience setting up ads, the easier it gets. Thinking about running Google ads for your company but don’t want to manage the ads yourself? Responsival, as a Pittsburgh web design agency, has experience running successful Google Ads campaigns. Get in touch with us today to learn more about how we can help.