Spanish small businesses and freelancers still have a long way to go when it comes to digital marketing strategies. In a study carried out in 2020, only 5% of these small businesses are taking advantage of SEM strategies, and more than 38% do not even know what they are.
If you are one of those who have come here looking for how to boost your business in the digital age, you are in luck. There are many ways to boost your business and reach more people, sell more, but in this article we will focus on the wonderful tool of Google Ads. We will teach you how to configure it to take full advantage of paying to appear first in the search results of the giant Google. Prepared?
Vocabulary of success in digital marketing
Before that, we’ll start by defining some of the concepts that you may not be so familiar with: SEM and Google Ads. On the one hand, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is paid search engine positioning, thanks to which you can get many more visits to your website, many more calls, and therefore more sales in a very short time. On the other hand, Google Ads is the platform through which you can carry out the SEM strategy by generating your “campaigns” there. This is not very different from creating a campaign in a newspaper, for example. Although you will see that there is more terminology that you must know so that your campaign is really profitable.
- Campaign: The experts call all the previous configuration before publishing an ad a Campaign. In the campaign you can segment your target audience, geolocate your ads and much more.
- Ad groups: They are the next level in the configuration before publishing your ad. In them you choose keywords by which you want to be found.
- Keywords: It is another way of calling keywords. For example “web pages in Oviedo” would be one of a web page business, in Oviedo.
- Match: Determines how closely a keyword should match a user’s search query.
- CPC: It is the Cost Per Click. Speaking clearly, it is what Google charges you every time someone clicks on one of your ads.
- : Click Through Rate, or what is the same, percentage resulting from the number of times your ad is shown, with respect to the number of clicks it receives.
- Conversion: The conversion is done when the user finally does what you put the ad for: buy, contact, subscribe. (not to be confused with clicking the ad)
- ROI: Return on investment. This is what should interest you the most. The higher the percentage, the more profitability, and more sales via SEM!
SEM step by step for beginners
Now that you are familiar with the most difficult terminology, we will help you create an SEM campaign from scratch, to achieve the best ROI.
To create an SEM campaign you only need two basic ingredients: a web page or landing page to associate your ads with and have a Google account. The most complicated part comes when it comes to optimizing your campaigns, since this depends on numerous factors. Here are some tips so you can take your Google Ads campaign to the next level:
1. Previous analysis
It is a mistake to start a campaign without being clear about where we want to go. For this, it is essential to create a prior analysis to know where we are, where we are headed and who our competition is in the digital sector. The questions we need to ask ourselves are:
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- What am I going to offer?
- Who do I want to reach?
- Who is my target audience?
- What results do I want to achieve?
- What keywords do I want to rank for?
Once we have a global idea, we can delve into how to achieve those results, those conversions. And the only way is that our ads appear in the most accurate way, when the user is looking for our services or products.
2. Three keys to choose the keywords for my SEM ads
In a paid advertising campaign in Google Ads, finding the ideal keywords for your business is one of the fundamental pillars for success. These words will be responsible for your ad appearing when users search for your services or products. We tell you the three keys to choose them:
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- Take into account the search habits of your customers, how they look for you, what they call you, how they name your products…
- Take into account the number of searches associated with each term. Although a keyword defines you perfectly, if it does not have a high search volume, you will not appear much.
- Take into account the CPC. The higher the cost per click, the more competition (more companies trying to appear with those keywords) and, therefore, the lower percentage of appearances of your ad.
To help us in this task, Google Ads itself has a keyword planner that will help you find the best search terms. This planner gives you information on search volume, CPC, level of competition, etc. Don’t underestimate it!
3. Set up your campaign correctly
Once you have followed the first two steps, it will be time to get down to work and start the configuration of the campaign. Google Ads has a series of recommendations that will appear as you segment your campaign. , these recommendations are fine to start with, but ideally you should be guided by the results data of the campaign itself throughout its journey.
In general terms, in the campaign you will target who, where and when your ad will be shown. Keep in mind that the optimization of the campaign is not something static and that it can be modified over time, to achieve good profitability depending on the changes in your clients, or their search habits.
4. Research the competition
If something is well done, why not learn from it? Look at your competition and analyze when, where and how it is displayed. If the first appear, it is that they are doing well. You can take ideas and apply them to your campaigns.
Note that we are talking about campaign settings, not keywords or phrases. That comes later.
5. Structure your campaign
As we told you at the beginning, campaigns are made up of ad groups (yes, more than one, exactly one for each keyword associated with your project). Within these, you will be able to create different variations of the ads to be able to analyze which type of ad has the best ROI.
For an eCommerce, the ideal would be for each ad group to correspond to the keyword of each category or subcategory of your products or services, to promote and position them separately.
To create the different variations of ads within each ad group, you will need to take into account the following:
- Ads must be relevant, and add value to those who search for them.
- The ads must be honest and specific: You cannot advertise vacuum cleaners, with the keyword “vacuum cleaners”, and that takes them to the main page of your home appliance eCommerce. Yes, the vacuum cleaner is a household appliance, but the user is looking for vacuum cleaners, not household appliances.
- Remember to name the keywords in the titles of the ads so that it is clear to Google and the client what you are offering.
- Add simple and clear calls to action (CTAs): “call now”, “see our products on the web”, etc.
- Do not underestimate attractive and differentiating copy to capture the attention of customers.
6. Sharpen the use of your budget
Okay, we already know who we are, our keywords, we have a well-structured campaign and we know how we want to show ourselves. We only have half the way defined. Now it’s time to say how we don’t want to be found.
Imagine that you sell subscriptions to books in digital format, for which you have to pay. Your keyword is “PDF Books”. The high volume of searches for “PDF books” on the web is well known. But almost all of these searches are associated with one more word: “free”.
If we do not define that we do not want to be a result for “free PDF books”, our impressions, or times in which our ad appears, will be many, but not realistic. This traffic would not be of quality and we would achieve two harmful things:
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- Having to pay for the clicks of these searches, when they do not fit our service or product.
- It would lower our CTR, by generating a no-value view, which would join the stats as a value view.
In addition to defining the negative keywords, you also have to establish the keyword matches very well. These can be:
- Broad: Ads can show on searches related to your keywords when using synonyms, misspelled search terms, etc.
- Phrase: Ads only show on searches that include your keywords. However, you can include other terms before and after.
- Exacta: the user must search for exactly the keywords that you have defined.
Our advice is that once your campaign has been running for about 2 weeks, pause those search terms that you see that are not giving you results or are interesting.
7. Ads with extensions
Google Ads rewards those ads that are in the first positions if it considers that your ad is relevant. To do this, it makes “extensions” available to this type of ad that will facilitate conversions even more.
These extensions will help us add more information, classify it, make the ads take up more space than the rest or make calls to us directly from the ad, among others. To get these extensions… optimize your campaign!
8. Optimize your destination URL
The success of a good SEM campaign does not only remain in the Google Ads tool. It is useless to appear correctly if the landing page or eCommerce where all that traffic lands is not optimized, or does not really respond to the needs of the client. In order not to break this valuable conversion funnel, the page must:
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- Go according to the search results.
- Have content that responds to a demand.
- The service or product must be correct
But in addition, the page has to have a good loading speed and has to have different calls to action (CTA) configured to achieve that desired conversion or sale without making the customer dizzy. And we left in the inkwell the correct indexing of these pages, but that corresponds to the work of organic positioning.
9. Your customers vary. your campaign too
An SEM campaign is not something static. Internet is not. Your clients are not. Their ways of searching, what they want to search for, evolves, and with them you and your way of advertising should change.
To do this, look at those ads that give you the best return on investment, that have more clicks, that are seen more times. We know it’s hard work (and the main reason companies outsource this SEM service), but if you’re just starting out, we…
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