Every business wants to increase the number of qualified leads for their business. Leads are, after all, a crucial part of any business to increase the profit margins of marketing campaigns, perform market research, and much more.
And in today’s world, the inclusion of online marketing strategies is indispensable, as it lets your campaigns reach almost any demographic you desire and target the people who’d make for the best, most qualified leads.
That’s where Google Ads enters the fold. By putting your ads on the world’s biggest search engine, you can expose your company, product, or service, to any potential customers and increase your list of leads.
So here’s a full guide on how to get more leads with Google Search Ads.
Choose the Right Keyword Match Type
One of the most fundamental aspects of any Google Search Ads campaign is to choose the right keyword type for the strategy and objectives of your campaign.
Whenever someone does a Google search, the words they’ve used for the search will be analyzed to see if they match your target keyword. Different keyword match types will affect the specifics of how this match is made, like also showing your ads to people who’ve searched related keywords. Picking specific keywords for your product or service help your ad show to potential customers that are ready to buy now.
The 4 types of keyword matches are:
- Exact Match Keywords: As the name implies, this type of keyword match is a highly-targeted and narrow match type, as the ads will only be shown to people who type in the exact word(s) you choose, or tiny variations. This type of match will generally result in few impressions, due to its narrowness, but will tend to give the highest click-through rates (CTR) and usually better conversions since you’re able to pinpoint the keywords that are commonly used by your most likely customers.
- Broad Keywords: On the opposite spectrum is the broadest of keyword match types. This option will also display your ads to users who typed in their search to users who make related searches, and to searches that have similar keywords in a related topic as the word. This choice will give you a lot of impressions but is likely to bring a higher percentage of irrelevant traffic or clicks, usually not the best option because it is too broad.
- Phrase Match Keywords: Instead of using just specific word(s) for the search queries of users, you instead target entire phrases and close variants of them. This is the most common keyword type to target for lead generation, since it is still focuses, but gives a wider range of search terms than exact match. Most lead gen campaigns in Google use this strategy to bring in the best qualified leads.
- Negative Keywords: This useful tool lets you choose different keywords you don’t want to target, making sure your ad isn’t going to be shown to irrelevant queries or demographics, resulting in less wasteful ad campaigns. Keep checking the Search terms report weekly to keep adding NEGATIVE keywords to block to not wasting money on the wrong searches and improve ROI>
Optimize Responsive Search Ads Correctly
Responsive Search Ads lets you create an ad campaign that takes in multiple headlines and descriptions of your choice, and mixes and matches the different headlines with different descriptions you’ve inputted, and shows them to different users to get data on which combination of headline + description is the most effective. They recently replaced ETAs (Extended Text Ads) and are now the only option for Search campaigns, not both.
This is an easy tool to use that lets you quickly A/B test different options without needing to manually operate different campaigns and settings for it, and will rapidly improve your key performance indicators and teach you what ad copy is most effective. If you want more control in A/B testing like the old way, you can pin one or all headlines and descriptions to keep it more like the old ads and let you control the a/b tests if you are not getting good results with Google’s automation. Also, don’t test more than 1 or 2 RSAs (responsive search ads) at a time to make sure they all get a good rotation to test.
Speaking of ad copy…
Ad Copy that Works
Targeting the right keywords and experimenting with different ads won’t matter if your ad copy is bad.
You need to understand your customer, why they are doing their search, and provide strong, short, titles that will capture their attention quickly and get them to click.
But ad copy doesn’t stop at the ad itself, it also goes into the landing page for the ad.
If your campaign is advertising computer parts, the user should be met with computer parts on the landing page. Keep the landing page very specific and matching to your keywords, ads, and ad groups – keep them organized and categorized well.
And although this concept may seem simple at first, there are a few details that make it harder and more complex than it seems.
Let’s say for instance that you’re advertising health insurance. You don’t want someone looking for car insurance to click on your ad. That’d be wasteful since the click could’ve been used on someone who is looking for health insurance. This requires an overall vision for your ad copy that includes the ad copy, the landing page’s copy, as well as the keywords you’re targeting. This is why it is critical to organize campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords into common themes, to avoid this kind of crossover.
Keeping your campaign well organized, and highly targeted with specific keywords that match your ads and match your landing pages can help you bring in a large amount of high quality leads for top performing strategies for Google Search Ads for lead generation!