VII Capital Funds Key Words, Part 2

The right paid search ad can generate sales overnight. But a poorly executed campaign will result in wasted ad spend and zero results.

PART 2- Use Ad Extensions

AdWords released ad extensions years ago, but many brands still fail to use them, causing them to miss out on click-through traffic. 

Ad extensions not only make your ads stand out from the other available options, but they also help to attract clicks by giving the potential customer exactly what he or she is searching for.

Ad extensions can greatly increase your click-through rate (CTR) by giving your potential customer what they want immediately, without having to land on your website and manually search for it. For example, we can have a ‘Free Consultation’ sitelink that sends the customer to a consultation form, or an ‘About Us’ sitelink that sends them directly to a page about our company.”

There are several ad extensions available, including:

Structured Snippets: You should use these to give the consumer more information about a specific product or service.

Sitelinks: These are links to other pages on your website that you feel a potential customer might be interested in.

Reviews: This pulls review information, and displays it in your ad copy, which can greatly increase your click-through rate.

Callouts: These can be used to attract interest, such as “Free Shipping” or “No Hassle Return Policy.”

Don’t Ignore Negative Keywords

One of the most important optimization tips is the use of negative keywords in your campaigns. 

This can significantly improve the quality of your traffic and reduce your overall costs. 

AdWords gives you the ability to include keywords that you do not want to trigger your ads to be displayed.

The use of negative keywords prevents your ads from showing up for keyword searches that don’t have conversion intent. 

For example, we include ‘business’ as a negative keyword, since our business is focused on personal loans, not business loans. 

If our ads were shown to someone seeking a business loan it would be wasted ad spend.

Focus on eliminating impressions that are information seeking, rather than intent to purchase and convert. Imagine if a Lamborghini dealership didn’t implement negative keywords and they were paying for clicks that came from the search term “Lamborghini pictures.” 

This would result in a massive waste of ad spend, as these searches are looking for pictures, with no interest in purchasing a vehicle.

Adjust Your Bids Based on Geographical Location

Every business can benefit from location bid adjustments. 

There are always going to be markets that convert higher than other areas. 

If you are selling a premium product that converts well, it would be worth exploring increasing your bids in wealthy cities, and decreasing them in others, as the conversion rates will likely be lower.

You need to think of the needs of your target customer. For us, we obviously want to target the local surrounding areas, but paying for clicks outside our defined radius would be a waste of advertising dollars. 

Not everyone will need your specific product or service, so remember that when bid adjusting.

You can save a tremendous amount of money by stopping ads from showing in some areas and allocating that spend to the geographical locations that convert the highest, which ultimately results in more overall conversions.

Select Proper Keyword Match Types

The keyword match type you use is just as important, if not more, than the keyword itself.

Whenever a potential customer searches on Google, AdWords shows ads based on how relevant they believe the term is. 

Selecting the correct match types helps Google display your ads to the correct audience.

You can select from four keyword match types:

 Exact: Your ads will only show when the exact search query is types into Google.

Phrase: Your ads will show only when searchers use the phrase you input.

Broad: Your ads will show when any words in any order include the keyword.

Broad Match Modified: Your ads will display when the target keyword is typed in the order you specify.

For the budget conscious, test using Exact Match. 

It will give you the lowest number of impressions, but your click-through rate and conversions should be high because of the high relevancy.