It is very important to have a checklist in place which will help you avoid costly mistakes checklists allow you to be more thorough in you game plan. They help you to remember to include all the right things.
If you’re about to launch a new Google Ads PPC search campaign, Please go through the below mentioned checklist. This will help you drive good Return on Investment from your campaign & avoid making costly mistakes.
Laying Right Foundation
- Set up Google tag manager on the landing page.
- Set up Google analytics tag on landing page.
- Set up the conversion pixel on the thank you page if it’s a lead generation ad.
- Remarketing Audience Creation of Google Analytics or Google adword account.
- Ad remarketing pixels standard & event for other digital platforms like Facebook & LinkedIn as well on landing page & thank you page respectively. This will help you in doing remarketing to those who would come to your landing page. If this step is not done you would not be able to use omni channel strategy & make the most of your advertising spend.
Keywords
- Remove duplicates so that you are not competing against yourself.
- Add negatives. You need to regularly keep adding the negative keywords based on the performance of the keywords. Remove Keywords which are not performing.
- Review match types.Suggested Keyword type is Phrase Type.
- Quality Score : Keep a track of the Quality score of keywords as the keywords with low quality score will require higher bidding to get a good Ad Ranking. It is strongly suggested to have keywords in ad
Ads
- Check that landing pages are functional and downloading speed is fast. Also test the customer experience both on desktop & mobile.
- Make Multiple Landing Pages & do multivariate testing.
- Spell check ad copy.
- Ensure Ads are in line with the google policy & you are not violating the norms.
- Place Keywords in your ad copy.
- Use ad extensions Recommended Extensions are Callout, Structured Snippet & Call. This will help in getting better click through rate & play an important role in getting good Quality Score.
- Create Multiple ads & find the best performing ad before scaling. You need to see which ads are having better click through rate & better conversions .
Ad Groups
- Make Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAG) .They are better performing and gives a good Quality score & hence lower cost.
- Set budgets. Make sure budgets are enough to get the campaign going. Many good performing campaigns stop performing because budgets get depleted. Avoid that mistake.
- Specify location targeting If your project has a local client & you can even choose pin code & radius targeting. Choose your location based properly. If you don’t want outstation leads then choose your audience accordingly. Its a strategic call that you need to take de-pending upon your strength & past experience. Generally outstation leads take time to convert & takes more time & effort to nurture so you need to be patient with outstation leads.
- Select the proper ad rotation & choose ads which are better performing.
- Bidding Strategy: Suggested is manual bids, here you have more control on the cost per click. If you want to go aggressive, you may choose the top of the page bid option.
- Set campaign language targets to the language in which your website is written.
- Choose the proper delivery method Accelerated is not suggested as it will consume budget very fast.
- Select “search network only” . Don’t select search & display in a single campaign.
- Define ad scheduling (optional).
- Ensure conversion tracking is set up. Most important, If you fail to set up conversion tracking, then there is no way you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of each keyword in your campaign. You’ll be flying completely blind.
