Google Adwords - Getting Clicks and Converting them into Customers

Google Adwords – Getting clicks as well as Customers

Google adwords is PPC (CPC) program provided by Google which is an excellent tool to attract traffic on a website. Newly launched websites do not have organic / natural rankings for months, may be even a year so the best way to attract quality traffic is to take help of Google adwords or similar PPC program.

Adwords give full control to you with various tools to optimize budget spend, maximize the clicks, and extract a good ROI. Following are few tips on how to use your Google adwords campaign effectively.

Aim for getting customers / Sale / Conversions rather than getting clicks:
Every single click through adwords comes with a price tag. Remember this and take actions accordingly. If you are getting clicks only and no conversions / sale / customer then your ROI is ZERO. You need to develop campaigns, which not only attracts clicks but also the customers, which exactly is your purpose of choosing a CPC program like Google adwords.


Track the traffic on the website:
Before you start and adwords campaign, you MUST place an independent tracking on your website to track the traffic which is coming on your website. This will give you an idea of what you are paying and what you are getting. In addition to this, you can track other traffic too which is landing on your website and the source of the traffic. Google analytics can also be utilized for this purpose. Other independent tools are WEB-STAT and Statcounter.com


Budget, Bid, And Position:
The basic information you can get from adwords help center. You need to know the importance of these parameters in order to get maximum out of your campaign. The position is based on the CPC (bid) and which in turn directly affects your click volume. You need to strike a balance for the three things to arrive at an optimal combination to match your budget.


CTR:
Click Through Ratio(CTR) is the figure, which gives you the ratio of number of clicks against the number of impressions. But this ratio is so not important as for primary keywords, you may get a high value and for secondary keywords this figure can be very small. This also signifies how good is your ad copy. Better the ad copy, more will be the value.


Keywords:
When you setup your campaign, start with few keywords. Then monitor the impressions, clicks, CPC everyday and then keep on increasing the set of campaigns, and keywords based on your observation. Keep refining the campaigns, remove non performing keywords, add more secondary keywords as they have less BID and your ad will rank higher thus increasing the chances of conversions a low acquisition cost.


Ad Copy:
Keep it simple and straightforward. The copy should match the services you offer. Irrelevant references to the services will yield in mere clicks, not the conversion / sale / customer and will dent your ROI.


Ad Targeting:
You need to be specific in targeting geographical location. You cannot create a campaign selling electronic gadgets in Europe and targeting the US customers. This again is very important in getting quality clicks and affects ROI.


Landing Page:
A good landing page is very critical in getting good conversion / acquisition rate. Remember, home page cannot be a landing page. Your landing page should provide comprehensive list of services and offers you have on your website. This is the page where customer will land when he / she clicks on the ad. The page should be action oriented, literally should force customer to take an action. If it fails to do so, you will only get a click not the sale / customer and this in turn will affect your ROI. Be honest on landing page and the page content should justify the ad copy you are using to target the customers in adwords.


Himanshu Singh is the owner and founder of Bangalore based Internet Marketing firm Himshilp