The following article was written by Adinah Brown, content manager at Leverate.
Investing marketing dollars on Google AdWords can drive large amounts of high quality traffic to your brokerage’s website and prove to be an incredible source of leads. Even a small campaign with the correct adjustments, can generate a significant impact and improve profitability, but designing a successful AdWords campaign can seem like a complicated endeavor if you don’t have the right knowledge to do so.
If you are getting started with Google AdWords in an effort to generate your own leads, here are some basic tips that will help you optimize your campaigns and make good use of your marketing budget:
1. Research keywords. There are many tools on the market designed to research keywords. I suggest you begin with the AdWords Keyword Planner. It is a free tool and it is rather simple to use. Think of the keywords that you think might be relevant to your industry. Think of a combination of general keywords, like ‘Forex investment’, as well as specific keywords that are related to the services you offer, like ‘risk management systems for Forex investment’. Input your list into the Keyword Planner and the system will throw you a list of additional keywords, together with statistics regarding how often people search these terms and how competitive these keywords are.
2. Write ads that contain the keywords. Separate your ads in groups and make sure each group has at least one ad that includes the specific topic of that group. This way, users will be able to connect your ad with the phrase or word they searched for and your ad Quality Score will improve.
3. Set the destination pages of your ads to be pages that cover topics similar to those specified in your keywords. This will create a smoother conversion funnel for visitors. If someone searches for Forex trading and sees an ad that says Forex trading, they will then click on that ad and get to a landing page that talks about Forex trading, they won’t be disillusioned. This coherence between their search, their expectation, and the result will translate into a more streamlined conversion process.
4. Use Geo-targeting. If you only offer services to traders in the European Union let’s say, set your campaigns to display ads only in that geographical area in order to avoid spending money on clicks from people who you cannot do business with.
5. Measure your keywords not only by click. Don’t stop at evaluating your keyword performance by number of clicks, but consider the behavior of each visitor inside your site as well. What is the bounce rate, what is the average time on site, what is the average number of page views? These factors can help you decide whether it is worth remarketing to visitors who perhaps did not convert during their first visit to your site. After all, “up to 95 percent of qualified prospects on your website are there to research and are not yet ready to talk with a sales rep, but as many as 70 percent of them will eventually buy a product from you – or your competitors”, according to research by Marketo.
6. Take mobile apps out of the display target. According to GoldSpot Media’s “Fat Finger Report”, over 50% of clicks on mobile app banners are unintentional, so to avoid wasting literally half of your budget on accidental clicks, remove the “GMob Mobile App Non-Interstitial” from the targeting tab, which is set up by default to show ads on mobile.
7. Make CTAs different for mobile users than for web users. Mobile users prefer to call a vendor, so take advantage of the exponentially higher chance of generating conversions, and make the CTA for mobile “call us”, rather than “find out more”.
8. Decide if you can afford a certain keyword. In order to determine whether you should invest in a keyword or not, nothing more than simple math is needed. Simply calculate your maximum cost per click by multiplying the profit per customer by your target advertising profit margin, by your website conversion rate. If this number is higher than the keyword CPC in the Keyword Tool, then that keyword will not be profitable, if it is lower than the CPC, you can profitably advertise on that keyword.
9. Track, track, track. Use Google Analytics to determine how your campaign is performing. Analyze bounce rate, time spent on site, conversions, etc, to evaluate your campaign’s strengths and weaknesses and adjust as necessary.