Foundation is Key: Your First 30 Days
The Beginning Steps
Setting up and launching a Google Ads campaign is no small feat. It takes skill, knowledge, and patience to get your campaign up and running in ways you deem successful for your business. While it can be easy to fall into the trap of expecting your spending to immediately equate to conversions, there is much more at play than you may realize. The first 30 days of any campaign are meant to be viewed as an opportunity to optimize your campaign while it’s still got its boots on the ground. The more that you can learn from these first 30 days, the better you can tweak and strategize on how to receive a profitable return on your investment in the long run.
There are a couple of pretty crucial steps before you begin any campaign. By giving extra attention and care to how these things are set up and what the potential data can mean for your business, you give yourself a solid foundation for understanding the ins and outs of how your campaign functions. Some of these key points include:
Conversion tracking:
This will arguably be one of the most important tasks to cover before starting your campaign. Accurate conversion tracking that can give you insight into how your campaign is performing and how that performance compares to your other traffic sources is key to eventually knowing your ROI. What's important to track is going to look different for every company, so you’ll want to put some thought into what conversions look like for you, and how that can be seen through the campaign.
Demographic targeting:
Knowing who you are trying to reach and what their behaviors are online can help you create a campaign that is specifically designed to get in front of your target audience. Maybe you get a lot of conversions from parents during the day or many of your conversions come from adults doing late-night scrolling. Either way, knowing this information about the people who are interacting with your business can be great information for guiding your campaign.
Campaign budget:
The question that stands the test of time - how much should I invest in this project? How much is too much or too little? Am I starting with the right number? Campaign budgets can be a tricky thing to tackle because every company will have a different conversion goal and monetary limit, but the key to approaching your budget is flexibility. When it comes to any marketing campaign, what you put into it might be exactly what you get out. If you want your campaign to be a driving source of revenue for your company, you’ll need to understand how choosing the right budget can give you an advantage and give your campaign a strong start.
Researching your Google Ads market can be one way to understand how much you might want to start with to be competitive, but not reckless with your investment. Some key indicators that might help you when planning your budget are:
Location and cost of living
Direct and local competitors who are running ads
National competitors who are running ads
Your product or service cost
Landing pages & content:
Trying to get more people to buy your product and service usually means that there is going to be a lot more traffic on your website than you might realize. Ensuring that your landing pages and the content they hold are an accurate reflection of what you are advertising is key to gaining the trust and support of the people who are looking to support your business. This goes beyond SEO tactics like keyword plugging and backlinks (although those should be a key component).
The reliability of the content, and how well it speaks to your target demographics is a key element to gaining that conversion. They want to land on a page where the information they are searching for is clear, accurate, and engaging so that they can feel confident in deciding to move forward with your product or service.
Goals for your campaign
Finally, one of the most important pillars that you can establish for your campaign is understanding what you are looking to get out of it, and why that is important to your business. Of course, everyone wants their campaigns to be profitable and successful right off the bat, but that image of success may look different for every company. Company A might want to increase brand awareness while Company B is looking for people to invest in their product/service and Company C needs more local visibility. All three of these goals require a unique campaign setup and conversion strategy, so building out exactly why they are running a marketing campaign is a fundamental step to recognizing any success they may see along the way.
The Takeaway?
Remember, these are just the beginning steps of developing and implementing a new campaign. In the next part of this series, we will dive deeper into what to expect during your first 30 days of running a Google Ads campaign, and how the initial data can help boost long-term results.
In the meantime, if you are looking to start a Google Ads campaign yourself, take some time to work through the steps listed above and really dig deep into what your expectations are when it comes to marketing your business. If you don’t know where to start, feel free to get in touch with RevKey to start the conversation on how Google Ads can benefit you!
