If your team or organization is considering spending any amount of time or money on Google ads to reach your target audience, you need to ensure it’s being spent in the right place.
With over 2.5 billion unique monthly visitors and over 5 billion daily searches, Google is a great place to reach users and turn them into customers.
Their advertising platform has become the most popular place to advertise for businesses of all sizes. It can be one of the best ways to get leads, but competition is high, and it can be hard to get noticed if you aren’t creating high-impact ads either by an in-house team or by outsourcing for Google Ads services.
To gain the attention of your target user and turn them into customers you need to do research, analyze every element of the ad, and optimize them before launching a campaign. When you begin creating high-impact Google ads you need to understand what they are, why they work, and the steps that go into creating them.
What are High Impact Google Ads?
Google Ads is a paid advertising platform that falls under PPC marketing, where the marketer pays per click or impression (CPM) on an ad.
It is an effective way to drive quality traffic, or high-intent users, to your website that is searching for products, services, and solutions like the ones you offer. With high-impact Google ads, you utilize user search intent to gain user attention by matching your ads to their needs.
A high-impact Google ad is one that ties in keywords, gains the attention of users, and persuades them to click or convert through the ad. This way you reach the target audience when it makes sense for them to come across your ad.
Over time high-impact Google ads will also help you analyze and improve the effectiveness of those ads to reach more people, giving you more opportunities to hit your campaign goals – Derek Bruce, Operations Director at Manchester First Aid Courses
No matter what sized business you have or your resources, high-impact ads allow you to convert users based on your budget.
Why High-Impact Google Ads are Successful
In short, creating powerful ads leads to more traffic, leads, and conversion opportunities. They allow your organization to reach your advertising goals and increase revenue.
According to techjury.net high-quality PPC generates twice the number of visitors compared to SEO, and 65% of customers will click on PPC ads.
Google is the most used search engine with billions of daily searches and has been around for decades, giving it authority in the paid advertising world. This means that high-impact ads have a great chance of reaching the right users.
High-impact ads match the user intent to your offerings, tie in keywords that people are looking for, and persuade users to click on your ad. When you take time to optimize you will increase your ad quality score, giving Google more reasons to show your ads in search results.
When you consider benefits and the user in ad creation you will get users to take the next step to become a customer. Therefore, you need to pay attention to the message you are displaying to users.
Additionally, hundreds of thousands of companies use Google Ads to promote their business. When your competition is running ads on keywords that you organically rank for, your results are being pushed down the page under your competition.
With high-impact ads you will be the first business users see when searching, it is the best way to have a competitive advantage in your industry. When you show users that your business is the best option for solving their problems by using their language and creating great ads you will beat the competition.
If you are using or planning to use PPC ads to promote your business, Google Ads needs to be a part of the strategy, and creating optimized ads is the only way to successfully reach your Google Ad goals – Ellie Shippey, Outreach Specialist at Epic Productions
How to Create High-Impact Ads
Fully understanding your audience and targeting them with the appropriate message at the right time and place is important in the increasingly competitive digital advertising market, connecting and engaging with consumers to cut through the clutter to achieve positive performance metrics and brand recall requires a few key elements.
1. Create Powerful Headlines
The headline is the most important part of your ad, most users will only read your ad title to form an impression and decide if they want to learn more. You only have a few seconds to gain the attention of the user.
Optimizing the Google Ad headline is essential to creating high-impact ads, so follow these best practices.
- Focus on Benefits: You should show the user that you solve their problem or help them achieve their goals. Advertise a solution to a problem that relates to your product or services.
- Use Keywords: An ad headline needs to be direct. Connect users’ search intent to your headline to show them they are in the right place.
- Be Clear and Concise: Headlines should communicate value in as few words as possible. Make sure the headlines are short and to the point.
- Use the Google Headline Optimizer: The Google Headline Optimizer by Poll the People enables you to write user-friendly headlines that drive clicks with the help of AI-backed enterprise software.
A headline is essential to effective ads, make sure you spend time focusing on your benefits, user intent, and the keywords that users are searching for.
2. Use Keywords Throughout the Ad
Keywords should be used throughout the headlines, body copy, and landing page you are sending users to. Think about what words the target audience searches for.
Creating ad copy that utilizes the correct keywords is a delicate process. You need to balance specific and general keywords throughout the copy to match the user intent to the business offerings while still being natural. Alex Uriarte from 1-800 Injured adds “Specific keywords gain the attention of the target users, general keywords target a more general audience. It is important to have a mix of both to create the most effective ads.”
Above all, make sure the copy is easily understood. Don’t force keywords into the copy, stuffing keywords can make the message unclear and confuse users. You have a small amount of time to communicate your message, too many words will create ineffective ads and you will lose the interest of the audience.
The intent around your keywords makes a big difference in reaching users. Why a user is searching for information? Do they want to make a purchase? Are they looking for a specific website or solution? Think about the user first, what they are trying to accomplish, and develop a copy that matches their intentions.
3. Always Add Value
Adding value through your digital ads goes hand in hand with using the right keywords. You need to write ad copy that speaks to the target users. Don’t waste their time with unrelated offers or using words that don’t match what your business does just to get clicks.
Sometimes we see ads that receive a lot of clicks and want to create copy that just maximizes them. Qualified clicks from users that are more likely to purchase or sign up are much better than clicks from a user that doesn’t intend to convert.
Defining your target audience before you create your digital ads is vital. Create buyer personas, created from user research and insights from the audience. You should ask yourself the following questions:
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Who is the target user?
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What kind of problems are they trying to solve?
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What are their demographics?
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Which types of content do they consume?
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How does my product or service make their life better?
This will help you understand who you want to capture through your ads and allow your team to speak their language when crafting your ads.
4. Remember a Call-to-Action
An effective CTA will go a long way in getting users to take the next step to convert through your ads. You need to clearly tell users what you want them to do and what they are getting out of clicking on your ad – Kathryn Smithson, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at PathSocial.
Never assume people will know what you want them to do once they have an interest in your business. Spell out exactly what they have to do to benefit from your offerings with simple, straightforward language.
Consider the end goal of your ad when writing a CTA. Do you want users to sign up? Purchase a product? Are you just driving traffic to your website? Collecting leads?
For example: if you want users to buy your product include “buy” in the CTA. If you want them to read an article include “learn more”. Make sure to use strong language and action verbs in your CTA to grab attention and tell users what the next step is.
5. A/B Test your Ads
A/B testing your ads is a great way to stay agile and understand what elements of the copy need improvement, what is the most effective, and if your ads work.
A/B testing is a way of comparing two resources to understand what works better. A lot of organizations run live A/B tests but this will only tell you the “what” behind the ad, can take days or weeks to complete, and cost hundreds.
An alternative to live A/B testing is usability A/B testing. It allows you to gather quantitative and qualitative feedback in under an hour to optimize parts or entire ads. You will get the same value from this test as a live A/B test all while spending far less. There are a number of effective remote user A/B testing platforms that allow you to generate rapid feedback and validate business decisions.
Antoine Boquen, CEO and Co-Founder of Horizons says “Consider using different word combinations in separate ads to see which copy is more effective.” Using two different headlines or body copy to compare ad designs, he added. You could focus on the benefits in one ad and the features in another. Compare both ads and determine which copy is more effective with the help of real user feedback.
Conclusion
PPC ads will continue to change and evolve but what won’t is the effect well-built ads have on users. Utilizing the most important tips for creating optimized ads will allow your business to increase traffic, gain leads, and have more opportunities to convert users. Writing ad copy can be a fun experience, but it will take some time and effort to find the formula that works best for your business.
If you want to run successful Google Ad campaigns, you should understand what a high-impact ad is, why your organization needs to use them, and the process of creating them. Every business should be constantly testing ad copy and using various tools to tweak its language, offerings, keywords, and ad design to make sure everything works toward its goals.
