If you are a business owner who is struggling to get people to your website, and then struggle again once they arrive at your website, you need an AdWords consultant.
What does a Google AdWords consultant do? An AdWords consultant will help make sure that your company’s ads reach the right audiences at the right time. They will also help you ensure that all of your campaigns are running smoothly and effectively by monitoring them on a regular basis. The aim of an AdWords consultant is often to increase profit for the business by increasing traffic and conversions. This article will cover everything that a Google Ads consultant does.
Prior to starting the Google Ads work
Before any Google Ads work is done, a project proposal should be drafted and agreed upon by all parties involved. This is a formal document that highlights the project’s objectives, scope and deliverables.
Depending on the size of your organisation or number of employees managing Google Ads campaigns, you will either work with an internal account manager to create a plan for how they can best help manage your online advertising needs or engage with an external marketing agency like Espan Digital, who specialise in managing AdWords campaigns.
Once all parties have agreed upon the proposal, it’s time to get started!
Research, strategy and define goals
It’s important before starting any work to develop an understanding of a client’s business, competitors and their target audience. Depending on the size of the business, a strategy can be as simple as several bullet points or a full-blown strategy.
Defining goals is important so that the the campaign can be benchmarked, tracked and measured. What are you trying to achieve? An example of a goal would be to generate 100 enquiries per month at £50 per enquiry. Optimisation and improvements can be made over time to reach and exceed the goal. A calculation should underpin the goal based on profit objectives of the business. How much can I pay for an enquiry via AdWords and reach my profit goals?
Set up campaigns
For business owners who are new to AdWords, the consultant sets up brand new campaigns in order to achieve the desired results. This can include allocating advertising budget, defining keyword strategy, and deciding what type of adverts are most appropriate for the business’ target audience.
Campaigns can be set up within the AdWords interface or by using the offline AdWords Editor which is recommended for advanced users and in my experience is useful to make large-scale changes, copying and pasting items and to change targeting en masse for example. Once changes have been finalised in AdWords Editor, they are then uploaded to AdWords, to reflect the offline changes in your Google AdWords account.
As well as using Google AdWords tools such as Keyword Planner to research keywords and forecast advertising activity, third party tools may also be used for research and input into the campaign build, for example competitive research tools and Excel.
Set up tracking and measurement
Tracking and measurement are central to achieving the AdWords goals defined at the beginning. If the Google Ads specialist does not have visibility of the performance of the campaigns, then there is limited scope for improvement as there is limited data to enable decision-making. To improve you need to see website conversion performance within AdWords down to the keyword level, so that bids can be optimised for high converting keywords for example.
Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics may be used to track website activity and conversions, such as form submissions or product purchases, in order to measure the success of the AdWords campaigns. There are also other tools and AdWords scripts for example that can help with monitoring Quality Score, which is a measure of the relevance and quality of a keyword, ad and landing page to an individual search query.
Call tracking is also an important aspect of tracking campaign performance and this is used to measure the performance of a campaign based on volume of calls into the business. There are third party call tracking systems that handle the call tracking and these days it’s relatively straightforward to set up.
There are various housekeeping tasks to ensure full tracking, such as linking AdWords to Google Analytics.
Engaging and persuasive landing pages
It’s not always required, but sometimes, dedicated landing pages are set up for the campaign. The landing page associated with a particular ad should be relevant to the offer and this increases the likelihood of someone making contact with the business.
The AdWords consultant will set up the ads to drive traffic to the landing page and it’s then job of the landing page to engage the visitor and persuade them to carry out the action you want them to, for example submitting a form or calling.
The landing page copy should be persuasive, engaging and easy to read – a good balance of benefits without overselling the brand or product. The landing page content will also need to engage visitors by explaining their offer in detail, highlighting its strengths and giving enough details so that customers know exactly what they’re getting into before signing up.
Apart from the copy, other forms of persuasion include social proof, for example customer reviews and product reviews. Anything that can reduce the barrier to contacting you may help, for example, showing off awards your business has won, accreditations and certifications. And don’t forget about imagery – you want to leave a lasting impression with potential customers, so if at all possible try and offer an enticing visual experience that will make them want what you’re offering even more.
Management of campaigns, optimisation and improvements
Once the Google Ads consultant has set up the campaigns, that is not the end of their work, it is really just the beginning. Depending on the size of client and AdWords spend, we carry out optimisation and improvements on a monthly basis, but for larger spends, closer PPC management is required. This is essential to ensure that campaigns stay up-to-date and perform well. It’s vital that the campaigns are monitored regularly and that any changes in trends are reviewed to ensure that the campaign performance is maintained and improved. The goal of the optimisation is often to maximise return on ad spend and minimise waste.
Optimisation includes split testing ads, so that we can find the best performing ads and increase conversion rates, and reviewing search term reports to ensure there are not any unexpected changes in search terms that may be affecting campaign performance. Other optimisation includes adjusting bids to reach goals, pausing or adjusting elements that are underperforming and boosting those that are performing well. There are many other points of optimisation and facilitating this are reports that can be accessed in AdWords as well as third party software, to help with improving the Google Adwords account or diagnosing issues.
Improve Quality Score
An AdWords consultant will aim to maximise Quality Score, because this may reduce the amount you pay per click. Quality Score is presented at the keyword level as between 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent). Quality Score is calculated based on a number of factors, including whether your ads and landing page are relevant. A higher Ad Rank means your ad shows in a higher position on the page and has a higher chance of being clicked.
Ad Rank = Ad Quality Score x Max CPC (bid)
So, to have your ad in a higher position on the SERP (search engine results page), the specialist will increase Quality Score where possible to ensure a higher position for the same bid. You can see from the equation above that if the bid remains the same but Quality Score increases, then Ad Rank increases, so the ad shows higher.
A higher Quality Score can be achieved by making sure that your ad and landing page are relevant to someone searching for the keywords you are bidding on. It’s a case of ensuring as far as possible that campaigns are set up in a granular way, with small groups of closely related keywords and corresponding ad copy. For example, if your keyword is ‘professional tennis racket’, then the ad should mention that keyword and so should the landing page. For the landing page experience component of Quality Score, you will also need to ensure that the page is relevant and has high-quality content, as well as being fast to load.
Set up remarketing campaigns
An AdWords consultant will set up remarketing campaigns. With this tactic, when someone visits your website, they will be added to an audience list. When the website visitor leaves your site, they will see your ads again on blogs and informational sites opted into the Google Display Network. The aim of this is to encourage the person to click your ad and return to your site to convert. This is an opportunity where the person has already shown interest in what you offer, but may be hesitant because they lack knowledge about how your product or service works for them.
Remarketing can also be used on the Search Network, i.e. the Google search results, by adding an audience with an increased bid to a search campaign. So anyone who left your site will then see your ad when they search with one of your keywords.
AdWords monthly reporting
Reporting ties in with measurement and tracking, discussed above, because reporting requires you to use real data like impressions, clicks and conversions. The AdWords reporting system is a fairly complex tool with many different reports available on the basis of what you want to know about your campaigns, for example:
- How much did we spend?
- How many conversion actions did we achieve?
- What was our return on investment?
- What keywords are driving traffic from Google search results pages?
- Who’s clicking my adverts and not converting into sales or leads?
- Which ads got clicked most often but didn’t lead to any conversion at all?
A monthly report usually includes key performance indicators such as: clicks, impressions, CTR (click through rate), total conversions, conversion rates and CPC (cost per click). Reports vary in detail as required by the client. Some reports will be shown in aggregate form to show overall account profitability. All of these metrics can be analysed and then used by the AdWords consultant to create future strategies that improve campaigns which have performed less well, whilst maximising top performing elements. It might suggest things like increasing bids for keywords with lower competition but more traffic potential.
Continued learning
A Google Ads Consultant will always be learning. The knowledge and skills required to set up and manage campaigns have evolved over time. With the continual introduction of new features, such as enhanced campaigns, expanded text ads, or advanced ad formats like video ads, there is always something fresh to learn.
A Google Ads consultant will be constantly researching what changes are happening in the marketplace which may affect their work. They might also read industry reports from third-party resources that focus on trends within advertising technology for ideas about future developments. Finally, they’ll keep a close eye on competitors’ strategies so that they can stay ahead of the game by adapting tactics accordingly.
So, in conclusion, a Google Ads Consultant will research, set up and manage campaigns. They’ll also constantly be keeping an eye on what is happening in the marketplace to stay ahead of game. Tracking and measurement is key to evaluating performance and making improvements. It’s a constant cycle of research, build, analyse, improve.
As an AdWords consultant your work is never done, but there is always a bit of time to celebrate the successes you’ve achieved for your clients!
