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At the beginning of your digital marketing journey, you need to conduct market research and prepare for advertising. This is an absolutely fundamental step, and every professional interactive agency should ensure that beyond setting up an advertising account and adding campaigns, the business has essential integrations and connections set up to facilitate traffic analysis and reporting. Digital marketing, however, is much more than just setting up a campaign. Once the account is properly prepared, conversions configured (you can read more about conversions in our latest article), and Analytics connected, you can move on to creating an advertising campaign. Before starting this process, however, it is worth analyzing the competition, internet traffic, and available tools, and preparing a target audience and a planned strategy. In this article, we would like to present several key methods for finding keywords and properly matching them to a given industry. Enjoy the read!
Digital marketing with Google
With each passing year, digital marketing through Google Ads search is becoming increasingly simple. It is getting easier to create a campaign, enter the right keywords, and launch it. Unfortunately, this approach has more disadvantages than advantages, as it also makes it easier to make mistakes, harder to manage and optimize such campaigns, and increases the likelihood of so-called “budget burning.” One of the most important tasks when creating a Google Ads campaign is properly selecting keywords (the phrases users type into Google) so that the available budget is used effectively and ads are not shown to people who are not interested and for whom the probability of conversion is not sufficiently high. For easier visualization of examples in this article, we will use a hair salon. The owner of a hair salon in Bielsko-Biala wants their ads to appear to people searching for hairdressing services, appointment booking, or those who are traveling through the city and type the word “hairdresser.” Google’s algorithms are designed in such a way that adding the keyword “hairdresser Bielsko-Biala” to a campaign will cause the ad to appear not only to people who type that exact phrase, but also to those who use various variations, extensions, and forms of that keyword. It is obvious that the hair salon would not want its ad to appear for phrases like “worst hairdresser in Bielsko-Biala,” “which hairdresser in Bielsko-Biala to avoid,” “where not to get a haircut,” or “how to become a hairdresser in Bielsko-Biala.” At this point, the first method for finding good keywords emerges — keywords are not just phrases users type to see the ad, they are also expressions that should definitively block ad display. Therefore, when creating an advertising campaign, it is worth listing not only the phrases you want the campaign to appear for, but also those whose entry should definitively block ad impressions.
Keyword Planner
Google has a dedicated tool that makes it easy to find the right keywords for the campaign being created. The Keyword Planner will help everyone not only prepare a set of phrases and expressions the campaign should appear for, but also plan the number of those impressions, searches, and the cost per click (CPC) triggered by a given phrase. It is an incredible tool for finding new ideas and trying to understand how audiences in a given industry search for companies, partnerships, or clients. Digital marketing in Google is primarily based on properly manipulating the target audience and keywords to match the creative to the user who will see the ad. One of the factors in pricing a single click is the relevance of our campaign and its level of match to the typed phrase. Therefore, the Keyword Planner is an ideal tool that should be used when setting up any campaign, to select only those expressions that are within the available budget and have an appropriate level of interest among internet users. The right time to use the Keyword Planner is during the research and analysis stage, even before starting to create the campaign. This is because keywords should be reflected in the headlines and copy of the ads used in the creative. Google search ads, in addition to the elements mentioned above, can also include additional extensions (more on this topic in the post 10 free ad improvements), whose use in a campaign provides an additional advantage over the competition.
Google Search
The next way to find high-quality keywords is Google Search itself. This tool offers at least 2 methods for obtaining important information about what typical users type to get specific results online. One of them is the fact that when typing a phrase into Google, it automatically suggests additional words and so-called long-tail keywords. These are usually very accurate suggestions, and using them will deliver significantly more precise and much cheaper traffic. When planning an advertising campaign in Google, a standard practice is to type already existing keywords into the search engine to discover new, high-quality user searches. Additionally, after typing our phrase “hairdresser Bielsko-Biala,” at the bottom of the search page there are usually suggestions. This is a set of between 8 and 10 keywords that represent extensions or other variations of the typed phrase. It is worth analyzing these suggestions and checking whether the advertising traffic driven from them to our site would be a cheaper and better way to gain paid search results.
Summary
Anyone can run Google Ads campaigns. Year after year, it is becoming simpler — you set up an advertising account with one button, attach a payment card, create a campaign, and launch it. However, incompetent campaign management can only lead to losing a significant portion of the budget and loss of motivation to continue marketing efforts. Professional agencies specialize in optimizing advertising activities through improving keywords, improving the quality of creative matching, but also through building the website the ads point to in a way that ensures ad quality is as high as possible. All these factors have a crucial impact on advertising costs, the quality of resulting traffic, and ultimately the campaign’s ROI. When planning marketing activities, you should seriously consider whether your company has the capability, knowledge, and skills to manage and optimize advertising campaigns. Typically, after partnering with an agency, their margin pays for itself through campaign optimization that makes the traffic driven to the site cheaper, more relevant, and better reflecting the advertiser’s characteristics and needs. Regardless of whether Google marketing activities are performed in-house or by an agency, it is important to remember that selecting the right keywords and their subsequent optimization is the first step to success, optimal customer acquisition, and driving traffic to your site through Google search. Only professional campaign management and optimization will help a company understand that digital marketing is the most effective way to acquire customers today.
