Simple Google Ads Tips To Drive More Qualified Leads

Google Ads is an excellent investment for businesses in every industry and can help drive users with high conversion potential to your website. However, it’s important to note that the strategy used to run a Google Ads campaign and the goals set for it largely determines the success.

Each company has unique goals for its campaigns. There are plenty of strategies to help achieve each of these goals. One thing many businesses look for from their Google Ads campaigns is finding viable leads. Check out some of these simple Google Ads tips to drive more qualified leads.

Lowering Volume

When a company wants to use a pay-per-click campaign to drive qualified leads, a difficult decision is to cut back on the overall volume. You can typically have either quantity or quality regarding most things in life, and leads are no different. When spending time searching for higher quality leads, the volume is going to decrease.

In this case, it becomes evident as the click-through rate will often drop. Only those users that are highly likely to convert are clicking. While the number decreases, the conversion rate should experience an uptick.

Lowering the volume also comes with a lower cost per lead. These changes can feel drastic and scary, but finding a few qualified leads is more beneficial to a business than finding tons of unqualified ones in the long run.

Measure Lead Quality

To understand if your leads are increasing in quality through your strategy, you must measure it. The best indicator of solid lead quality is the conversion rate from lead to customers. The conversion rate provides you with insights into what percentage of leads turn to conversions. Ideally, this is a high percentage to indicate high-quality leads.

Target Longer Tailed Keywords

A common mistake when companies run their own PPC campaigns is targeting short-tailed or too broad keywords to narrow down the audience. A highly targeted audience is much more likely to respond to your ad than a wide one.

Long-tailed keywords will find fewer users, but the users that see them are more likely to click on them. For example, if a clothing brand tries to target “shoes,” more people may search for it—but few will end up clicking on the ad or converting on the site. If that brand targets “women’s size 6 wedges,” the people that see that ad are much more likely to click on it because it is specific to what they’re searching for.

The more specific the keyword, the more intent is associated with its searches. Check out a few strategies to lengthen your current keywords.

• Add an adjective to specify the product or service.
• Add modifiers to increase intent.
• Consider how you search online and imitate your queries in your keyword strategy.

There are many resources to help business owners develop long-tailed keywords for their PPC campaigns in Google Ads.

Use Phrase Match Keywords

Phrase match keywords are another method of improving the lead quality of your PPC efforts through Google Ads. The phrase match feature provides an opportunity for ads to show for keywords and phrases that are close variations of those keywords.

Phrase match keywords allow ads to populate for phrases with added words before or after the specific keyword. It does not allow ads to populate for phrases with additional words in the middle of the keyword phrase. This makes keyword strategy essential to consider.

For example, if a company’s keyword is “anti-anxiety pet collar,” with phrase match keywords, the ad would show up for “anti-anxiety pet collar for dogs,” “pink anti-anxiety pet collar,” and other similar phrases.

In this example, the ad would not show up for “anti-anxiety dog collar” or “anti-anxiety pet cat collar.”

Phrase match is restrictive and will lower impressions but can raise the overall quality of the impressions.

Use Negative Keywords

Companies use negative keywords in PPC campaigns to limit as much irrelevant traffic as possible. Negative keywords help to avoid showing ads to users who have low conversion potential. They’re keywords that are close but that do not accurately reflect what your keyword describes.

For example, a company that sells car insurance may want to add a negative keyword such as “life insurance” because while both are insurance types, it can avoid low-quality leads if the company does not offer life insurance. Negative keywords ensure people searching for a similar but not related inquiry are not served your ad.

When it comes to using negative keywords, being intentional and basing them on thorough research is the best practice. Ensure your negative keywords do not contain any of the exact words that your keywords have, or you risk not showing up for your actual keyword.

Be Intentional With Ad Copy

Ad copy is an essential part of a PPC campaign. It is what grabs the attention of a user and pulls them in to click on the ad. The ad copy is what drives people to your site and sets their expectations. If your bounce rate is high, it could be an indication that your ad copy is not accurately reflecting your landing page.

Placing keywords in your ad copy can help refine it and appeal better to your target audience. Producing professional and intentional ad copy can improve your click-through rate and increase the ad quality score—two significant factors in lead quality.

The more effective the ad copy, the more compelled a user in your target audience is to click on your ad. Trial and error is the best option for refining the ad copy to grab a target audience more effectively. Track your ads with different ad copy and see which get more viable clicks that lead to conversions.

Optimize Landing Page Copy

Optimizing landing page copy is also beneficial when looking to increase the quality of your leads in a PPC campaign. The landing page is the page the user goes to when they click on your ad. The landing page must target the same target audience that the ad leading there does.

If the landing page copy does not fit or reflect the ad copy, many users will click away quickly, leading to a drastic increase in bounce rate and a lower quality of lead with less conversion potential.

Tailor your landing pages to the audience of the ad. When a person clicks on an ad, the page they land on needs to match the intention of their search query. Landing pages are for the users being served the ad, not everybody who lands on a website.

These simple Google Ads tips for driving more qualified leads are a great starting point when deciding to improve your PPC campaigns. When companies notice a dip in conversion rate or a high bounce rate, often the best course of action is to find a digital marketing agency to help refine the ad campaign.