I’ll tell you a fact as we begin. What we know as Google AdWords today had started by the name of Self-Service Advertising Program in October 2000. Today, it’s worth tens of billions of dollars in revenue for Google.

The reason: All businessmen and entrepreneurs across the globe know how important it is, and use it.

Now you understand the kind of competition we’re talking about here. So, here are some tactics, strategies, and action points to help you get more from Google Ads and beat the competition.

Understand AdWords Pricing and Strive to Lower Costs

You can save a major portion of your AdWords expenditure, only if you know how Google charges you for advertisements. Your ad copy’s quality and your campaign’s effectiveness matter a lot. Google uses a Quality Score (QS) to evaluate your ad and charges accordingly. Here’s how you can check your ad’s quality score.

More importantly, let me tell you that even a single point improvement in QS of your ad will save you significant money.

For example, if your ads fall in the QS=8 score, and a competitor’s ads score 5, then you’ll save half the expense incurred by your competitor! This frees up a part of up your web marketing budget, which you can invest elsewhere.

Keep on Fine Tuning Your Adwords Campaign to Maximize ROI

In an AdWords campaign, Google tries to find matches for your keywords and places ads accordingly. Better the matching, higher the chances of success. Google uses three types of phrase matching –

broad match (generic),

phrase match (more specific), and

exact match (most specific).

I’ll not cover the technicalities here, but suggest you give it a quick read here.

Note that unless you specify otherwise, Google uses broad matching, which runs the risk of irrelevant matches.

Here are some ways you can take control here –

Use negative keywords to inform Google NOT to match your ads with unrelated terms.

I strongly advise you to either monitor and identify low performing ads and remove them, or hire someone to do it for a month.

If your high performing ads are consuming the daily allocation of Adwords budget, consider increasing the budget.

Big businesses are very particular about maximizing the returns from their Google Ad spends, and it’s time for you to adopted the same philosophy.

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Your Conversion Strategy is a Key to Success – Be Diligent in It

The money you’re spending on Google AdWords returns its value in the form of increased business for you. However, the business comes only if a user clicks on the advertisement and then actually contacts/purchases/talks with you. Google Adwords help you with the first half, and your advertisement’s and its linked web page’s conversion efficiency. This is where you need to be open to testing different options (learn more about A/B testing here).

If needed, hire a specialized ad copywriter to get the job done. Next up, I’ll share some tips on preparing powerful ad copy.

Make Your Ad Copy Super Powerful

How persuasive and impactful is your ad copy? For starters, your ad copy must have the following:

A clear call to action

Addressing the viewer’s problem or area of interest

Clearly displaying contact information (email ID or phone number)

Clearly mentioning any special deals, special pricing, and promos you have

I am a huge fan of constantly reviewing ad copy (every quarter, at least) by comparing it with the best ads of the competitor and thinking from a consumer perspective, as to what’s missing in your ads. Check out Wordstream’s top 10 ad copywriting tips; they’re great.

How did you find Google AdWords useful for your business? Share your experience in comments and share this article with your friends. If you have any question for me, then you can ask me here.