2-Hour PPC Campaign – How to Start a Local AdWords Campaign Fast and Flying Solo

This article assumes an AdWords account has already been set-up for the user.

Google AdWords can be a powerful tool for growing your company and acquiring customers. That said, prior to beginning such a marketing campaign, you should understand how to use AdWords properly. Doing so will help optimize a strong ROI from an advertising budget and bypass making any errors in the process.

This article will go over how you can develop a Google AdWords campaign aimed at a Sydney-based target market.
For the sake of this article, let’s suppose you are working with a store owner who is selling restaurant furniture, with a specific locale in Sydney. The goal for the owner is to promote his goods online.

Establish Keywords

The most important factor in a successful local AdWords campaign is to have the right keywords selected and to optimise your campaign for those keywords. Although Google provides assistance with its handy Keyword Planner tool, it is worthwhile to do some manual keyword research as well.
When trying out PPC advertising for the first time, some approaches are too broad and unfiltered. For instance, using the example referenced earlier, the restaurant furniture store features bar furniture, cafe furniture, office furniture and club furniture. The last thing you should do is group all of these categories together. Instead, isolate an element of the company — in this case, restaurant furniture — and attempt to allure new leads using relevant keywords.

You can narrow down their focus by asking these questions:

• At the present time, which products or services are most popular with the customers in the business’ vicinity? Does the demand for those products/services change seasonally?
• What part of the business’ inventory/services bring in the most revenue?
• Is there a particular part of the company that should be expanding and growing?

Additionally, after keywords have been chosen, negative keywords should be selected. This step is something most fail to do. Negative keywords might be just as important as positive ones because they can stop a business from ranking for keywords or phrases that don’t produce leads. Google has created a resource for advertisers who want to add negative keywords to their campaigns, which can be seen here.

Develop a Campaign

The initial step is to establish an all-new campaign within an existing account. The restaurant furniture store only wants to seek out potential customers looking for table and chair suppliers on Google, and will designate this campaign as “search network only”.

Target by Area

The next step involves selecting the terrestrial area he intends to target. Since the store services the Sydney NSW area exclusively, pick the “let me choose” option, which allows, among other things to:

• Establish a precise radius.
• Establish a precise zip-code.
• Target precise regions applicable to his business. It might involve amusement parks, airports, schools, etc.

If you weren’t sure which areas to target, consider isolating a smaller vicinity first, so that you can remain within the advertising budget.

Bid

It’s vital to manually place bids. Failure to do so will result in Google having complete control over how much a user pays per click. To prevent this, simply select “manual bidding”, rather than “automatic bidding“.

The costs of any PPC campaign should be thoroughly researched. Once spending limits are established, it is easy to determine how much to bid.

Figure out which ad placements and keywords will be best for the company by identifying overlap between target customer profiles and keywords or placement opportunities (you’ll need to use a combination of common sense and research into your customer base and your industry). Those keywords are the ones to bid on.

 

Ad Extensions

Make use of all ad extensions offered, including Call Extensions, Sitelinks Extensions, Review Extensions, and Location Extensions. Each of them allows a user to optimize an ad, use up more SERP space, and develop supplemental keywords and phrases for people to search for.

Ad extensions are free and are usually simple to integrate with a PPC campaign

Content

With the recent launch of expanded text ads, there are new specific character lengths PPC ads must adhere to:

• 30 characters for the first two headlines.
• 80 characters for the description field.
• A display URL that uses the domain of the final landing page.
• Up to two optional 15 character “path” fields for the display URL that appears after the domain.

Google doesn’t provide a lot of customization flexibility for PPC ads, so ensure the characters used are chosen wisely. An eye-catching, descriptive headline that grabs a user’s attention should be chosen, one that encourages them to read the rest of the ad. Additionally, include between two-to-four keywords, one of which should be relevant to the business’ geographical target market. The ad should be concluded with a cleverly-phrased call-to-action that gets people to click the ad.

Connect “Google My Business” and AdWords Accounts

Contact Google Support if more information on updating location extensions is required.
The initial step in establishing location extensions is to connect a user’s Google My Business account to their AdWords account.

Once that has been done, click on the “Ad Extensions” tab. From there, use the drop-down menu to click “View: Location Extensions”, then click “+ Extension”.
This will prompt the user to connect their Google My Business account to their AdWords account.

Ensure that the locations for Google My Business are synced. Once they are, the user’s ads will display their location, which will increase offline conversions to their place of business.
The amount of locations synced can be seen in the “Account Extensions” section. If the account isn’t present, click “+ Extension” to connect the Google My Business account.

This should get you well on your way to a great foundational AdWords campaign to support your business, but ongoing maintenance and improvements can be challenging – contact us if you have further inquiries about managing, setting-up or optimizing your AdWords campaigns.

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