7 Football Tips That Save You Money on Google Ads
It’s all kicking off these days with the Champions League, Europa League, and club competitions all coming to a climax.
Here at Marketing Mavens, there’s been plenty of buzz about the latest scores, so we’d thought we’d try to combine our love of football with our marketing expertise.
So, what can football teach you about Google Ads? In our opinion, quite a lot. Stick around for our 7 football tips that will stop you wasting so much money on Google Ads.
Landing Page Optimisation
Even the best advert will fail if it points to a landing page that either doesn’t convert or fails to provide the right user experience. No matter how good your advert is, it’s the landing page that will get the job done.
Think of it like this: the Google Ad provides the assist, but it’s the landing page that scores the goal. And while you need both, the landing page is always the one that gets you on the scoresheet.
Specifically, a form. Whether it’s a contact form, download form, or pop-up, you need an action that someone can undertake so that you can capture their details.
After all, once the customer leaves Google, it’s your website’s turn to take over and impress. You’ll need micro-conversions, relevant ad copy, and engaging content to keep your customer intrigued.
Remember that most customers won’t even know who you are, so their default setting is to leave your website. Your landing page needs to give them a reason to stay.
Use Your Youth Academy
Creating a new Ad Group is like promoting a youth player. You’ve got to nurture the potential and work hard to optimise their performance. That comes with time and dedication. A new Ad Group is never going to start converting on its own, just like few youth players make the first team without the right guidance.
Find the right keywords, experiment with bid strategies and find the balance before plunging all your money into a new ad group. Trust us, it’ll be worth it.
Besides, who says you can’t win anything with kids?
Negative Keywords & Scouting
The only thing more important than finding the right keywords is selecting the right NEGATIVE keywords. A Negative Keyword is essentially all the things you don’t want your ad to show up for.
Think of Negative Keywords like your scouting parameters. If you’re looking for a striker who can get you 20+ goals a season (who isn’t these days?!), then what’s the point in looking for a goalkeeper? Plus, can he do it on a cold, rainy night in stoke?
Make sure to be critical about the keywords that trigger your ads. They need to be representative of your ideal buyer, so that you can accurately predict their search behaviour. If you’re still struggling to pin-point your ideal customer, then check out our useful Buyer Persona Guide.
Bid Adjustments
Away goals count double right? Well, Google Ads just became the second leg of a European fixture, and you set all the rules.
Bid adjustments give you the possibility to configure your own rules and adjust how high you want to bid on certain devices, times, demographics, locations, and more. You can get as granular as you want – just make sure you’ve got the figures to back up your decisions.
For example, if you’re twice as likely to convert on mobile, then it’s more than justified to stick an extra 25% on mobile bids to ensure your ad shows up as frequently as possible.
Conversion Tracking & VAR
Conversion Tracking is a must. Otherwise you won’t know how your ads are performing and you’ll struggle to optimise them.
Running a Google Ads campaign without implementing conversion tracking is like being a football referee without VAR. You would manage, and you might think you’re making the right decisions, but you never really know for sure.
If you’re struggling with conversion tracking, check out Google Tag Manager, which allows you to set up reliable conversion tracking templates which you can link with your Ad account.
Experiment with Different Tactics
Every manager has a trick up their sleeve. It could be a tactical substitution, an alternative formation, or a small tweak that has a huge impact.
With Google Ads, you need to embrace experimentation and try new things. This will allow you to exploit cheaper long tail keywords, while discovering new call to actions that elicit a positive response from your potential buyer. It may feel like wasting money on an unproven strategy, but if it works, it may just allow you to lower your cost per conversion and boost your ad performance.
Plus, this allows you to adapt to the unique circumstances of your business.
Not met your sales targets for the month? Go on all-out attack.
Just had your best month ever? Try to consolidate your learnings so that you don’t get overconfident and underestimate your opponents.
Quick tip: The new responsive text ads are a great way to automate successful keyword and phrase combinations within your ad texts. Instead of a static Headline and Description, Google Ads will automatically start joining up different elements in order to find the winning formula.
Ad Extensions & Football Chants
What good would football be without the chants? Atmosphere is what makes each game special and ad extensions are the football chants of AdWords.
Callouts, for example, are great tools to shout about what makes your business special. Sometimes, Google Ads can get a bit sterile, as business feel they need to keep things professional and informative. As a result, we always recommend trying out some unique and personal callouts. Plus, most ad extensions won’t always show up, so there’s less pressure on you to find the magical combination.
These days, you can even set up message extensions, which – when clicked – take someone directly into their text messages, where you can prepopulate a text field that they can then customise. It means people are now never more than a convenient click away from getting in touch.
Get A Google Ads Audit
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed learning a few tips about Google Ads. But, most importantly, we hope you’ve chuckled at all the football references.
Google Ads is constantly changing, so there will undoubtedly be all sorts of exciting new updates that you can take advantage of. If you’re struggling to get the most out of your Ads, why not sign up for a free Google Ads Audit? Shoot us a message to let us know what you want us to focus on, and we’ll give you some suggestions for improvements
