Performance Strategies for Google Adwords and Facebook Ads

With Google and Facebook as the two main advertising platforms, it’s no wonder that they offer the most competition and the biggest pay-off when everything goes right. With both platforms offering hundreds of millions of users, a significant percentage of businesses with an online presence now pay for ads on one or both of these platforms.

For beginners and experts alike, however, one common problem that arises is ad performance. Paying for ads has plenty of rewards and benefits, but only when:

• The creative is strong
• The message resonates
• The ad reaches the right audience
• The budget is optimized
  

When one or more of these features is off, the whole ad experience is ineffective and inefficient. Fortunately, we’ve compiled five strategies that will help to boost the performance of your ads on the two giant platforms - Facebook and Google.

1. Optimize for Mobile Devices

For those who are already catering to mobile users, don’t skip ahead just yet because you’ll still find some useful information in this section. For those who aren’t considering mobile users in their ad efforts, now is the time to get started because the mobile revolution has already occurred. If you aren’t optimizing for mobile users, you’re missing out on a significant chunk of your audience.

Especially on Google, seven in ten people have dialed a business number directly from a Google search result. If you haven’t optimized ads for mobile devices, this means that seven in ten people using Google search on mobile will call a competitor instead of your own service. We aren’t saying that every prospective client will call you after making this strategy change but isn’t it better to put your business in a position where it can win battles against the competition? Your ad should show and maybe not get picked rather than not show at all.

For us, this strategy becomes even more important when the business can cater to people on-the-go. Whether someone is on a short business trip or just passing through a town, localized ads can reach people on the move and make prospective customers out of any individuals near your business.

Optimize for mobile devices and make sure you reach every corner of your niche for maximum return on investment.

2. Always Track and Evolve

We’re always surprised to hear the number of businesses that set an ad campaign and then just leave it for weeks and weeks. How do you expect it to perform when you aren’t tracking and continually optimizing? According to Hubspot, a positive ROI is 17x more likely when the business tracks ads on Google Ads and reviews the analytics.

How many Google Ads users track their ads? According to some studies and surveys, it’s as low as 58%. For those who read this tip and thought it was a certainty these days, this one statistic shows that businesses still aren’t tracking their ads even though it’s a huge contributor to success. Without tracking, it’s impossible to spot opportunities to improve performance.

There are many applications that help with tracking these days, but the easiest place to get started with Google is the Tag Manager. With this, advertisers can assess the performance of campaigns, engagements, and even learn the best times to run campaigns. After optimizing with Tag Manager, you can focus on the targeting aspect of your campaign. The goal is to continually improve performance by hitting a more applicable audience with a more applicable creative and message.

Externally, you can also work with tools like the ones we have at Trapica. With Trapica linked to your Google or Facebook campaign, campaign improvements are automated so you don’t have to worry about a thing. Alongside creative A/B testing, our AI also automates budgeting, targeting, and other areas so that your ad is always in the best position to succeed.

With Quollo, our market research tool, you can also understand more about the people who interact with the brand. Ultimately, it’s a great way to track and evolve even for those with little experience in the ad world.

3. Manage Advertising Attributes on Facebook

Recently, Facebook released a report after generating feedback from users. The report considered the low-quality ad attributes; in other words, the attributes that take away from ad value rather than contributing to it. When an ad contains these low-quality attributes, ad quality reduces, and you may even encounter issues with policy violations. The more ads that you post that are classified as low quality, the more Facebook will punish you for it in auctions.

What does this mean? Ultimately, you get fewer results and pay more for every ad that manages to win a bid. Such negative attributes include:

• Sensationalized Language - We need to use clever language to entice users towards our ad, but this doesn’t mean we should resort to sensationalized language and over-exaggeration. Often, a landing page doesn’t deliver on promises and this frustrates users. Of course, this is the last thing Facebook wants to do to users.
  

• Withheld Information – Similarly, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about enticing somebody to click on a link. You shouldn’t excessively withhold information just to get a click; users should gather a basic understanding of what you’re offering without clicking.
  

• Engagement Bait - Thirdly, a company should never push for engagement in an inauthentic way. Spam content is frowned upon and will be punished if you’re trying to gain comments, likes, and shares in this way.
  

• Post-Click Negative Attributes - Negative attributes that can detract from your ad after a click include a misleading experience, pop-ups, interstitial ads, poor content, copied content, and unexpected experiences. With the latter, an example would be content spread over several pages.
  

The quality of your ad is essential, and you’ll also get a negative reputation when your ads are hidden, reported, or if the landing page bounce rate is high.

4. Use Local Advertising

With both Facebook and Google, targeting options are incredibly advanced. Therefore, those with a physical location hoping to pull in the locals should use this to their advantage. According to Google, over seven in ten people who do a local search actually visit a store nearby (up to five miles away). While around half visit a local store within 24 hours, around three in ten actually make a purchase.

You can appear to all those searching for a business of your type within a certain radius. When somebody nearby looks for a nail salon, for example, your ad appears, and they feel inclined to visit. The number of people looking for local services while out and about is only increasing, so we highly recommend taking advantage of local advertising today.

Things you can do to improve the performance of local advertising include:

• Create and optimize your Google My Business page
• Encourage users to get in touch
• Make it easy for people to get in touch
• Explain why YOU are the best service in the niche
• Offer solutions to the biggest pain points
  

5. Improve Targeting and Location

Finally, our fifth strategy is to focus on targeting and ad location in the coming weeks and months. We’ve said it plenty of times, but you could have the best ad in the world, and it would have no impact if you’re putting it in the wrong place. By ‘place’, we mean targeting as well as ad location. You need to appear to the right audience and in the right locations because ads at the bottom of pages very rarely generate clicks.

Targeting - Learn about your audience. The more you know, the easier it is to reach them with advertising. Don’t just assume you know your audience because you created a buyer persona when launching the business. Use analytics and check that your actual audience matches your perceived audience. Keep testing and ensure that you’re advertising to people who are interested in your service.

Location - In terms of location, the top of the page is the ideal spot because 85% of all clicks on a website come from the top position. The click-through rate is much smaller when an ad is on the side or at the bottom.

If you’re ready to boost ad performance on Facebook and Google, we recommend starting with the five strategies we shared:

1. Optimize for Mobile Devices

2. Always Track and Evolve

3. Manage Advertising Attributes on Facebook

4. Use Local Advertising

5. Improve Targeting and Location