We always try to provide our clients with great initiatives and projects to help with expansion in paid search and adapt to newer Google updates and betas. Last week, Hanapin created an infographic that you should print and post in your office area right away for a quick reference on how to stay on top of your lead generation game!
Now that you printed off your cheat sheet for success, we are going to discuss some of the topics covered on the infographic in depth to help you brainstorm how you can best use these tactics in your current campaigns.
Geo-targeting
It is no secret that you need to target by location if your client only services a certain area. There are several ways you can target by geo location – some of our clients focus on a mile radius around their school while others focus on zip codes surrounding the area. One way to optimize your targeting is to run a “Users Location” report in the AdWords dimension tab and analyze which towns your users are coming from.
When we ran this report for a client and looked at a map, we did find a correlation with towns near major highways. We added these smaller city locations and bid higher for these users. Of course, you can do the reverse exercise and see where users are spending without converting and remove these locations.
Ad Customizers
These handy ad customizers help take some of the work of writing ad copy for you. Joe Martinez has a great blog about using these different customizers to work for you. We are going to continue with our geo-targeting example from above to help you build a more granular ad.
You have pulled your reports, done your research, and noticed that some cities convert at a higher rate. Instead of writing ad copy and making many of ad groups for each location, you can use ad customizers to insert the name of the town into your ad copy. This ad stands out to your user by saying, “Hey you, we know you are in a different town but you can still go to school here!”
Not only can you use ad customizers to make your ads more granular by location, but you can use these customizers to show different ads depending if your user is on a mobile device or on desktop. These IF functions in ads save you from writing two types of ad copy and allows for a different CTA depending on device. The images below show how the CTA changes by how the user found our ad.
Desktop
Mobile
If you want to go deeper with IF Functions, our own Secret Jake wrote a great piece to help you see the world of if possibilities.
Now for my last ad customizer for lead gen pitch, using the countdown function to create urgency for your users. Countdowns are great for ecommerce clients because these ads can show when a promotion is about to end, or the availability of the product you want to buy.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t be afraid to try some different ad customizers” username=”DianeChelius”]
With educational clients, you are selling a program, but you can still use these countdowns to show some urgency about when a program is about to begin or when enrollment for the next semester is about to expire. With countdown ads, you will need at least two active ads in your ad group, one static ad where there is no ad customizer and one ad where you have the ad customizer in place. Once your countdown hits zero these ads will pause, but I would recommend using labels for urgency ads to make sure that these ads turn off at the desired time through automated rules.
Don’t be afraid to try some different ad customizers, even if they are tailored to traditional ecommerce clients. With these ads, we created some urgency and saw an increase in CTR. Below is a comparison of our static ad versus our countdown, and the results made for one happy EDU client.
Final Thoughts
While we only covered a few of the topics on the infographic that is currently hanging by your computer (wink wink, nudge nudge), that infographic has a lot of information that could cover several blog posts.
We learned that the more granular you are with geo-targeting and pulling location reports, the more opportunities you have to increase or decrease bids to optimize your campaigns. You can also go a step further and use ad customizers in several ways to help build more specific ads to focus on your users’ location, device, and create urgency during the end of an enrollment period. If you find more ways to use ad customizers in your lead generation client accounts, please contact me @DianeChelius and we can keep the ad customizer love alive!
