How to Track your Brand’s Ad Results on Google

Advertising on Google tends to get quicker marketing results for marketers. The reason smart marketers really take advantage of Google ads to reach new customers and grow their brands. You can never know how well your Google ads are doing if you cannot effectively track the ads. Without good tracking, you could be wasting a lot of resources, time and money on ads and end up with very poor results.  If you decide to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for instance, it is essential to diligently track your ads performance data. If you do, it is easy for you to see how well your ads are doing. You must therefore understand how PPC performance works before you can effectively track the success of your Google ads campaigns. That is about the best way to know how well you are doing and if you are getting the most out of your advertising budget.

Following are recommended steps you can take to effectively track your Google ads results.

Use Google Analytics to Track Ads

Google Analytics is a free Google online tool. With this tool, you can effectively track how much traffic your website gets from all sources, inclusive of PPC ads. The tool will help you to understand how visitors interact with your website and the ads displayed on it. The information you gather with it can help you to make the right adjustments on your advertising. Well-adjusted ads can help to improve your conversion rate and ultimately good ROI.

Keep an Eye on Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a direct way to gauge the performance of Google ads. You must keep a keen eye on it during your ads campaigns. Technically, conversion rate is the percentage of people who click on your ads and take desired action. Such actions include but not limited to making a purchase. You can find this information in the “Conversions” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. High conversion rate means high performing ads while low conversion rate indicates poorly performing ads. If your ads are performance well it means they are reaching the right audience but if low, it means they are not reaching the right audience. This could mean your ad copy is ineffective or you are targeting the wrong audience. This is why if you track your conversion rate well enough, you can identify issues that may require adjustments to enable your ads perform optimally.
 
Use Google AdWords to Check your Ads Positioning

Ad positioning is a crucial metric that tells a marketer the average position of where his ad appears on Google SERPs. What this means is that the higher the ad is ranked on the SERPs, the higher the chances that more users are likely to see and click on it. To make this possible, your ad must be optimized with the right keywords that users are targeting. Next is to review the positions for your brand’s keywords and compare them to the positions of your competitors. If you notice that your brand is appearing in a lower position than your competitors it is an indication for you to quickly make some performance adjustments on your ads campaign. You can find keywords information in your Google AdWords account’s “Keywords” tab.
 
Test Your Ads with A/B Testing
 
Regularly testing your ad copy is a way of determining how well the ad is doing. Most marketers rely on A/B testing to track their ad performance and optimize results. When they create two or more ad versions, they can use A/B testing to track and compare which one performs better. Before launching your Google ad campaign, you can run an A/B test on the versions of ad copy you are planning to use. This is about the best way to ensure that your Google ad campaign is performing as optimally as you want. You can check out the right information you need to do this in the “Experiments” tab of your Google AdWords account. If you want to get the best results from PPC ads, you can A/B test different ad copy, landing pages, and other website elements. By doing this, you’ll get to know which ad combination leads to the most conversions and consequently, a higher ROI. 

Review the Impressions and Clicks on your Google Ads

Impressions are another great way to measure the performance of Google ads. They represent the number of times an ad has been shown. This is as against clicks which represent the number of times people have clicked on the ad. A diligent review of these two metrics gives the marketer a clear idea how effective his Google ads are at reaching the target audience. You can access this data in the “Ads” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. When your Google ads have a high number of impressions but the click-through rates are low, it means your ad copy needs some adjustments. When the ads have high click-through rates, it means they are actually reaching the right audience and driving them to take desired action. To actually determine if your ads are doing great therefore, you must diligently review these PPC metrics regularly.
 
Wrapping Up

Tracking your Google ad performance is a desirable step to know if your marketing campaign is doing great. The metrics data you collect from your tracking efforts is helpful for you to better understand what’s working well and what’s not working well in your marketing campaign. These metrics provide the data you can rely on to make needed adjustments to help you get the most out of your PPC and Ad campaigns budget. If you want to get such vital marketing benefits, start now to track your Google ads campaign results.

Simple Small Business Customer Research Strategies

As individuals are different, so are their needs and products appeal to them based on these needs. This is why as a small business owner, if you really want to grow your business, you must know who you’re selling to, what to sell them, and exactly how and where to reach them. Getting such basic marketing information requires some research without which, it will be extremely difficult for you to effectively market to your target customers.

The best way to get to know your customers is through customer research. If you know your customers well enough, you can effectively market to them using the right marketing channels, and the type of content and products they want. By doing this effectively, you can generate interest in your products/services and boost conversions as a result. Information from customer research helps small business owners to do better customer targeting through the use of the right ads, right channels and more effective optimization strategies. Doing all these helps small business owners to improve on their branding, create the right content, and use the right marketing language and tone, and the right SEO keywords to enhance their marketing and to grow their business.

So, if as a small business owner you want to do some research to get the right data to grow your small business, here are simple ways you can do customer research.

Use Simple Surveys

The best way to gauge customer satisfaction is through surveys. You can directly ask questions and get information from your customers. Through this customer feedback, you can identify potential problems that need solving. Customer survey strategy can help you to identify how well a new product into the marketing is accepted and how the products you are already marketing are faring in the market. You can even directly find out from your customers what they want that you are not even selling yet. Simple survey questions to get the basic customer information you want can be delivered through your website landing page offers, email list subscriptions, pop-ups, and social media posts. You can entice customers to take surveys by offering them token gifts and rewards, making sure the time needed to take the surveys is not really too long.

Checkout Demographic Data

For vital marketing information, you can diligently checkout the average customer characteristics as they relate to the demographics of your target customers. You can find out what products people in certain age brackets want, same for educational backgrounds, hobbies, gender, income level, employment status, home ownership and so on. Once you identify your target demographic, you can do some research on them to identify what they want and what their common needs are even without collecting elaborate data. You can simply get the information you want by checking out articles, research statistics, studies, and trend reports which are widely available online.

Check Sales Data

It is not possible to run a business successfully without keeping concise records. Such records particularly as they involve sales can help you with customer research at a later date. You can always compare your current sales figures with previous sales figures over same period of time to get valuable information. Through these figures, you can determine which products your customers really prefer. If you are selling many products, such comparative sales figures can help you to determine which products to rest and which to sell more of. If however you’re only selling only one product, you can still take previous sales data and use it to identify trends. You can easily determine what made sales of the product to go up and what made sales drop and over what period of time. This information will help you to determine if and when to run ads for your product or not and what type of ads and through what channels. You can even cross-reference sales data with customer support data, reviews, surveys, and demographic studies if you want to get a much better picture.

Review Customer Feedback

In reacting to a product in the market, customers usually have questions, concerns, and complaints. Even without a customer care team serving your business, you can on your own handle most of the inquiries and gather vital data from this feedback. Through such data, you’ll be able to clearly identify common service problems, questions, and product complaints. When it comes to finding solutions, you can address common inquiries with FAQ, rectify product and marketing defects, improve production, handling, delivery shortcomings an so on. More importantly, feedback data helps you to identify how customers accept your product, what they feel about it, and what they want improved about it. Even though everyone can complain or give suggestions about your products/services, it is your customers’ opinions and experiences that are the most crucial for the growth and development of your business.

Last line

Through customer research, you can get to know your customers well enough. That knowledge is vital if you want to optimize your marketing strategies. If you research well and get to know your customers well, you can write better marketing content for them, market to them with the right ads and through the right channels. This way, you can better plan more effective marketing campaigns, create better products and increase sales.