If you’re advertising on a budget, mobile ads offer surprising savings. In fact, mobile ads cost more than 75% less than the desktop alternative. But even with those savings, you’ll want to be sure you’ve optimized your AdWords for mobile, and these 10 strategies will help you get there fast.
1. Focus on CTR First
Google favors ads with a higher click-through rate because it creates more money for them. If your ads aren’t getting a decent CTR, they’ll give your spot to other bidders with higher rates.
There are a lot of ways to go about improving your CTR, but one of our favorites is simply inspiring people with a need for more knowledge, as we’ll learn in strategy #2.
2. Create Curiosity
Humans have a natural thirst for knowledge. In the age of cavemen, it kept us alive. Today, it keeps your business alive.
Curiosity is one of the most powerful tools used in advertising, and this is especially critical with AdWords. You don’t have nearly as much space to convince people to buy your products, but the short length of your ads will allow you to easily get people asking questions.
For example, you might be selling a money-making informational product. Instead of telling people they “can earn $2,319 in one week” (a trite little offer they’ve heard a million times), you might tell your audience, “98% of entrepreneurs failed because of this mistake.”
Get the customer to ask a question that only you have the answer to.
3. Add Those Call Extensions
According to Google, call extensions typically increase CTR by 4-5%. (If that’s not advice straight from the horse’s mouth, we don’t know what is.)
Given a list of ads with similar information, it’s easier to act on the ads that have call extensions compared to those that don’t. Instead of going to a website and searching aimlessly, customers can instantly connect with your business, increasing your success with close to zero effort.
4. Cut to the Chase
This might sound like the opposite of “creating curiosity,” but in reality, they go hand-in-hand.
When creating an ad, it’s easy to fall into the trap of simply filling out the space with some general ideas. But remember: your ad is a very, very brief interaction between you and your customer.
The next time you create an ad, don’t just write out the basic details of your business. Instead, imagine standing in front of a real customer and telling them only one or two sentences about your offer.
If those sentences aren’t strong enough to get them to at least develop some curiosity, your digital ads won’t be any more effective.
5. Rotate Indefinitely
One of the default settings in Google AdWords is the limited rotation.
While this is great for businesses that don’t want to manage their ads too closely, it can result in poor testing. By default, Google very quickly throws away your ad variations, even if they’ve only been shown to 10 customers.
Meanwhile, it takes at least a few hundred views to develop a truly accurate estimation of the ad’s effectiveness. In order to achieve those statistically meaningful results, you’ll have to rotate your ads indefinitely and remove the ineffective ones manually.
6. Test Operating Systems
Yes, you should be testing just about every metric you can think of, but one that often goes under the radar is the mobile operating system.
iPhone and Android users can have wildly different shopping preferences, even if your product has nothing to do with technology. For example, Android users are more likely to own multiple cars and have jobs in technology, while Apple users tend to be more affluent and highly educated.
Either of these demographics can be lucrative, but it’s important to make sure you’re targeting the right audience. And if your audience is more interested in your ads, your CPC will go down.
7. Change Locations
This might not work for all local businesses, but the location of your ads can have a huge impact on your costs.
If your local business is also selling information products that can be downloaded online, here’s even more good news: countries outside the US have a much lower CPC–sometimes as low as 95% less.
Even if your ads must remain within your state, keep in mind that various regions or cities can also have differing costs.
8. Add Negatives
Another tactic recommended by Google is the use of negative words.
Suppose you’re selling premium jewelry. You don’t want people to click on your link after searching for “affordable jewelry discount.” In this case, you would add “affordable” and “discount” to your negative list.
In essence, it allows you to weed out the people least likely to make a purchase or click on your ad.
9. Match Ads to Business Hours
While it doesn’t decrease your CPC as far as Google knows, it also doesn’t make sense to run ads at hours when your business is closed or unavailable.
Ads that run in the middle of the night might cost less, but they won’t be generating much value for your business. To fix this, try dayparting your ads to the appropriate hours.
10. Stop Competing with Yourself
Many ads create internal competition by sharing keywords. If those ads are actually directed to different offers, you will lose the ability to direct traffic to those offers equally.
Using Google’s keyword diagnosis tool, you can quickly spot conflicts and eliminate them, improving the results for all your ads.
For more information and personalized guidance in your PPC campaign, simply contact us today.
