SEO certainly has a cost but its effectiveness is proven. However, it is important to manage your campaigns using data and maximize your ROI. Here are the steps to follow and some tips for smart campaigns!
1.Link your Adwords account and Google Analytics for better management
Adwords is a Google tool that you should already know. As a reminder, it allows you to buy traffic to your website and thus boost your audience. To best optimize your Adwords campaigns, I advise you to associate it with your Google Analytics account. This will allow you to analyze your audience, and little by little, generate more qualified traffic. In addition, it is easier to have a single platform to analyze your traffic (natural or paid) and its audience. Link your accounts, this will allow you to effectively visualize your marketing actions (Analytics) and manage your strategy (Adwords). You will be able to contextualize your actions, which will make your analysis more relevant
2.Use the Google Analytics Adwords Treemaps Report to visualize your results
At first glance, the treemaps report may scare you. However, it is very useful since it allows you to analyze the performance of your Adwords campaigns at a glance. Indeed a treemaps, which is a “representation of hierarchical data in a limited space” is a visualization solution that allow you to quickly visualize the performance of your campaigns, and identify positive or negative trends. According to Google,” Treemaps is an effective tool for generating hypotheses, as it reveals the relative importance of different entities and the relationships between them. ” How to understand this report: First, the variables. Many are available. There are main variables (clicks, cost, impressions, e-commerce transactions, etc.) and secondary variables (CPC, CTR, RPC, conversion rate, etc.) Choose two variables that you want to analyze over a given period of time. For example, this could be the cost of a campaign and its conversion rate. With Treemaps, the two data are then combined to give birth to a clear visualization.
- The area of the rectangles represents the size of the first variable.
- The color code (green or red) applies to the second variable.
The more important the first variable is, the larger the rectangles are. Likewise, if a variable has a positive value (high conversion rate, low bounce rate), then the zone appears in green. Conversely, if the conversion rate is low, or the bounce rate is high, then the zone turns red.Sample report
- The cost of the campaign + the conversion rate: which campaign is more profitable?
- The number of sessions + the conversion rate by objective: Are your Adwords campaigns the most effective?
- The number of sessions + the duration of each session : where do your most interested visitors come from. It's not just the conversion that counts
- The number of new users + the conversion rate or the bounce rate and pages/session: which keywords bring you new customers, and especially those that turn these visitors into buyers.
In summary, link your Adwords and Google Analytics accounts and use the Treemaps report to get a clear and quick view of the effectiveness of your Adwords campaigns.
3.How to improve your Adwords campaigns
Creating an Adwords campaign is pretty easy. The most difficult thing is to analyze each campaign, correct them, make them evolve in order to optimize them! Always keep in mind that your ad has one objective: to generate traffic, which should lead to sales or conversions (white paper download/Newsletter subscription) Here are some tips to get started
- Always target your campaigns
Your target is the person who will convert later. Remember to define who your campaign is aimed at.
- Focus on keywords that are rarely searched for, but very profitable
Prioritize the method “Long Tail ”: very specific keywords that generate quality traffic. Feel free to use the Adwords keyword planner tool to create a list of keywords with their associated search volume. You can then analyze the CPA (click per action) to first determine if your keyword is relevant. A high CPA means that your ad and keyword are generating good conversions on your site. This keyword and this announcement should be retained!
- Attract the eye of your Internet user: Arouse his curiosity
Why did you click on a link? Sometimes it's a bad manipulation on your part, which should have already happened to you if you navigate on your mobile. But in most cases, you clicked because the ad caught your attention. If you want to improve your click rate (percentage of clicks compared to the number of impressions= CTR), you need an effective hook. A catchy title will have a higher number of clicks. Do not hesitate to do some a/b testing to find your best grip.
- Optimize your landing pages:
Google Adwords campaigns must be faithful to your offer, and value what makes your difference. If this is not the case, Google will penalize your ad and it will only be very weakly distributed. Thanks to Google Analytics and the “landing pages” report, also known as Landing Page, analyze the following KPIs: Bounce rate, time spent on the page, number of page views. You can then improve your landing pages. This will make your Adwords campaigns more relevant. Last tip: don't forget a/b testing! The result can sometimes be a surprise!
4.Why use remarketing with Google Analytics?
Google Analytics can be useful for increasing your conversions by reaching an audience that already knows you! In short, remarketing with Google Analytics allows you to highlight an advertising message to a visitor who has already visited your site/application, and therefore to reach them again. This marketing technique is very useful for maximizing the conversion rate and staying in contact with visitors who are looking for information elsewhere on the web, hesitate, compare... before making a purchase.How to choose the right criteria to “re-touch” them.Google has created preconfigured audience groups, from which you can draw inspiration.
- Smart list: it's a bit like “autopilot” mode because you let Google manage the operation of the group itself, in an “intelligent” way. Google is strong;
- All users: this is a bit the default mode. All users who came to your site are included in the audience group;
- New users: in order not to annoy the “usual” ones, we only re-target visitors who have only one connection to the site;
- Users of a specific page or section of my site/application: we are starting to get into the details. Here, you can refine your group and bring together people who visited a particular page! A predictive tool with the gradual appearance of urls is implemented;
- Users who have performed a conversion by objective: here, we use goal tracking in GA to re-target users who have left the conversion tunnel;
- Users who have completed a transaction: finally, this preconfigured audience group targets customers. Practical for pushing a promotional offer reserved for existing customers or relaunching a purchase at a specific period of time.
5.A few tips for your remarketing campaigns
Today the consumer is volatile and even versatile. The more points of contact you have with your target audience, the more likely you are to convert them! Practice makes perfect! The strength of Retargeting lies in the audience it targets. Someone who already knows your site, its products or services is more easily convertible! Touching them again allows you to redirect them into your conversion tunnel! It's a quick reminder to tell them that you still exist! However, there are a few mistakes not to make:·Don't target all of your visitorsWho has never stumbled upon a site by chance and quickly left the page? Everyone would answer yes to this question. Indeed, some of the visitors to your site do not belong to your target. How do you separate things?
- Optimize targeting based on the pages visited
Most websites have the following pages: “recruitment”, “legal information”, “contact”... This audience is not necessarily the most relevant to re-target. Indeed, if you sell handbags it will be more appropriate to target the people who visited the product pages of your site and not the recruitment page. How to do it in Google Analytics: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. Exclude these pages from your campaigns.
- Optimize targeting based on the quality of visits
A word of advice, put yourself in the shoes of your future customer. If you are interested in a product/service, it is certain that you will spend more than 10 seconds on this page! Acquiring traffic via paid channels costs enough, so target your most engaged visitors. The duration of the sessions is an important parameter to optimize your remarketing campaigns and improve your ROI!Go to the report: Audience then Behavior and Interest and InteractionNow that we have seen free referencing (lesson 1) and paid referencing, are you wondering which one should choose? The answer is no! The two are linked and complementary. Thanks to web analysis you will be able to optimize each lever. paid referencing allows you to attract highly qualified traffic over a given period of time. The more you spend, the more traffic you get (depending on the quality of your ads, of course). When your campaigns stop, your paid traffic will drop as a result. So paid referencing is not “sustainable” over time. Natural referencing, known under the term SEO or even free referencing : is often considered to be the ultimate goal (because it allows you to generate traffic without spending a cent! However, it requires a considerable expenditure of energy: production and valorization of content (texts, images, videos), link strategy, URL optimization, keyword strategy ect... it is a technique that requires time but is sustainableThe two methods differ, but they should not be considered as two distinct silos. Analyzing the first channel will allow you to optimize the second. Let me explain! A blog post can be compared to an Adwords campaign: A hook, a text and a call to action. The analysis of your Adwords campaigns can thus allow you to optimize your blog articles and vice versa! In conclusion, to improve your traffic, do not neglect any acquisition channel. Multiply the points of contact with your target!
