When you first launch your Google Ads campaign, you may feel the full spectrum of emotions–excitement, anxiety, fear, and aspiration–as you eagerly await for your ads to perform. Others may be squeezing their pockets for dear life for fear of breaking the bank. But, despite what you may have heard, you do not have to spend a boatload of your advertising dollars and precious time on your Google Ads campaign to produce results. While strategy is key to generating wins from your campaign, with a little research, the right keywords, and some small adjustments to your website, you can be well on your way to producing extraordinary ROIs for your property.
Take a look at these five best practices to help kick off your campaign to produce better results for you:
1. Pay attention to your metrics.
Your Google Ads campaign will be pretty fluid over the course of its lifespan. After the initial set-up, you’ll be making constant adjustments and variations to keywords, copy, URLs and more over time. This is why you’ll want to keep a sharp eye on your metric reports often, as this data will alert you to if you need to experiment with different call-to-actions or make other tweaks based on your campaign’s performance. Over the course of time, you’ll begin to see which ad and text combinations prove the most effective with your target audiences and tend to score you the results that you’re seeking.
2. Pick your keywords perfectly.
Keywords are the foundation of Google Ads campaigns, and bidding on the right ones for your property can make it or break it. This is where Google’s Keyword Planner comes in. This tool will help you search for certain phrases that relate to your industry, provide insight into how often specific keywords are used over time, and give suggested bid estimates for those keywords so that you can better align your budget accordingly. Incorporating negative keywords (the words that you don’t want your ad to show up for) is also important to refining your campaign and improving performance. Ultimately, your keywords should mimic the search terms of your potential renters during their own apartment search.
3. Make sure your website is up to par.
While you should spend a considerable amount of time structuring your ad campaign for greater success, you can’t ignore the role your website plays in the process. You Google Ads should entice your traffic to click through to your website. And, the job of your website or landing page is to convert this traffic into renters. So, this means, if your website isn’t quite up to par, then the ROI from your ad campaign is almost guaranteed to be poor. For starters, you’ll want to ensure your site is responsive, visually appealing, easy to read and navigate, and includes great call-to-actions.
4. Know your competitor’s strategy.
By remaining abreast of what marketing steps your competitors are taking online, you can be better positioned to improve the effectiveness of your own campaign. There are external tools available that will assist in determining which keywords your competition is using. You can also begin by creating a list of keywords that are likely to be used by your prospects to find your property, and then jotting down the properties that appear in the initial SERPs. This tactic tells you who is competing for the same target audience. From this information, you can analyze their websites for other potential and relevant keywords to include in your own campaign.
5. Fine-tune your call-to-action.
Apart from your website, your call-to-action is the most essential component of your Google Ad. It aligns directly with your campaign goals and instructs the viewer as to what step to take next. To effectively reach your prospects, the text within your call-to-action message should be specific, relevant, attractive, and empowering. It is also important for you to incorporate messaging within the body of your Google Ads that supports the call-to-action message so your prospects can clearly see the benefit that they’re receiving from engaging with your ad.
Rentbot can help.
In addition to helping you build a website for your property that is guaranteed to attract more high quality leads, increase conversions, retain more tenants and reduce vacancies, we can also help your property establish an effective Google Ads campaign with great results. With our targeted Google Ads services, our clients have experienced immediate website traffic, more high quality leads and actual, measurable results.
Ready to turn your website into a lead generator? Get started with your Google Ads campaign today.
About the Author
Jonsette Calloway joined the Rentbot team in 2015. With a background in public relations, advertising and copywriting, she has helped a multitude of clients achieve their marketing and communications goals within various fields, but she particularly enjoys working with the apartment industry.