Whether your target audience is mainstream or niche, Google is likely the North Star of your potential customer. You’d be hard pressed to find a successful business not utilizing Google Ads and Merchant Center, but it goes beyond just your average ad set. Step away from your tried and tested methods, and explore how you can make the most of Google Ads and Merchant Center.
Find Customers Who Aren’t Looking for You
It may seem an unusual tactic, but instead of bidding on expensive adwords in your campaign, try finding customers who aren’t searching for you. Your business likely has a detailed schedule of Google Ads running that relate to your products or services, but consider tapping into your competitor’s market. Try bidding on competitor names for your adwords and disrupt your competitor’s customers by featuring in their searches. You can even take this a step further by bidding on your competitors names, but misspelled. We all misspell—so turn a potential competitor’s customer’s mistake into your gain. Driving traffic through misspelled adwords is a creative way to be seen by a whole new audience.
Know Who Your Customers Aren’t
Another way to make the most of Google Ads is to know who your customers aren’t—and then weed them out. Most companies have a good understanding of their own limitations. Instead of potentially driving customers who you can’t service via your Google Ads, negatively target AdWords that you don’t want your company to appear in. If you only service a particular geographical area, then consider negatively targeting the areas outside of that key zone in your adwords. This is a great way to improve the conversion rate of your Google Ads, and not pay for ads that won’t yield a return. Avoid that customer churn rate, and only drive traffic to your website that is a qualified lead.
SEO Doesn’t Have to Take Time
We all know the pain of waiting to see whether you have correctly nurtured your content to drive traffic via SEO. Instead of putting in hours of painstaking copy writing or content development, only to find you have used the wrong terms, use your Google Ads to inform you. You will quickly obtain the metrics and performance of your Google Ads, which means you know whether your terms are hitting the mark or not and can make the appropriate amendments. Take the search terms that are driving the highest performance and use those across your content to improve your SEO. Knowing the terms your customers click on will help drive even further traffic for a fraction of the cost. You can also integrate these insights into your other channels.
Take Note of the Warning Signs
A lot of businesses can be forgiven for setting up their Merchant Center at the beginning of their campaign or trading and never looking at it again. It happens—business rolls on, and priorities shift. But the answers to your struggles could be right beneath your nose, in a well-presented dashboard. Making sure your Merchant Center and feed is clear of errors is crucial to search visibility, and subsequent profitability. Too many businesses ignore the warning signs. Log in regularly to make sure you have actioned all of the potential feed or back end issues with your campaigns and product listings, and take the time to clean up your feed in Merchant Center. This will give you the best chance of staying visible to the right potential customers.
Promote Your Business
Not enough businesses are aware of the functionality of promotions in Merchant Center. Merchant Center allows you to opt-in to promotions, making your products stand out to customers via a tag on the ad. Customers will immediately know that the product is on special for a certain period of time, and peak interest. Your products will begin featuring in front of customers with a new sense of urgency for purchase, and can be harnessed during low and peak seasons in line with your business needs.
Like any channel, the due diligence is needed to familiarize yourself with the platform so you can best leverage its functions. Resist tunnel vision, and experiment with different ad sets so you can best optimize your activity and wield the dynamic power of Google Ads and Merchant Center.
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