What makes digital marketing so much more powerful than traditional marketing today is the enormous amount of data that businesses can collect on their audiences, which can give them an edge over competitors. One of the clients we work with—a large government organization—ran their own Google search ad campaign a few years back and it performed poorly because they ran it without really knowing what they were doing. They hadn’t implemented a strategy to identify what keywords to target and thus got low click rates on their ads. Many businesses fumble their digital marketing because they approach it using old school marketing techniques that favor artistic creativity over cold hard data analysis.

With the right data-guided techniques, you too can have massive success with Google call ads. You just have to understand your audience, and most importantly, know what they want. On top of that, you have to follow the right steps. What follows are some basic techniques you have to use to run a successful Google call ads campaign. You can learn more about Google call ads in a previous post we did.

1) Research Your Keywords

This is by far the most crucial aspect of generating calls because unlike Facebook, Google’s business model is based around intent. That means that before someone does a search online, they already know what they want. They instantiate that desire by typing a keyword into the search bar. In a nutshell, when somebody types a keyword into Google, all ads that could be relevant to that search must go through an auction whereby Google evaluates them on dozens of variables to decide if the ad should appear as a search result at the top of the page. Picking and purchasing the right keywords is crucial because if you pick overly broad keywords, your ads may be served to irrelevant people or Google may decide to penalize you and not show any of your ads.

So, your first task is to do some research to figure out what kinds of things your potential audience might be typing into their browser to find your product or service. This may seem simple, but you have to remember that you’re competing against possibly dozens or hundreds of other business that are selling similar products or services and they’re all trying to purchase the same types of keywords. If you sell digital marketing services, for example, there could be a dozen other companies purchasing keywords like “digital consulting services” and you need to figure out how to narrow that down, yet still pick out keywords with high enough search volumes and low enough costs that you could generate a return on your investment.

So let’s imagine your firm is based in Miami and you specialize in helping tourism businesses. You would want to narrow your strategy down geographically and industry-wise. There are literally hundreds of ways to get creative with this and you have to figure out how to do it by understanding first and foremost who your audience is.

2) Organize the Campaign

Because Google ad campaigns revolve around keywords, the best thing to do is to organize your various ads around keywords. This matters because Google assesses the quality of your ads in the context of the keywords you’ve picked. Google assigns a score to each ad called a Quality Score, which is an important factor in determining how many people Google shows your ads to. Because Google wants your ads to make sense in the context of the keywords that you’ve picked, you have to be methodical about this.

What you’ll want to do is essentially create buckets within the campaign called ad groups, with each ad group containing 3-5 ads. Each ad group should also contain one keyword or several closely related keywords, which are also semantically related to the ads. For example, if one of your keywords is “digital marketing consulting,” all ads associated with it should be about digital marketing consulting or else Google will assign them a low quality score and not show them to people.

3) Run and Refine the Campaign

Obviously, the campaign doesn’t end after you hit Go. Google advertising, like all digital advertising, is a game of run, refine, run again. Without a solid a/b testing strategy in place, you’ll never maximize your potential because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll get things right on the first run.

Once you’ve got all your ad groups and their associated keywords and ads all set up, what you’re going to want to look for is to see which ad groups performed the best. Then you’re going to want to take those keywords and ads and create even more variations of those.

Because the keywords are the backbone of Google advertising, you should look at what keywords performed the best and see how you can expand on those.

The more people see your ads, the more clicks you are going to get, so maximizing your ads’ impressions should be one of your top priorities. How many impressions your ads get depends largely on their quality score, which itself depends on the ads’ relevance to your audience and numerous other factors.