Google Tools for the Digital Marketer

So you are now convinced that you would like to become a Digital Marketer. What would be your job profile? Of course, to run a great digital promotion campaign, optimize the campaign and get maximum reach, visibility and conversions at optimum costs.

In the endeavour to become a great digital marketer, Google is ready to lend you a helping hand with a plethora of tools that can make your task much easier and very interesting. These tools are Google Keyword Planner, Google Display Planner, AdWord Editor, Conversion Optimizer, Bid Simulator, Ad Gallery and Google Analytics.

Before we go deep into the Google Tools, let us understand how a digital marketing campaign is structured. To run a Google Adwords campaign, we need a Google Account. The Account is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information. Once the account has been established, you can run multiple ad campaigns under a single account. Each campaign in your account has its own budget and settings that determine where your ads appear.

Under a campaign, comes Ad Groups. Each ad group within a campaign contains a set of similar ads and keywords that you want to trigger your ads to show.

Source : Google AdWords Fundamentals Refresher Guide

Google offers you two networks to advertise. These are Search Network and Display Network. The Search Network comprises of Google Search, Google Map, Google Shopping and Non-Google Search Partner Sites. The Display Network comprises of YouTube, Gmail, Blogger and Google Finance. Search Ads comprise of Text Ads and Ads with extensions. Display Ad formats comprise of Text Ads, Image Ads, Rich Media Ads and Video Ads. You can choose between Search only, Display only or Search Network with Display Select. 

Now coming back to the Google Tools, these are the ones that you can utilise to enhance and optimise your campaign:

1.       Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner helps to build your Search Network campaigns, getting keyword and ad groups ideas along with search traffic estimates. Keyword Planner helps you to develop a campaign around an advertising goal. You can get keyword ideas based on terms that are relevant to your product or service, your landing page, or different product categories.

The tool will automatically organize related keyword ideas into ad groups. You can also multiply two or more list of keywords, saving the time of manually combining keywords. Keyword Planner will show you statistics, like keyword search volumes, to help you decide which keywords to use for your campaign. You can also get traffic estimates, like estimated clicks, for a given bid and budget to get an idea of which bids and budgets to set.

2.       Google Display Planner

The Display Planner helps to plan your Display Network campaigns, getting targeting ideas along with impression estimates. You can also use Display Planner to expand the reach of your existing campaigns, finding new websites, mobile applications, and video channels where you can show your ads. You can get ideas for keywords, placements, and all other Display Network targeting methods to help you plan your campaign. See how your targeting ideas may perform based on past results and get historical costs to help guide your budget and bid decisions.

3.       Google AdWord Editor

AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your AdWords advertising campaigns. The process is simple: Download one or more accounts, make changes offline, and then upload the changes to AdWords. AdWords Editor can help you save time and make it easier to make changes in bulk. It also allows multiple users to share archives and proposals for an account.

Any advertiser with any size account can use AdWords Editor, but it's especially useful for accounts with multiple campaigns and long lists of keywords or ads. For example, you can:

è Use bulk editing tools to make multiple changes quickly

è Export and import files to share proposals or make changes to an account

è View statistics for all campaigns or a subset of campaigns

è Manage, edit and view multiple accounts at the same time

è Search and replace text across ad groups or campaigns

è Copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns

è Undo and redo multiple changes while editing your campaigns

è Make changes in draft before uploading them to your account

è Keep working even when you're offline

4.       Google Conversion Optimizer

When a customer completes an action that you've defined as valuable, these customer actions are called conversions. Conversion Optimizer uses your Conversion Tracking, cross-account Conversion Tracking or Google Analytics data to get you more conversions at a lower cost. By optimizing your placement in each ad auction, Conversion Optimizer helps you to avoid unprofitable clicks and gets you as many profitable clicks as possible. Conversion Optimizer also makes managing your AdWords bidding a lot easier, while maximizing results.

Conversion Optimizer provides you with a recommended target CPA to help get you started. As with CPC bidding, the target CPA that you set is your primary control over how many conversions you'll get and how much you'll pay for them. You can raise your target CPA if you want to increase traffic and conversions. If your average CPA is higher than you prefer, then you can lower it, which will probably decrease both average CPA and the number of conversions.

There are certain pre-requisites for setting up Conversion Optimizer:       

     

      Your campaign uses AdWords Conversion Tracking or cross-account conversion tracking, or is         importing data from Google Analytics

  

  The campaign should usually have received at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days

5.       Google AdWords Bid Simulators

Google AdWords Bid Simulators help you see how different bids might change your ads’ weekly performance. The regular Bid Simulators show you how changes to your Max CPC Bid might change the cost or the number of clicks, impressions, conversions, and conversion value your ads would have received for your keyword or ad group. You can find them on the Ad groups and Keywords tabs.

The Campaign Bid Simulator shows you how changes to your campaign’s bids might affect that campaign’s performance. Find it on the Campaigns tab. The Shopping Campaigns Bid Simulator shows you how certain changes to your bid might have impacted your product group's performance. You can find it on the Product groups tab. The Video Campaigns Bid Simulator shows you how changes to your max. CPV might impact your typical weekly video traffic. Find it on the Campaigns tab.

The Target CPA Simulator shows you how changes to your target cost-per-acquisition (target CPA) might affect your ad performance. Find it on the Campaigns tab or in the Shared library. The Mobile Bid Adjustment Simulator shows you how changes to your mobile bid adjustment might affect your ad performance on different devices.

6. Google Ad Gallery

The Ad gallery, formerly known as the display ad builder, is an ad-creation tool that offers various display ad formats in different categories, such as image ads, dynamic ads, Lightbox ads, and video ads, in any of your campaigns on the Google Display Network.

Here are some benefits of using the Ad gallery:

è Differentiated products and services

è More effective campaigns

è No-cost ad templates

è Customizable ad styles

è Industry-standard ad templates

6.       Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free Google product that provides in-depth reporting on how people use your website. It shows you how people found your site and how they explored it, giving you ideas for how to optimize your website. You can also link Google Analytics and your AdWords account to get an entire view of your customers' behaviour, from when they click your ad or see it to what they do on your site. This information can shed light on how much of your website traffic or sales comes from AdWords, in turn helping you improve your ads and website.

The Last Words

With such a rich treasure trove of tools, Google has made life much easier for the Digital Marketer. And the best part is that all these tools are free to use. All you need now is a regular hands-on use of these tools to ensure that you are getting the maximum ROAS (Return-On-Ad-Spend) with Optimized Digital Ad Campaigns for yourself or for your clients.