How to customize your marketing for a better Google Ads strategy

Customization might not be true personalization, but a better Google Ads strategy will still help you reach your very best customers!

Personalized marketing should be a focus for all marketers out there. By collecting relevant data, it’s possible to create personal interactions and experiences with dynamic content and product recommendations based on purchase history and shopping behavior.

With Google Ads, the tailored experience you can offer users isn’t true personalization (since Google is protective of user data) – but it’s just as important in order to target the right people at the right time.

It’s important for businesses to know if someone’s visited their website 5 times in the last 30 days, what device their target audience uses the most, what items consumers keep adding to their cart, or what keywords they search for – all these aspects could be just as beneficial for marketers as knowing the user’s gender, specific age, ethnicity or other demographics.

The most common mistake when using Google Ads to customize your marketing is to optimize for terms that are too broad. A funeral business paying for the keyword “dead” without thinking further could be losing all their Ads budget to teenagers searching for “Is Justin Bieber dead?”

It all comes down to understanding how keywords and searches work, and how to use negative search terms. Once you fully master Google Ads and know what results you want from your digital marketing efforts, you’ll see that doing less is actually doing more! This is really important for a good Google Ads strategy.

Start by targeting more narrow than you usually would in a Google Ads campaign.
Is most of your business’ revenue coming from mobile devices? Start by targeting these. If 90% of your customers are women, target women only. If your main customers are between 24 and 29 years old, then direct your campaign to this age group only, and exclude everyone else.

If the biggest part of your campaign shows results in only three cities, don’t set your campaign for the whole country. Don’t waste your money targeting other ages, geographic areas, genders or devices just because your company may have these target groups set in your overall digital marketing strategy.

Along with more narrow targeting, you should also go deeper if you want to create great personalization and better experiences using data from Google Ads. Having one keyword that correlates well with your ad and landing page (used both in your title and description) is a great first step. If Nike sneakers are what you want to campaign around, don’t just go with “sneakers”, but be more specific and go with an exact match, like: “Nike Air Max Sneakers”. Your target group will, on the one hand, be very limited and specific – but on the other hand, the bid for this certain keyword is probably cheaper and the intent behind the search term is certainly higher.

Working with single-category keywords such as “shoes” is not as common in Google Ads – only about 5% of eCommerce businesses are large enough to find profit in this technique.

Define the different campaigns based on the intent of the user; if he or she is a new customer or a returning one, for example. To continue with the shoe example, your Ads will perform better by being more defined: try to add color, size, brand name or product category (as well as some more budget!) – to get more spot-on results.

Your gross margins are probably one of the most important things to take into consideration when planning your Google Ads strategy.

If you have products with wildly different gross margins, say 25% vs 75% – you should not have these in the same campaign. The granularity is important here, in terms of different gross margins, products, and categories.

If you have to cut down on your Google Ads' budget, you don’t want to mess up the products with the highest gross margins.

If you’re selling clothes, you probably know that a lot of people tend to order the same item in different sizes, and simply return the ones that don’t fit – making “intentional returns”. If you’re in electronics, on the other hand – the return rate is only around 5%.

Return and shipping rates are important costs to track. Include them when you set your ROI target for your Google Ads. You should also consider what you must pay in lost sales and orders you cannot fulfill for some reason – if the product wasn’t in stock, for example.

Whenever someone clicks one of your ads in Google, you will be charged, even if the purchase is never completed or if you have to send the customer their money back.

Based on these different factors, Keywordio has developed an algorithm called “eCommerce economics”. The algorithm determines your ideal return on investment from your Google Ads. You should never base your sales on the things that don’t come through all the way! By answering questions about your margins, returns and shipping costs, as well as the cost of any lost sales, the algorithm calculates your ideal ROI on each product. There’s a lot of parameters to understand here, but when you do – it’s possible to control your Google Ads down to your most profitable keywords or product.

Personalization and customization both allow you to create better user experiences, boost customer confidence throughout the journey, and improve customer satisfaction! Add third-party validation like Trustpilot reviews in the user journey, and your conversions will skyrocket.

Find out how Trustpilot reviews could help you business, download your free copy of our Complete Guide below!

Author Bio

Jonas Hagströmer Theodorsson, Co-Owner and Business Developer Global eCommerce at Keywordio.