Whenever you are starting a new adwords account, you need to ask yourself or your client a number of important questions that will guide you throughout this process. Here goes the full list you need to be aware of.
- Objectives of the client (leads, form submission, sales)
- What’s the budget for advertisement?
- How much money are you willing to pay to acquire a new customer?
- Who are the competitors?
- What’s the difference between the competitors and you?
- What’s the unique selling proposition of your business?
- What’s the target audience (location, age, gender)?
- What are the locations you want to target?
- Are you using any other digital channel? Provide information
- Do you have Google Analytics? Is it set properly?
- Are you tracking opportunities and sales?
Objectives of the client
What do we mean by this? Well whenever you are starting a project you need to understand what type of business you are trying to promote. Do they sell services or products? Are these services exclusively sold online or do they have a different type of sales process? These, and other foundational questions, are important for you to understand what type of conversion you will target during the implementation phase.
What’s the budget for advertisement?
All companies should have some form of business plan and within this business plan is the amount of budget dedicated to each part of the business. If you have this number then it will be clearer for you how much they are willing to spend on online advertisement. If, however, they do not have a fixed budget then you can suggest one. You can prove to them the value of your work with a trial budget.
How much money are they willing to spend to acquire a new customer?
Another budget-related question is an understanding of how much is the company willing to spend to acquire a new customer. You can help them achieving this number either by looking at the price of the value of the services or products that they sell and apply the 1/3 rule of by having a specific cost per conversion number that you need to target.
What’s their unique selling proposition?
In order for you to develop coherent ads, you need to understand everything there is to know about the business you are working with. Including what’s their most valuable proposition as a business. They need to tell you these core messages so you can reinforce them especially when you are writing your ads.
Who are the competitors?
Having a list of competitors will help you not only to find the best keywords to target but also to understand how your competitors write their ads and develop their landing pages. You need to have a good grasp of the market in which you are operating to develop your own adwords campaigns to their maximum potential.
Who is the target audience?
Knowing who the target audience is can also help you write your ads. You can have this information as a backup so you can provide a proper tone to your writing. Writing for a young audience is different from writing to an older audience. Even though I don’t believe that the tone you use should be conditioned by this information, it is always useful to know.
What locations do you want to target?
This is also a crucial information to extract. If you do not know this information you will be blind to what geographical region your customer wants to get their clients from. These can change from business to business of course – e-commerce websites normally do not care what particular region to target, for example. And even during the optimisation you can look at different metrics to understand where in particular are your ads best performing. Be it as it may, this is an important question you always need to ask.
Are they using any other digital marketing channel?
This is useful because if they are using any other online strategy then you can coordinate with them and their team how best to achieve greater results. It would not be the first time that I am presented with a project where the client already has other complementary services to mine. So it is your job to understand if they exist and to optimise the execution.
Do you have google analytics installed?
This is another important question to ask. Google analytics allows you, among other things, to set the goals of a particular campaign and to easily connect these goals to your adwords account so you can track conversion performance. If your client does not have google analytics installed then it is your job to get it installed.
Do you track conversions and sales offline?
A crucial element of any adwords account is to start tracking whether the investment you are making in advertisement is getting the return on investment you want. In some businesses the only way to do this is via a mechanism to understand how many conversions are happening because of your google adwords efforts. You need to distinguish in this analysis between leads and sales. These are two important numbers you constantly need to check.
