5 Insider Tips to Supercharge your Google Campaigns

Written by Elisabeth Vorley, Paid Media Manager

Google Paid Ad Campaigns are a powerful tool every event organiser should be utilising in their event marketing activity to reach potential customers actively searching for your event.

Dive into our latest blog, where we spill the beans on five tips to supercharge your Paid Ad Campaigns. 

1. Choose the correct campaign objective

Choosing your campaign objective may not appear as crucial as perfecting your keyword strategy or gathering visually appealing creatives.

However, your campaign objective plays an important role in defining the campaign’s strategy, instructing machine learning algorithms, and finding your target audience. 

The objective you select should align with the main goal that you want to get from your campaign, for example, if you are looking to generate brand awareness you’d want to set up a Display campaign.

This is because Google’s Display Network offers extensive reach coupled with relatively cost-effective bid strategies  – providing an ideal campaign to showcase your event to a wider audience.  

On the other hand, if your campaign’s objective is centred around promoting visitor registrations, a search campaign is a great choice.

This is because a search campaign allows you to target users actively searching for keywords related to your event on Google’s search engine.

By tapping into users who are already expressing interest through their search queries, you enhance the likelihood of attracting individuals genuinely interested in registering for your event.

2. Make your budget work smarter, not harder

If you are in a position with limited budget to spend on your Google ads campaigns, maximising your spending efficiency is crucial.

To streamline your approach, keep your strategy simple. You can do this by being specific with your geo-targeting.

For example, if your primary target is the United States, consider narrowing your focus to key states, such as New York, Florida and California or any others that hold significance in your market.

This precise targeting ensures that your ads reach users who are most relevant to your business and reduces unnecessary ad spend in locations that are less likely to generate the desired results.

Moreover, a less-is-more approach can also be applied to your keyword strategy. Begin by creating a list of keywords that have your audience’s search intent in mind.

You can then use Google’s keyword planner which is available on the platform to identify keywords with a moderate amount of traffic and relatively low competition in terms of CPC (cost per click). 

Looking at the latest benchmarking data from the events we’ve managed between the year 2022 to 2023 we’ve found that in a search campaign, the average cost per click (CPC) is £0.64 (keep in mind this is across multiple objectives, industries and locations so this can vary).

To put this into perspective, with a daily budget of £10, you’d be capped at approximately 15 clicks. Understanding these metrics is crucial when aligning your budget with your targets.

Make informed decisions during your keyword research to ensure your budget meets your goals.  

3. Lean on AI

It’s time to take advantage of Google’s AI powered advertising. What do we mean by this?

It means that we can combine AI-powered campaigns alongside our campaign best practices to create ads that adapt to show more relevant messages to your target audience.

Innovations like Performance Max and the newly introduced Demand Gen campaign both use AI and can serve as valuable tools for campaign optimisation.

Performance Max uses Google AI to process complex intent signals, behaviour, and context. This helps your ads show at the right time, increasing relevancy and allowing you to connect with users most likely to convert.

Performance Max has proven to be a resounding success for us, consistently delivering results at a low CPA.

Across the Performance Max campaigns we’ve run over the past 6 months we’ve seen the CPA’s range from anywhere between £3.50 – £18.50 across qualifying visitor registration and delegate registration objective campaigns.

Demand Gen Campaigns, previously known as Discovery, which were released in October 2023, also applies Google’s powerful AI by identifying “lookalike” audiences that share characteristics with your existing customers.

This enables you to expand your reach to potential customers who are highly likely to be interested in your event. 

4. Make use of assets

We’re big fans of ad assets (previously known as ad extensions) at Tag Digital.

Google ad extensions help expand your ad’s presence by occupying more space on search engine results pages and adding additional information for the searchers to use in their decision-making process.

You can see the extent of this below and the impact ad extensions have in the search results.

Google ad extensions are also a great way to generate higher-quality clicks as the users who click through to your landing page are far more likely to take the desired action on your website. 

Google offers various ad extensions, such as sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippet extensions. Among the various ad extensions offered by Google, price and promotion extensions have generated some great results for us.

We recommend experimenting with price extensions as a way of providing additional information on the ticket options, this also helps eliminate users who are maybe looking for free events.

Promotion extensions are also great for highlighting ticket discounts such as early bird tickets. Each extension will enhance the visibility of your ads and give potential customers more reasons to click.

5. Test creatives 

Don’t settle for utilising one form of creative in your ad campaigns, experiment with multiple creatives to ensure that your ad campaigns continue to capture the attention of your target audience and drive results. 

A few ways you can experiment with your creative assets is by taking advantage of your existing show imagery. These can be used in your RDAs (Responsive Display Ads) to provide visual context to your ad. 

We’d also recommend looking at ways of incorporating last chance messaging and speaker images to your standard banners. This works really well at increasing engagement and urgency. 

Additionally, at Tag Digital we’ve been testing AI-generated banners, which combine the power of generative ai and human creativity.

It delivers a unique visual experience and is effective in catching the attention of user scrolling, especially on social media platforms.

To find out more about implementing Gen AI into your campaigns click the link here.

To conclude, using Google Paid Ad Campaigns can be a valuable asset for your event marketing strategy, however it’s important to keep some tips in mind to help improve the performance of your next campaigns.

We can do this by setting clear campaign objectives, utilising your budget effectively, lean on AI where possible, use ad extensions to your advantage and test creatives in your campaigns.

Keep in mind that Google ads is constantly evolving, so staying informed about the latest trends and updates is essential to a successful campaign.