August 7th, 2017

How to Use Google AdWords to Learn More About Your Customers

If you’re a small business owner you may wonder, what were the words someone typed into a search engine to find my business? I know I think about this all the time. It’s good information to know and not something that you get anymore from Google search. The only way at this point to get the exact key phrase that a searcher used from Google is through AdWords.

This is especially important if you’re using a CRM or marketing attribution software. We always want to know what key words lead to conversions and sales on a sale by sale basis. Sure, AdWords will show you which keyword got a conversion, but you don’t know who they are. The power of mixing a marketing software like SharpSpring to AdWords, gives you some amazing insights. But, it requires the use of a connector to make this all work, that connector is a ValueTrack parameter.

What is ValueTrack?

If you’re at all familiar with UTM codes you know that they are used for tracking where your traffic came from. A ValueTrack in AdWords is similar in that it tells you what words someone used to find you.

You can input it right into your AdWords ad, here’s a simple example:

How Does This Help?

If you’re at all concerned with tracking where sales come from, then this idea shouldn’t come as a surprise. At build/create we tie this into our marketing automation software, to help us find exactly what keywords create not just leads, but sales. 

Here you can see that SharpSpring pulls this information from AdWords. It can then display it at the Visitor level as well as the account level.

Above we can see that the lead we have searched for the term “website development.” If this lead turns into a sale that campaign of website development will have grown our sales, and we know we need to invest more in those keywords and less in others that aren’t producing sales.

Secondary Benefits

In a software like Inspectlet, we still see these ValueTracks displaying on the screen. But now we can look at how users that are coming from AdWords, and specific search terms are interacting with the site.

When we did this for one of our clients it helped us shape the language of their homepage. The original text on the homepage was about the product they wanted to sell, and not what people were expecting when they came to the home page.

After seeing people click on ads about a specific topic they came to the website and bounced relatively quickly. The ad costs were wasted, and no leads were coming in. We tested it with content more related to the searcher’s intent and all of the sudden those same clicks had longer visits.

We were able to tailor the message of the website to the message people wanted to see when they’re searching for a specific service. This of, of course, will have positive impacts on your traffic from organic as well. But without knowing that information you couldn’t have that insight, and possibly their site content would be the same today.

How Do I Make the Changes?

AdWords makes it easy to add these to any ad. Adding a simple change like the one below doesn’t take much time, and you can start seeing the benefits within a short period of time. 

This is the kind of information that can help you learn so much more about your visitors and your customers. Learning how they found you will help you craft your content and your website to help others like them find you.

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