Over the course of last decade we worked diligently in numerous verticals in order to increase the CTR and conversions on the campaigns we run. On particular account we perfected the landing pages and we started getting 7%-8% CTR and above average conversion rates. Yet we still wanted to have more growth and more ROI for our clients. We never ceased to observe Google Ads inefficiencies at scale, so we resolved that if we are to win more quality clicks and more conversions than our competitors we needed to do something radically different. So we introduced Micro Campaigns for our search ads services.
After reading this article you will gain deeper insight into ways you can maximize the return on your marketing investment by diving deep into the mind of the searcher, their location and their intent. If you’re looking for ways to push through the Google Ads plateau, and you are tired of your agency or in-house employee telling you that this is as good as it gets, then you’re in the right place.
Why Micro Campaigns Matter In Your Google Ads Mix
Alpha Efficiency team members were amongst the first ones to pioneer the micro campaigns for Google Ads in 2013. We always felt that advertisers should get more for their money without breaking their bank account, so we hyper focused on driving value for ourselves as well as our partners. Growing your budget doesn’t need to be an expensive experiment in what works and what doesn’t work, it should be a smooth slow growth into profitability from day one. Micro Campaigns matter, because they transform your campaign from elusive “investment”, into pure revenue that you don’t have to justify anymore in order to keep it going.
Defining Google Ads Micro Campaigns
What is a micro campaign? It’s a campaign that is deliberately focused to create ad copies for small geographic areas as well as very narrow keyword subset. We used to go up to 2 keywords per campaign bundled with a single zip code location or a smaller town.
What are our results?
This approach yields very interesting results, as we’ve noticed that our micro campaigns are absolutely dominating the SERP competition in the terms of CTR as well as quality score. It was all to common to see 10%+ CTR on a micro campaign, and we had zip code level campaigns that were getting up to 35% CTR. The quality score in these campaigns would easily hover above 8/10, which would create significant savings on your budget and ad spend.
By our calculation, based on the fact that we were fully optimizing landing page experience, our lead cost would be 3-5 times cheaper than our best competitor. All these optimizations were creating small victories that over time significantly add up.
Who is a good candidate for Google Ads Micro Campaigns?
Most small to medium businesses that have small budgets and can’t compete with the big guys absolutely need to work on creatively standing out against the bigger players, and that doesn’t happen by accident. It takes hard work and experience.
Standing out on the SERP is challenging task, and as such it requires careful planning, working within the existing Google constraints that encompasses writing quality ads, creating sophisticated site link extensions amongst the regular aspects of the campaign.
But in the end, the smaller your company, the more focused you need to be on micro campaigns. This way you can snatch victories from the jaws of defeat, and you stretch your advertising dollars further. Micro campaigns are designed for smart business owners that want to move ahead.
Larger Google Ads account benefit even more. While smaller Google Ads accounts are a must in order to survive, larger companies need to retain advertising edge over ever-evolving competition. The larger the account, the more saving opportunities it presents.
What Do I Need In Order To Run A Successful Google Ads Micro Campaign?
Micro Campaigns won’t yield the best results if you can’t truly prepare your campaigns to compete with quality design and personalization for every micro campaign. If you are targeting a zip code, you better have a landing page that is created specifically for that zip code and include a name of that location in the Ad Copy. This customization is reminding the user that they are in the right place. We have a landing page for every micro campaign that we run, and we personalize it to match that specific keyword, as well as that specific location.
Alpha Efficiency team is expertly creating 1000s of landing pages at scale, and intelligently inserting the location and keyword information in the standardized landing page template with the help of PHP programming and integer files. This is why our Google Ads are outperforming the lazier competitors that use the same landing page for all locations and keywords, forgetting how important it is to have highest quality user experience that they can have. This creates an effect after the click occurs, thus further improving the quality score.
Considering that you are paying for your online presence with hard earned dollars, you and your business really want to have the best leg forward, that’s why we are offering premiere design and web development services, so that you as our client can benefit, as well as your audience.
How To Run Them?
As all things Google Ads (and Bing Ads), our honest recommendation is to start small, and play around with lower end budgets until you start getting consistent results with your landing pages. You don’t need to be an expert in statistics in order to determine wether something is working or not. Solid ads get clicks right out of the door, and solid landing pages score conversions immediately. You know you’ve hit the nail in the head shortly after you’ve released your ad copy to the world.
In order to run successful micro campaigns you need patience and solid knowledge of Google Ads power editor, and you need to be very versatile with Google Sheets. The reason why you need these two tools to be successful at Google Ads (and Bing Ads also) is so that you can create large campaigns at speed and efficiency.
What Can I Expect From Micro Campaigns?
Micro Campaigns are ideal for testing things out, because they give you hyper focus on the location and the keyword of your customer, and can be a great playground for experimenting. Our most recent micro campaign achieved 15% click through rate within first week of us launching the ads.
Micro campaigns won’t bleed your Google Ads budget, and they will maximize your ads potential. It is definitively worth the time to go hyper local, and hyper keyword focused, because it is setting up very high constraints as to where your advertisement is showing up, and gives you more control as to who is seeing it.
We were running large scale accounts on the nation wide level, where we broke down entire states on the zip codes, and radically enhanced the performance on the entire account.
How To Manage Your Micro Campaigns?
Having thousands of campaigns can be tough to manage at scale, so you need to introduce Taxonmy for all your campaigns. Managing thousnads of campaigns is tedious, so you need to aggregate your data so you can monitor multiple keywords across multiple locations. This allows you to create saved searches inside of Google Ads, that will help you monitor the groups of campaigns instead of observing them individually.
The Psychology Behind Google Ads Micro Campaigns
When a visitor sees that ad copy is perfectly matched to appease his search intent, and that is coupled with the location from which he is searching, it warrants for explosive combination that transcends the quality of the copy alone. This in return grants you the opportunity to “out-hustle” competitive agencies and in-house Google Ads managers that take their jobs for granted.
When searcher sees that you understand their problematic, as well as your capacity to relate to them, and feeling that you are specialized in serving their location, they will trust you more. This results in extremely outperforming
The Challenges of Micro Campaigns
Micro campaigns are hard to execute, because not only you need superior Google Sheets and Google Ads editor skills, you also need to great Campaign groups through taxonomies. All of this takes a lot of time and dedication into making it work. The constraints within the ad copies themselves and location names are creating this solution challenging to scale, but it’s very well worth it. That’s why putting heroic amount of work into a small campaign can yield big returns for your advertising dollars.
Most if not all micro campaigns have very low search volume. It may take time for your quality score to build up, especially if your account is brand new. You can overcome this challenge by creating macro campaigns and fragmenting them into smaller pieces, as you grow.
Next Steps
We want you to start implementing micro campaigns as your go-to strategy. Alpha Efficiency and our dedicated team will always be here to help you if you get stuck. If you feel you need help with this approach, don’t hesitate to schedule a call with us, so we can take a deeper look at ways you can get more revenue for the same or less advertising investment. Good luck!
