Imagine arranging a massive corporate event and no one shows up for it except for a few of your coworkers. Watching bored and yawning faces, you may feel disheartened. You might even refrain from organizing events in the future altogether. What if we tell you that there is a way through which you can make your event a smashing success?
Let us introduce you to Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords.
Google Ads is the top contender for many organizations looking to increase attendance for their events. Google Ads appear on the SERPs either at the top or at the bottom. A company aiming to increase brand recognition can customize its ads according to its budget and target audience. A well-structured ad can hit all the right cords and pull in leads that are guaranteed to convert.
Benefits of using Google Ads for Events Promotion
Google has always brought quality to its massive user base. A tool from its arsenal is Google Ads. Entrepreneurs have highly appreciated Google Ads for their efficiency and brilliant outcomes. According to Clutch, 90% of consumers believe that ads have influenced their purchase decisions.
This is a significant percentage illustrating the profound outcomes of Google Ads. If you are still unsure about Google Ads, let us tell you the benefits it offers.
You can target your ads
Targeting involves showcasing your products and services to an interested audience segment. Using Google Ads, you can reach people based on their interests, who they are, their habits, and what they’re actively researching online. In short, you’ll be able to target the most relevant segment for your event.
Here are the targeting options that Google Ads offer:
● Keywords: These are the words relevant to your business. These enable your ads to pop up when the customers enter specific phrases or words.
● Ad location: This shows your event ads when a user seems interested in your field and lives in the same vicinity.
● Age and language: You can choose the age and language of the people you want to attract.
● Days, frequency, timings: This helps you determine the time and days for your event adverts.
All kinds of content targeting will be found under the “Content” in the side navigation. The content targeting options include Placements, Topics, Displays, Video Keywords, and Exclusions for all kinds of content targeting.
It is a cost-effective marketing strategy
Marketing channels like Network Marketing and Email Marketing have proven to bring plenty of customers to your platform. However, these require more investment and effort compared to Google Ads. For example, a study reports that a mid-sized business can anticipate spending $9 to $1000 per month on email marketing.
According to Google, $10 to $50 is the recommended budget for its ad campaign.
Remember that you cannot afford the marketing investments to imbalance your entire budget. Even though you yearn for the whole world to attend your event, spending heftily on an ad campaign will bring more setbacks and fewer rewards. Instead, learn how to control costs and make the most out of these ads.
Google uses a price model. Learning about the ins and outs of this model enables you to focus on every element of the campaign. A key aspect to remember here is paying for your ad when someone clicks on it. If someone genuinely interested in your event clicks on your ad, a share goes to Google.
Your event gets the most visibility
Given that you are paying for the ads, the ad stays on top of the search results. For instance, if you host a massive seminar about Emergency Medical Care in Melbourne, you can use Google Ads to make your event appear at the top of search results every time someone searches for Emergency Medical Care in Melbourne.
The perks of optimized Google Ad campaigns outweigh all the myths about them.
Now that we are all on the same page, it is essential to work out a perfect plan for promoting our upcoming events. Let’s begin!
How to Use Google Ads to Promote Events in 2023?
The idea of the majority of your target audience showing up at an event is indeed quite tempting. Here is how you can use Google Ads to make it happen:
Step # 1: Set and Finalize the Ads Budget with the Marketing Team
Generally, Google Ads uses average daily budget slots. You have to set a monthly amount to achieve your objectives. What do you want to accomplish by displaying advertisements?
In our case, we want to pull a colossal audience to our event. Use the Smart campaign feature to set a maximum budget such that the ad bids will adjust automatically to enhance the results. After becoming a seasoned advertiser, you can then explore the bidding strategies like Cost per Acquisition, CPM, or CPA.
Once you have decided on a monthly marketing budget, you should stick to it. Google Ads will allow you to figure out a daily limit on how much budget you should spend on display ads. The variation in daily budget occurs because Google evaluates daily search traffic.
Meanwhile, the Google Ad algorithm creates an average daily budget limit to ensure that your campaign doesn’t go beyond the budget limits. The Google Ads interface has several budgeting options. For example, you can use the Shared Budget to control spending across several campaigns. It works by tracking the combined daily expenditure across the campaign.
Step # 2: Research the Right Keywords and Audience for Your Next Event
Shooting the event ads toward an irrelevant audience will lead you to failure. Likewise, you have to choose relevant keywords to target ads toward the right audience. The keywords will determine your success and how much you pay for your campaign.
How do you pick the right keywords for your ad campaign?
Thorough keyword research is essential to ensure that your ads are effective and you have plenty of tools at your disposal to do just that. Some of the most famous tools you can use in this regard are Google Ads Keyword Planner and Keywords Everywhere.
Moreover, you can also conduct a keyword analysis with Moz if you have its pro membership. It gives you access to the tool called Keyword Difficulty and SERP Analysis.
It is vital to focus on the monthly keyword volume when deciding on the words or phrases you will target. All your efforts should be focused on the keywords with a monthly search volume of 300+.
Some measures you can take to find relevant keywords for your event are:
1. Put yourself in the audience’s shoes. Think about what they might have on their mind when searching for an event like yours.
2. Try to be more specific. For example, you are conducting a culinary event with Gordon Ramsay; your keywords could be “Gordon Ramsay live cooking Los Angeles.”
After you have determined the best keywords, you should segment them into groups. Some words and phrases may be following the same theme so allot them in a single group to input into Google ads for event promotion.
How can you determine the type of audience for Google Ads?
Before you promote events with Google Ads, you should figure out your target audience.
Google Ads is a powerful tool for targeting the audience. It helps the organizers set up an event and reach out to people with relevant demographics.
You can use it to:
● Evaluate the demographics: People who make accounts on Google have to input their personal details such as gender and age. The algorithm can figure out the potential prospects of your event and use Google Ads for event promotion.
● Research the market: The search engine conducts a thorough background check to determine your potential attendees. If you are struggling with who might be interested in your event, you can use Google Ads to see the ages and genders of people who searched in this regard.
How to use keywords to target the audience?
Once you know your audience’s demographics, you can then use the relevant keywords to target them. For example, if you are planning a corporate event, you can use keywords like “business ideas for the professionals” or “business ideas for the beginners” to gather the right audience at your event.
The ads should provide enough information for the prospects to learn more. You promote an event, so it is better to go for a local or a community approach instead of spending on a worldwide ad campaign.
Step # 3: Create Highly Engaging and Converting Landing Pages
A landing page is a link or a page where people land after clicking on your ad. The display URL of this page resembles the URL of the ad.
In our case, we want to get a packed audience room at our event, so the landing page must be scannable and compelling. It should be designed to tempt the visitors to register for your event or sign-up for the previous event attendees. This is(a landing page for people who interacted with your company at an event).
It would help if you lay down the groundwork for creating a solid landing page. This involves including details like:
● The who: Tell the people who are you and why you hold the expertise of hosting this event
● The what: Tell the audience what they should be expecting from this conference
● The details: Share the location and timing of the event
● The CTAs: Your landing page should have a highlighted button telling people where they can get the ticket or registration for the event
Check out the landing page design by WPEngine Decode Event. Even though the event is over, you can register for its live stream through the code. When you click on its live-streaming button, you can attend the event for free!
Besides this, you can find some the great landing pages design to curate one.
Step # 4: Write Event-optimized Ad Copies
There is no textbook approach to writing a copy for a Google Adwords Event promotion plan that guarantees success. Some of the best practices when crafting an ad copy are:
Integrate keywords strategically
Use keywords strategically in the ads to improve their relevance and indicate to the users that this event is worth attending. When working your way around the keywords, remember to use them only 2-3 times in the ad copy. Also, try to add the keyword in the URL slug. In the end, run A/B testing on the keywords to find what works for you to attract the most people.
The ad copy should be concise
Users looking for their queries have specific concerns. You can advertise events using Google Ads by ensuring that you tell them how this event will help them. Ensure that the ad copy and the landing page URL are specific. Let the searchers know that this event will help them in their endeavors.
Moreover, it would be best to keep the ad copy short and concise.
Include a call-to-action (CTA)
The ultimate goal of event ads is to attract people to sign-up for your event. Spell it out for them by telling them what they can do next to enter this event. This requires inserting a call-to-action (CTA) button right below the advertisement.
Calls-to-action could be a starting point when researching the CTAs for your event ad copy. When you want more people to register for an event, you should ensure that you use the best event registration software and link it to your CTA.
Step # 5: Create the Campaign in the Google Ads Dashboard
A well-articulated event campaign will allow you to promote your upcoming event to the interested digital audience or local community. Follow these steps to complete the setup based on your campaign type:
Identify your campaign goals
The initial step to running a Google Adwords event campaign is to choose the ad objectives and overall goals. This campaign goal will allow you to determine the best campaign type to reach your target audience.
You can also choose the conversion goals in the process and add more goals according to your requirements. Ideally, event promotion aims to boost its audience online and offline. If you’re promoting virtual events, it’s important to focus on online audience building, since physical attendance isn’t a factor. Some entrepreneurs or agencies may have a hard time gathering people for a virtual event.
Choose your campaign type
The campaign type determines where your customers will find your event ads. Given that your campaign aims to increase attendance at the event, you get options for the best campaign types to achieve it.
Some campaigns aim to enhance a brand’s reputation and credibility. Meanwhile, others have the goal to scale the profits.
If you want to improve attendance at an event, you can include a countdown timer to let people feel the urgency to subscribe to the event. You can also mention the number of tickets left on a sidebar to tell prospects they may lose the chance of attendance. Remember, every word on your ad copy counts. So it would be best if you crafted it to match your campaign goals for the event.
Step # 6: Publish your campaign
Once you have identified all the core concepts of a campaign, it is time to take it mainstream.
Advertisers can select the websites, applications, and search engines where they want the ads to show. It is important to ensure that the keywords and audience selection are on-point. Compare the final outlook of the advertisement with those of competitors and the best event ads in the market. This enables you to fix the flaws in your advert.
Step # 7: Monitor Performance
After you have published the ad, conduct regular checks on it to optimize it. Those who are relentless in testing receive incredible paybacks because the advertisers learn what works and integrate those strategies in future campaigns too.
It is essential to understand the performance of your campaign and ways to scale it. It would be best if you took a deep insight into the following metrics to measure your Google Ads performance:
● Average click-through rates
● Conversion rates
● Cost per click
● Revenue
● Return on investment (ROI)
These metrics help marketers to determine keyword performance. They can see through the search words and analyze the weak ones to replace them. When you promote events with Google Ads, know that some metrics may produce lower numbers. This is because the metrics for products and services bring different outcomes compared to an event’s metrics.
Conclusion
Voila! You have reached the end of the guide. Keep in mind, the secret to achieving a massive audience at the event is to pull the reins of Google Ads.
Learn how to experiment with the ideas discussed in this guide until you find the best strategies. Once you understand how to use Google Adwords to promote your event, don’t forget to measure their performance. This will help you enhance your ads’ performance in the future.
The turnover at the events in the future might surprise you beyond expectations!
