More attendance. Those two words are powerful enough to make your mouth water. More attendance leads to more opportunities to serve and wow, strengthening your business's financial health allows you to hire more staff, increase wages, and expand your offerings. However, more guests don’t walk through the door by snapping their fingers and generating a return on investment from marketing can sometimes be tricky to calculate. How many people drove past your billboard last month? How many listened to the ad on the radio or walked past that bus stop? Most of all, how many of them saw or heard those ads and then showed up and gave you money?
Fortunately, advertising has become much more sophisticated in recent years, and the data you can leverage from where you spend your money allows you to make smarter decisions. When your investments work, you no longer ask yourself what your advertising budget should be, but instead, ask yourself how much you can increase your spending!
In this article, we will cover advertising with Google as a channel to drive traffic to your website and ultimately buy tickets to your venue. Here are five considerations as you strive to boost your attendance through paid search.
Quality Score
One of the most critical features in Google Ads is your Quality Score, yet it is also highly underrated. Simply put, your Quality Score is a metric that is ranked on a scale from 1-10 that measures the user experience that your ads and landing pages provide when users search for your keywords. The three main factors that go into your Quality Score are expected click-through rate (or CTR), ad relevance, and landing page experience. This is defined by how likely people are to click on your ad when they land on it if the ad is related to the keywords being searched, and how correlated the information on the landing page is to the content in the ad.
As your quality score increases, the less you pay per keyword.
Extensions
Using extensions like sitelinks, callout, structured sniper, and others can help increase your CTR. These features expand your ad, creating greater visibility when users search for your keywords, making it stand out more. This naturally leads to a greater click-through rate for your ad and increases its overall performance. While it seems that it may require additional expertise to create more customization for your ad, this is only half true. Google will allow you to create manual extensions, which will enable you to leverage your in-house expertise to maximize the benefit. However, if your talent is limited, you can automate your extensions, letting Google Ads take over to predict how it can improve your ad performance.
Keyword Research
Keywords and keyword research are the foundation of Google Search ads. They help you target the right audiences and manage your budget while catering to your business needs.
While you can do keyword research directly on Google Ads, several third-party platforms can help broaden your research. If you use Google’s research tool, you can narrow your search to the keywords that will be most optimal for your business. This is by seeing the frequency of search of the keyword you are researching and how the frequency has changed over time.
Display Advertising
In addition to ads that appear while searching, Google offers ads that display on their network of websites on the Google Display Network (GDN)... of which there are over 2 million. This extends beyond users who pull up Google to find their answers, as your ads appear on websites that your target audience is already visiting (or arriving at via search).
YouTube Advertising
Similar to display ads, ads on YouTube can serve your target demographic while on YouTube, even if they did not search for your specific keywords. Google (YouTube’s parent company) allows you to create your video ad and upload it to YouTube, choose your audience, and set your budget accordingly. With the massive amounts of data that Google and YouTube both collect on their users, your ads can be hyper-targeted toward your demographic, their interests, age ranges, and much more.
Not only are display and YouTube ads boost the potential of your search ads, they can also increase your Quality Score, which, as mentioned above, is one of the most essential features in Google Ads.
While the topic of driving business through paid search can seem overwhelming - and yes, there is much more to be written on the subject, this at least can be your springboard into finding creative ways to grow your attendance and see the direct ROI from where you put your marketing dollars.
