Google Ads for Photographers: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads is a powerful advertising platform for photographers that want to achieve quality leads online. This includes targeting people that are searching for a photographer whether it’s for a wedding, head shots, commercial advertising, aerial or conference event.

Getting started is easy. First you’ll need to create a Google Ads account at ads.google.com and then setup your first campaign and start advertising within a few hours.

So, I’ve included below instructions on how to setup a Google Ads campaign for photographers.

 

Campaign objective

There are at least five objectives in Google Ads that photographers can use to promote their businesses. Each of these has its related campaign types and features that help to make the campaign successful for you.

For photographers, the best objective is ‘Leads’ because it encourages customers to take action from your ads or website by calling or contacting from the contact form.

However, you can also opt out of an objective and select the features according to your requirements. But using a goal can help your campaign achieve a specific outcome more effectively.

 

Campaign type

After selecting your campaign objective, you will now need to choose the campaign type. The Google Ads Search Campaign is the best type for photographers because it targets people that are actively searching on Google and its partner sites for photographers.

This helps you target people that are interested in hiring a photographer and not potentially waste budget on irrelevant traffic. There are other campaign types that photographers can use like Display, but these are mostly for raising awareness and not for direct action like enquiries.

Later you can also create a Remarketing campaign to retarget people that have been on your website before but did not make contact.

 

Budget

One of the benefits of running a Google Ads campaign for photographers is that a small budget is not a hindrance to achieving a good ROI. Many photographers start with budgets as low as $500 or £300 per month and are able to achieve a relatively good lead conversion rate.

As performance improves and achieve a conversion rate above 5%, you can start to increase your budget each month. And an increase in budget will lead to more clicks and more conversions.

 

Bidding

Choosing the right bid strategy will free up your time to focus more on your business, than regularly updating your keyword bids. So, an automated bid strategy is the best to use because it sets the bids automatically based on the search context. And this means you leverage the machine learning capabilities of your Google Ads account.

The Maximise Clicks bid strategy is one of the best to start with because it helps to get as many clicks as possible for your budget.

And if you are able to achieve 15 conversions per month, you can switch to a Smart bidding strategy like Maximise Conversions. This will help you to set a target cost per acquisition (tCPA) and make your campaign more efficient.

 

Keywords

Keyword research is essential in Google Ads for photographers that want to run a Search campaign. The Keyword Planner tool under Tools & Settings is the tool to use and provides you with forecasting tools too, to see how much you are likely to spend each month.

Match types help to control the search queries that you get for your ads. The best to start with are phrase and exact match keywords because they give you greater control over the searches you get. Later you can add broad match type to increase search volume and target other searches.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match that you can use and you can do the same for other keywords you find.

“photographer glasgow” – phrase match keyword
[photographer glasgow] – exact match keyword

 

Text ads

Your ads are one of the most important part of your advertising campaign. It’s what visitors see first about your business when they are searching for a photographer.

So, it’s important to create targeted ads with good ad copywriting. And you should list all the key benefits that you offer in the ad headlines and description lines.

The Responsive search ad format provides you with up to 15 headlines and four description lines. And that’s much more space than other ad types like Dynamic search ads and call-only ads.

 

Ad schedule

Running ads when you are available to take calls is a good idea. It means you don’t waste your budget and can focus on the best times to run your ads. The default ad schedule is for ads to run all days and hours but you can change it easily to your requirements.

Later when you have more data, and can see which are your best performing days and hours, you can update the ad schedule. And in the Segment section on the Campaigns tab you can see the Time reports to see how your ads are performing.

 

Where your ads appear

As a Search campaign your ads are eligible to appear on Google when people search for a photographer with your keywords. And they are also eligible to show on Search partner sites if you opt into the Search partner network.

Where your ads appear on the page is important too. Appearing in one of the top positions is important, preferably in position one and two for many of your main keywords.

These positions help to achieve a high click through rate and higher impressions and clicks and should lead to more conversions compared to lower positions. Using a bid strategy like Target Impression Share to achieve higher positions is a good way to achieve this and you can set it to appear in the ‘Absolute top position”.

 

Get in Touch

Want to know how a Google Ads campaign for photographers can help you get more clients? Fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you.