Just a quick disclaimer. AdWords are a really powerful marketing and sales tool, but there are a lot of complexities to making sure that you are maximizing your investment. This post is intended for those who are running their own campaign or thinking about trying AdWords.
Guaranteed SEO strongly recommends that if you are planning to set up a campaign and want to maximize the bang for your buck that you hire experts to do it, but if you want to try it yourself these 7 tips will prove invaluable!
Well you would think it sounds obvious, but even the pros get this one wrong sometimes. Google requires that you set a maximum daily spend limit. Fair enough… So let’s say you set it at $50 per day.
That said your actually monthly budget is $1000. You watch closely for a few days and see that with the parameters you have set, you are spending only $30 per day on average so you stop watching. Not a good idea, and almost certainly a bad idea if you have set your campaign to auto-optimize the bid process settings. You might come back at month’s end and find yourself well over budget.
Set caps on both maximum amounts you are willing to pay per click and also maximum daily budget.
The bidding options let you focus on clicks (to drive traffic to your site), impressions (to increase the visibility of your ad), or conversions (to specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition bid). Figure out what you want to accomplish before you launch your campaign as the results can be very different!
Make sure that you use keywords in your ads. It is important that you have relevant keywords in your ad copy as failing to do so lowers your Quality Score and reduces your “bang for your buck”. Using no or poor or low quality keywords in your ad ends up raising your cost per click and reduces the conversion rate of your clicks.
To make sure that you are really targeting people who are interested and likely to respond positively to both your ad and your offer, avoid generic single keywords. They tend to be more expensive and less effective. Instead use “long tail keywords” and whatever you do, make sure you set the parameters to “exact match”.
One way to make sure that you are excluding irrelevant searches is to use negative keywords. This will stop the “tire kickers” from wasting your money.
For example: if you want to exclude people looking for “cheap” or “trial” or “free” because you are not giving away your product and don’t want to waste time and money on people who are looking for something for nothing; then be sure to account for these terms by setting up the appropriate exclusions for your AdWords Campaign.
Without conversion tracking codes you will have a hard time determining ROI for your PPC dollars and telling which ads are actually driving interested customers versus ads that are getting clicked but don’t convert to your bottom line. You can link your campaign to your Google Analytics from your Adwords account settings.
For instructions on how to set up conversion tracking, please click here.
Stay focused at the level you operate on and decide where you want to generate customer interest from. If you are running a local business then don’t waste your efforts advertising nationally. You will get more responses and a better ROI by focusing on where your customer base is.
Also, if you can justify a broader campaign it is often better to set up multiple ad groups so each area has its own KW list, negative KW’s, budgets etc. You can then fine-tune things more easily and accurately to adjust and optimize each region you wish to target.
We all like to get lots of clicks, but what you really want are clicks from only the people who are interested in your business, offerings, products, etc. Anyone else is merely costing you money with little chance they will buy. If you use a display network campaign then be sure to keep it tightly focused. Make sure your display ads are showing up on relevant sites and are not confusing to your audience.
Getting the right people to click on your ad is only half the battle. If after they land on your site and the landing page they are directed to does not “speak” to them, then you have just blown your budget and wasted their time.
Do not simply point your ads to your homepage and hope the person clicking the ad will stick around and bother to navigate your site until they find what the ad was referring to. It does not work and it furthermore gives a negative behavior signal to the search engines which just sets your organic SEO efforts back too. Big no no!
Still got more questions? Finding your AdWords campaign to be a lot of work and not giving as much return as you thought? Got some other good tips you think our readers should know about?
