Before you do anything you need to work out what you want to achieve from your paid campaigns. Fully understanding what the goals of your business are is crucial to having success with AdWords campaigns. Are you wanting to drive sales? Are you wanting more phone calls? More visits in store? Are you trying to build awareness of your brand? What are you prepared to pay per lead? Answering all these questions will enable you to choose the right platform for your business and also enable you to determine the profitability of your campaigns.
A well structured AdWords account will always outperform a badly structured one. Google is all about relevancy and keeping a tightly run ship when it comes to your account structure will ensure you have ad groups with relevant keywords and ad texts.
Don’t fall into the trap of having loads of keywords in your ad groups. You don’t want any more than 10 keyphrases in any one ad group. Ad groups should be based around tightly themed phrases. Keeping the number of keyphrases down in ad groups means that you can keep the relevancy high with your ad texts and landing pages, which will in turn lead to better click through rates.
Negative keywords stop your ads appearing for irrelevant searches and prevent wasted budget on unwanted clicks. Obviously when you first set up your campaigns and ad groups you populate your negative keyword lists accordingly but that is not where the work ends. You need to regularly review your search query reports to identify new negative keyword opportunities.
There are 4 different settings for how Google can deliver your ads. I recommend you set your ads to rotate evenly or even indefinitely. You should be testing new ad creatives out all the time and in order to evaluate their performance against each other fairly, they need to have been served a similar amount. Setting your ads to be optimised for clicks or conversions, although sounds good, would undoubtedly skew this data and lead to your experiment results being invalid.
There are now 11 sitelink extensions in Google and they seem to be adding to the list all the time. Not all these sitelinks are feasible for everyone but you should be using every single one that you can. Sitelinks provide you with fantastic opportunities to get more click throughs, more phone calls and now even text messages to your business. Sitelinks now also play a part in the calculation of ad rank which is another reason to make sure you are using as many of them as makes sense for your business.
As we all know mobile search is becoming more and more important. Indeed, Google have just announced that they are splitting out their organic search results into one mobile index and one desktop – with the priority being given to the mobile index. This more than ever shows the importance Google is putting on mobile and you can’t afford to ignore it. Google AdWords allows you to segment your data by device; computer, tablet or mobile. Using this data, you can make informed decisions about what your bid adjustments should be for different devices for all your campaigns and ad groups.
Making sure that the page your customers are clicking through to matches both what they’ve searched for and what is talked about in your ad is really important. So many advertisers fall down on this and I have no idea why! It makes perfect sense – if people don’t find what they are looking for on the page you’ve taken them to, they will click straight off that page and go back to researching. As with most things in AdWords, relevance is key here.
Having proper conversion tracking is so important when running AdWords campaigns. Without it you have no real way of knowing how your campaigns are performing. You could be getting the best CTR in the world but if it’s not leading to any conversions for your business what is the point? As explained earlier, setting out clear goals and objectives right at the beginning of the paid marketing process is crucial, however, without proper conversion tracking you would have no idea if those goals were being achieved.
Testing and experimentation is vital when managing AdWords campaigns. It’s not a case of setting everything up right then letting it go. New keyword opportunities, new ad creatives, trialling new innovations from Google, all these things need to be tried and tested. Analysing the results of experiments you run in your AdWords campaigns gives you the information you need in order to optimise your campaigns and constantly be improving them.
With over 17 years of continuous experience of managing Google Ads campaigns, Laura is responsible for the setting up, optimising and management of Google Ads campaigns for Tiger Eye's clients.