How many of you actually know that you are running a truly awesome Google AdWords campaign? Not many, I presume. What’s even more frustrating is not being able to benchmark yourself against your competitiors or to be able to see how they’re running their AdWords campaigns and if they’re better than yours. Stop nitpicking and pull yourself together man, just follow these simple instructions below and before you know it your AdWords campaigns will be generating more return on investment than you ever dreamed of.
Split your Search and Display Network
I have seen many companies and individuals make the mistake of grouping the Google Search Network and Google Display Network together in one campaign. This is seriously not ideal as your quality score will be jeopardised due to Google’s Display Network’s inability to generate high CTR’s (this is not necessarily a bad thing – more on this in another article). By creating separate campaigns for both the Google Display Network and the Google Search Network, you are able to target specific areas of interest in a much more controlled environment.
Use Google AdPlanner in conjunction with Google AdWords
If you are making use of the Google Display Network in your campaigns, you should be using it in conjunction with Google AdPlanner. Google AdPlanner makes it easy to target websites that are relevant to your areas of focus and allows you to filter your results to further increase the relevancy you are seeking.
Target a specific area
As simple as this sounds, it can make a huge difference to your stats. Whether you are a company that offers nationwide services or an individual that sells pancakes on the street corner, targeting your specific areas will allow you to identify hot spots and cater for the areas that are lacking in interest. For the bigger companies, targeting main cities (or even provinces) is a good idea. After a few days, you will notice a trend as to where most of the clicks are originating and at what cost. Use common sense to adjust your budgets and optimise for maximum conversions.
Forget about weekends
Depending on the type of business you are running, it may be a good idea to stop displaying your ads over the weekends. Disable weekends in the campaign settings tab. Its a simple step but can save you a lot of waisted clicks from irrelevant visitors.
Target specific hours of the day
This is another simple step that hardly anyone makes use of though its effectiveness cannot be stressed enough. By making use of data from Google Analytics you can target specific hours of the day whereby you can modify your keyword bids to ensure top placement during these hours. To get this information, go to your Google Analytics Dashboard -> Visitors -> Visitor Trending -> Visits page, click on the “Hour” option (top right of the graph) and ensure that you have the “Paid Search” segment enabled). To adjust your bid settings in your Google AdWords campaign, go to the campaign settings tab and click on the “Ad scheduling” edit link.
Use Ad Extensions
Let’s assume you have a Google Places listing (if you don’t, what is wrong with you?!?). You can link your Google AdWords campaign to the data on your Google Places listing which allows your Ad to display your address in certain instances. Not only can you display your business address to increase ad relevancy, but you can also opt-in to display your business number which can be incredibly handy for users on their mobile phones to make a click to call conversion.
Make use of Keyword Match Types
This is one of the most common functions within Google AdWords that not many amateurs know of and use. Many users just make use of the Broard Match type which is great for targeting every single phrase or keyword that contains your broad match keyword. For example, if you are selling blue boats and you use the keyword boat in your Google AdGroup, you’re not only target blue boats but also red boats, yellow boats, boats under the sea, boat, ship, shipping, shipping company, woman in shipping, sexy woman in shipping… OK OK maybe not that far but you get the picture right? There are 3 other match types that you can use (actually there’s 4, but thats a ‘secret’ for another day). For more information on these match types, check the official Google help page on keyword matching.
And lastly, create a compelling, well structured landing page FFS!
This is what it all boils down to chaps. At the end of the (PPC) line comes the landing page, the page that makes or breaks a campaign. You can have everything perfectly set up in Google AdWords and direct thousands of relevant users to your website but if you have a sh*t landing page, its all over. Converting users to into sales and leads is part art, part science and a dash of ingenuity. One of the best websites to follow to keep up to date with the trends in the conversion industry is ABTests.com. Remember to keep experimenting on your different landing pages. A great tool to use is Google Website Optimizer which allows you track the differences of your various landing page experiments.
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