Google Adwords Optimization Tips

Google AdWords is a very impressive advertising platform. It provides us with numerous tools and features to work with and make our campaigns better. As long as you have the right mindset, resources and strategy, you can make your campaigns Awesome!

Fine Tune Your Keywords

• Don’t be too broad. Be specific to your advertising goals. Pause under performing keywords and explore more relevant ones.
• Keep an eye on Search Term Report. Use negative keywords to stop your ads from appearing for irrelevant search queries.
• If using multiple match type of the same keywords, bid lowest on Broad and highest on Exact.

Make use of Ad Extensions

• he overall impact of Ad Extensions is a key factor in deciding Quality Score.
• The Use of Ad Extensions with ads gives your potential customers more reasons to choose your products or services. Do not miss these opportunities.
• If you use relevant and optimized Ad Extensions, they improve your ads’ CTR and work to improve your quality score as well.
• A better QS definitely means lesser costs for you.

Fix Location Targeting

•  Have location specific campaigns if you are targeting bigger areas, say different countries.
• Restrict your ads only to the locations you need to target. Opt for Advanced Location Option if getting impressions/clicks from untargeted geographies.
• Use Location Bid Modifier to increase or decrease bids based on the relevancy and profitability of your target locations.

Use Custom Ad Schedules

• Once you have run your campaigns for a few weeks, analyse how your ads are performing during different hours of the day, or days of the week.
• Schedule your campaigns to run in the hours which are profitable. Exclude hours when ads do not convert well.
• Use bid modifiers to adjust your bidding based on how your ads perform during different hour or days,

Bring visitors only to the most relevant pages

• Do not bring all your ad traffic to the website’s homepage. Give your visitors ease in getting to the right product/service. They will love it and will reward you for the same.
• Having dedicated landing pages based on content themes/contexts boosts relevancy score. Make sure your keywords, ads copies, and landing page fall in the same line of contexts.
• It positively affects relevance score, CTR, landing page experience, quality score, and eventually the price you pay per click.

You must track Conversions

• Do not hit arrows in the dark. Start tracking conversions if you are not already.
• It will give you, and to the system, certain goals to work for. Remember, you don’t reach anywhere if you don’t have a destination set, you can only stop by.
• Once your conversion tracking is working properly, you can be more strategic in terms of bidding. It will give you more paths to explore and to optimize your campaigns for better ROI.

Optimize Display Network Campaigns for better

• If you do not aim merely branding, it’s wise not to use Keyword Targeting alone. Combine it with other targeting, for instance – keywords + topic, keywords + interests, keywords+placements.
• Have all possible dimensions of ad banners. It will make sure your ads are eligible to appear in more auctions. Eventually, you will have more exposure and you will be paying comparatively lesser.
• Exclude Site Categories where you don’t want your ads to appear.

Explore Other Campaign Types Such as a Remarketing Campaign

From small to large companies, search campaign is one of the most effective online marketing efforts when your purpose is direct response. However, you can’t disregard the fact that there are other marketing channels to be explored and exploited.

Some marketers and business owners still are hesitant to expand their marketing efforts to other channels once they are doing well with a Search Marketing campaign. It only makes sense to invest more to get more. If you limit yourself with budget, you are limiting the reach of your success.

That is why expanding to other marketing efforts is so important, once you’ve already killed it with one channel.

There are so many other effective campaign types and efforts such as:

• Remarketing – Remarketing lets you show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web
• Display Campaign -You can reach a wide range of customers with broad interests, choose which sites or pages to appear on, and engage users with appealing ad formats when ads are in the display network.
• Product Listing Ads – A unique ad format that allows you to include rich product information like an image, title, price, promotional message, and your store or business name.
• Shopping Campaigns – Shopping campaigns are a better way to manage and optimize Product Listing Ads to promote your products online using retail-centric tools.
• Dynamic Search Ads – Dynamic Search Ads automatically show your ad based on the content of your website.

Don’t be afraid to expand and explore other marketing efforts, as you can see there are many options available to you.

Have mobile friendly website

• Be ready for now and the future by offering ease and a better UX to your mobile traffic.
• Don’t force them to Pinch and Zoom, it gives a bad impression and affects your conversions badly.
• A mobile friendly version of your landing page works to improve your overall landing page experience. I am sure you know it’s a decisive factor in deciding quality score as well.

Don’t make your website a slow coach

• Nobody likes to click and wait for the website to load.
• The speed at which your website load affects conversions and finally your costs as well.
• Make it a matter of seconds. Ideally around 3 to 10 seconds.
• If a website loads too slow, the UX is affected adversely. And in the long run, the quality is sure to suffer.

For E-commerce Campaigns: Use Google Analytics E-commerce Transactions

If you’re running a campaign for an e-commerce website, it is crucial that you work with Google Analytics and that the e-commerce transactions tracking is setup properly. Google Analytics will provide you with an abundance of data to assist you in the success of your ad campaign.

With E-commerce Transactions tracking, you have the most granular level data; data for strategic account management, and business driven decision making.

As long as your AdWords account is linked to Google Analytics and reporting accurately, you will be able to determine:

• revenue driven per ad group
• per keyword
• per ad
• bounce rate
• visit duration
• and more.

Analyzing an AdWords e-commerce campaign through Analytics can be eye opening. One can be under the impression that the ad group or keyword that drives the most conversions in AdWords is the most profitable one, but there are times when having more conversions doesn’t necessarily mean more revenue.

The prices for each product differ and that is why an evaluation in Analytics is indispensable. You will be able to determine which ad groups and keywords are producing the most revenue and which ones need improvement.

For further reading on maximizing conversions through Google, please read the following articles.