google adwords successful tips – Indian Academy of Digital Marketing https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com Sun, 18 Dec 2016 04:25:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.6.1 https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/wwwsss-150x150.png google adwords successful tips – Indian Academy of Digital Marketing https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com 32 32 How to Build the Best Google AdWords Campaign https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com/how-to-build-the-best-google-adwords-campaign/ Sun, 18 Dec 2016 04:25:32 +0000 http://www.isdmmt.com/?p=2778 How to Build the Best Google AdWords Campaign

 

There are a many methods to build best Google AdWords Campaign on the internet which can help you with Google AdWords.No matter how many free tools crop up for ecommerce companies, a paid ad is sometimes the best bet for driving new traffic to your website. The problem is that other ecommerce and even brick-and-mortar competitors are using the same search terms and keywords you will. Not only do you need to know how to build a campaign through Google’s AdWords product, you also need to know how to stand out from the crowd.

Learn how to build and optimize all of your social campaigns with this social media marketing strategy kit.

We’ll start with the basics and then throw in some pro tips for good measure. By the time we’re done, you’ll be an expert! Here’s how it’s done.

Get an AdWords Account

Before you can do anything, you’ll need to visit the AdWords site and sign up for an AdWords account. This involves some financial information so that Google can get paid for each click, so be ready with all your banking credentials.

Once you have an account and you’re ready to go, click the Create Your First Campaign button.

Choose Campaign Type

Most would suggest starting with the “Search Network only” option, but you can change this as you learn and grow. Next, you’ll want to give your campaign a name so you can track your results. It’s a good idea to start with a naming system that you’ll keep using so you don’t get confused somewhere down the line.

Designate Geographic Area

Being an online shop does mean you’re less concerned about geographic constraints. It’s still not a bad idea to consider where, exactly, the majority of your audience lives. If you don’t know, then you may want to back up a step and consider your buyer personas first. Why spend money advertising to people in the Midwest if the bulk of your customers live in the Northeast?

You can also reach other countries, if your ecommerce company serves international buyers. Just be sure you’re prepared for any of the buyers who come your way as a result of your ads. You might pay a lot of money for visitors who can’t make a purchase if you’re not careful.

Set Your Budget

This is a pretty important step. You want to include enough money to make a difference, but you really don’t want to break the bank. You can manually set the bids for clicks, which gives you more control. This also means your ads will stop showing once your budget is spent. That means you won’t end up with a shocker of a bill later.

Once you have the hang of everything, you can go back and change your settings to automatic or maybe even apply for a Google credit line. These are best left to experienced users, because it doesn’t take much to completely empty a bank account just for paid clicks.

Write Your Ad

This is the most important aspect of your AdWords education. The copy you use is what will convince potential buyers to click. You want to attract plenty of people, yes, but you also want those people to buy. If they don’t buy, you pay anyway. So start with a great headline that uses search terms that will reach your niche. You only get 25 characters, so make every last one of them count. You might even need to use abbreviations, or you can search for shorter synonyms.

Then you get 35 characters for the second and third lines. Use this space to point on benefits. How will the product solve your buyers’ pain? Then on the third line you can capitalize on a feature. Be ready to change these if you notice your ad isn’t gaining a lot of traction.

Add Your Display URL

It’s important to notice the difference between the URLs you’ll use in your ad. The display URL is the one you want people to remember. It’s the home page to your website, the address people will type in if they visit without finding you through an ad first. This is what you want to display.

Add Your Destination URL

Now, it’s never a good idea to have a PPC ad that leads straight to the home page. You want a landing page that focuses on the products featured in the AdWords ad. If you send people straight to the home page, they’ll have to do another search for the products they want, and they’re not likely to stick around for that. This is why it’s so important to understand the difference between the display URL and the destination URL.

Add Your Keywords

Remember that you’ll be competing against many other companies for the same audience. Take some time to think of the keywords that will reach people who are ready to buy. For instance, instead of using “luxury shoes” in your PPC ad, you can use keywords such as “red leather heels.” Maybe you’ll miss out on people who are looking for shoes of all types, but you’ll snag those who have a particular shoe in mind. They’ll be more likely to make a purchase if your ad leads to a landing page with red leather heels, and that will more than pay for their click.

You can also use negative keywords and save a lot of money on your clicks. These tell AdWords what you don’t want your ad to show up for. In other words, you can use keywords such as red leather heels not stilettos. 

Bid On Your Clicks

Finally, you’ll need to tell Google how much you want to spend on your clicks. Remember that you’re bidding on visibility here. Those willing to pay more for clicks will show up more often in the searches. You really do have to spend money to make money, especially in the pay-per-click game. As long as you’re manually controlling your budget, you can go all out for clicks until your cash runs out and just replenish your budget when you’re ready to go again.

Double Check Your Double Check

It’s always a good idea to check over everything one more time before you set your ad in motion. Is everything spelled correctly? You’ll miss out on keyword searches if you typo one of them. Did you make sure to manually control the budget? You could end up broke tomorrow if you didn’t. When you’re sure you did everything correctly, then take a deep breath and launch.

Beyond setting everything up correctly, you’ll also want to A/B test your results often. Change headlines, introduce new features, focus on different benefits—and then take note of the number of conversions. There is always a way to make your ad perform better. Google AdWords campaign can now help more businesses bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds by measuring in-store conversions.

 

]]>
10 Tips for Creating a Successful Google AdWords Campaign https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com/10-tips-for-creating-a-successful-google-adwords-campaign/ Wed, 14 Dec 2016 03:52:25 +0000 http://www.isdmmt.com/?p=2734 10 Tips for Creating a Successful Google AdWords Campaign

 

As Google will (and does) tell you, you don’t necessarily have to spend a lot on AdWords to get a lot out of the pay-per-click advertising. But even if you have a small daily budget, you want to make sure your money is not being wasted — or at least try to ensure that the right people are clicking on your AdWords campaigns.

So to find out how your business can improve the odds of your AdWords campaigns reaching your target audience or customers, Google AdWords users and experts offer their 10 top tips for AdWords success.

[ For additional information and tutorials on AdWords, visit Google’s AdWords site as well as the Google Ads channel on YouTube. ]

1. Have a clear goal. “The most important part of any SEM [search engine marketing] campaign is to have a clear goal in mind,” says Michael Ortner, CEO, Capterra, which connects buyers and sellers of business software.

“The point of almost any AdWords campaign should be to grow sales, as opposed to merely generating brand awareness (which is more difficult to measure),” Ortner says.

“With that in mind,” Ortner says, “the advertiser needs to know what specific action they are trying to get their target market to perform. Is it completing a lead form? Calling an 800 number? Making an online purchase? Before you go live with your campaign, make sure you’ve identified that goal and know how you’ll measure the results.”

2. Keep your target customer in mind when writing your ads. When “writing ads, follow the AIDAS principle of advertising,” says Alexa Talpau, director of Online Marketing at Webs9, an Internet marketing company. That is, make sure your ads will “attract the Attention of your audience, raise customer Interest, convince customers that they Desire your product, lead customers towards taking Action (include a call-to-action) and [provide] Satisfaction if they end up choosing your website.”

3. Don’t mislead customers. “Your ads need to be entirely accurate for the landing page advertised,” says Talpau. “Your top targeted keywords should be used in the content included on that landing page and in the ads text,” she continues. Above all, “Don’t mislead your audience! Make sure that each ad group is entirely relevant for the landing page you’re promoting and [that] it’s only being displayed for relevant queries.”

4. Use negative keywords. “Always remember to include negative keyword targeting,” says Susan Mirkin, online media specialist, Market Mentors, a full-service marketing agency. “Negative keywords are keywords related to other keywords in the campaign that are not related to what is being advertised,” she says. “This further qualifies the ads within a campaign, ensuring ads do not show to users who would not find them relevant anyway.”

“Negative keywords help to streamline your ad, presenting it on more relevant search result pages,” says Beth Horodnyk, Marketing anf PR manager, I Think Security, which provides cloud-based data protection solutions. “This drives better quality traffic and leads to your landing pages, while also improving your Google AdWords Quality Score.”

5. Target your ads. “Implement all three types of keyword targeting — exact match, phrase match, broad match — into your targeting strategy,” advises Mirkin. “Bid the most for exact match keywords and the least for broad match keywords.” She also suggests you “separate ad groups by keyword type, in addition to category, to keep the campaign well-organized.”

To further help you reach your intended audience, use “Google’s targeting criteria,” says Joy Gendusa, founder and CEO of PostcardMania, postcard marketing experts. For example, you can use geo-targeting to have your ads run in a particular geographic area.

“You can also target ads according to type of website (health and wellness, automobiles, etc.). And you can target prospects by certain Web behavior, like often visited websites that are relevant to your business,” she explains. “You can also choose to place your ad on a particular website and keep it there, if you desire.”

6. Don’t ignore mobile users. “Ensure that you are using mobile-preferred ads within your enhanced campaigns,” says Shelly Cihan, digital marketing manager, Adworkshop, a digital marketing agency. “This allows for customized message and mobile specific calls-to-action (CTAs) that will speak directly to your mobile users,” she explains. “Coupling this with a mobile-optimized landing page will result in higher conversion rates and a positive user experience.”

7. Always be testing. “Once you identify your AdWords campaign goal/action, plan various tests to try to maximize your outcome,” says Ortner. “These tests [should] span the entire funnel, beginning with identification of keywords to bid on and which ad copy to use, to the design of the landing page and any follow-on email marketing campaigns,” he says. “But only run one test at a time. If you change your landing page design and add 20 new keywords to your campaign at the same time, you won’t know which change made a bigger impact.”

“Test, test and then test again,” says Talpau. “You can only guess what might work best, as it’s impossible to predict exactly what your targeted market will consider as being most appealing and trustworthy,” she says. And “sometimes one single word can make all the difference.”

To get the best results, Talpau says, “create variations of your ads and monitor which gets the best click through rate, the lowest cost per click, the highest number of conversions, etc.” Once you know what works, keep only those ads that are performing well — and start the process over again.

8. Implement conversion tracking. “Being able to see what keywords are triggering a sale or a lead is huge in bid management and optimizing the account to increase ROI,” says Jason Otter, senior SEM manager, PCG Digital Marketing.

“Setting up conversion tracking is critical,” agrees Brent Curry, CEO & Principal, Lodestone Generation, which specializes in search engine marketing. “For your business a conversion may be a purchase, a sign-up or a lead. It is the action or actions that you want your visitors to take on the website,” he says.

“Without proper tracking in place, you cannot trace and promote the successful keywords, ads or keyword themes.” Moreover, conversion tracking “allows ongoing optimization based on the data but also gives you direct insight into the ROI for your efforts.”

9. Monitor and tweak your campaigns. “It can be hard to manage by yourself but a good campaign needs to be monitored and tweaked [regularly],” says Sean Williams, digital marketing specialist, Referlinks Full Circle Marketing.”Doing this at least once a week can keep your costs low by eliminating ineffective keywords.”

 AdWords settings “can be adjusted throughout the duration of each campaign,” says Mirkin. So “take advantage of the opportunity to make changes while the campaign is running,” she says. Some of the campaign changes she has made include: “pausing keywords and ads with low click-through rates, lowering keyword bids if a campaign is hitting daily budget limits and adding new versions of copy if ads are underperforming.”

Make “search term reports your best friend,” says Salman Aslam, CMO, Omnicore, a digital marketing agency. “Your search term report can help you identify low click-through rates, higher cost-per-click keywords, decreased time on site and a host of other issues that can negatively affect your bottom line,” he explains. Using the search term report, you can then “clear out keywords that have become obsolete or are low performers” — and replace them with new keywords that will hopefully perform better.

10. Use Google’s Remarketing feature. “Don’t neglect Google’s Remarketing option,” says Christopher S. Penn, vice president, Marketing Technology, SHIFT Communications.

“As long as you’ve configured it correctly in Google Analytics, Smart Lists leverages Google’s big data capabilities to track who has visited your website by any means (including AdWords campaigns), and identifies who is statistically most likely to convert,” Penn says. “Google then pushes that data back into AdWords for you to use in your AdWords campaigns for remarketing. It’s a powerful tool that not many people know about or have talked about for making the most of your ad dollars.”

]]>
19 Powerful Tips for Google AdWords Campaign Optimization https://indianacademyofdigitalmarketing.com/19-powerful-tips-for-google-adwords-campaign-optimization/ Mon, 05 Dec 2016 05:15:20 +0000 http://www.isdmmt.com/?p=2635 19 Powerful Tips for Google AdWords Campaign Optimization

Learn the Google AdWords Campaign optimization techniques that everyone should know, and act upon every month when managing an AdWords account. Most existing posts will tell you how to use a certain feature, give you a list of reports that you “must know about” or explain how to optimize towards something specific such as CTR, but you won’t see a lot of material that’s comprehensive about optimizing your adwords account.

The reason that this is so important is because in my opinion, optimizing all of your campaigns is the most complex task of managing the account.

When I say complex, I don’t mean that it requires a lot of work, but because you must re-invent the wheel every single time and find the gems that will improve performance among all the ‘dirty’ raw data. That is why if you do not work according to a proper methodology, you’ll find it hard (and annoying) to get results.

The difference between setting up a campaign and its optimization is the same as the difference between setting up a pipeline system and finding a leak in an existing one – In the first case you know that your goal is to connect between the different pipes, while in the second case you’re supposed to locate the leak source in the darkness, and without the proper tools you’ll find a very hard time doing so.

Over the years in our company, we have developed a work methodology on this subject, and that’s the reason I decided to write an organized post with the list of actions that I believe need to be taken in order to do a thorough optimization job without taking any guesses.

Of course, I do not assume to cover every single optimization activity because there are countless of those, but this will at least put you on the right track.

Ready? Here we go:

First Step – Technical Optimization

Tip #1 – Define your targets

I know that this sounds a little too obvious to you, but every optimization has to be performed against a certain target.

Is $1 a click cheap or expensive? Depends. Is a CTR of 20% good or bad? Depends. Is an average cost of 50 cents per conversion high or low? Depends.

It all depends on the targets you’re trying to achieve, which of course will be the foundation of your optimization process, because only after you’ve defined them will you be able to compare your adwords campaign/ad group/keyword/ad to them and see if there’s a match.

Tip #2 – Make Sure You’ve Checked The ‘Auto Tagging’

This is the checkbox that will pass the ‘gclid’ through to Google Analytics and allow AdWords to send data to it as well.

The checkbox is located under Account Settings > Preferences after clicking the wheel at the top right corner of the screen (Next to your customer ID & Email):

adwords-auto-tagging

After that, you’ll have to link your AdWords account to your Analytics account, which is done through the interface of your Analytics account. Only after doing this will you be able to see your AdWords campaigns optimization data in your Analytics reports:

adwords-link-analytics-1024x649

Tip #3 – Make sure that your ad rotation is set to “Rotate Indefinitely”

The default option in AdWords is ‘Optimize for clicks’, but the default options are in most cases meant for beginners. You should set your ad rotation to ‘rotate indefinitely’ so that all ads will get an equal opportunity.

This way, your CTR will be a lot more meaningful, and won’t be a reflection of one ad that got 1,000 impressions while the other only got 10.

Screen Shot 2016-01-18 at 8.19.39

Tip #4 – Never Start A New Campaign On Friday

The best tip I can give you is to go over the campaign in depth 24 hours after it has been uploaded, and this of course can’t happen if you upload a new campaign on Friday.

The reason I’m telling you this is because from my personal experience you always, but always will find keywords or ads that will waste more money that you expected when creating the campaign, and by examining the campaign from top to bottom the day after you’ve started it you’ll be able to identify and fix the waste as soon as possible.

In addition, the manner in which people search during weekends is significantly different than during the rest of the week, therefore is you start running a new campaign on Friday and do your first optimization on Monday – you might make wrong decisions.

Tip #5 – Make Sure Everything Is Approved

I know that this might sounds like an obvious tip, but often you’ll be able to find disapproved ads that you missed (and as a result – the entire ad group was inactive), important keywords for which the bid was too low (perhaps a competitor entered the arena and raised the minimal bid?), or keywords that clash with other keywords within a different ad group.

In order to find the disapproved ads, go to the Ads tab in AdWords and apply the following filter:

adwords-disapproved-ads

Tip #6 – Always Look For The “Why” – The Reason On Which You Base The Optimization Action You Want To Take

The key to an efficient optimization process comes from the ability to identify the source of the problem, or the way we call it in the company – where the money is “leaking” from.

To better understand this let’s review an example:

Say you’ve defined your advertising activity targets as explained at the beginning of the article – to bring as many conversions as possible, at a cost of $30 each. After a week you examine the account and see that a certain campaign is bringing conversions at a price that’s 200% higher than your target.

What do you do now? Do you stop the campaign and build a new strategy?

The answer is – not in the slightest. At this point you need to find the why – the reason that the campaign didn’t work and only then decide what to do with it.

More often than not you’ll find out that it’s not that the campaign didn’t work, but only one of its components (ad group/ad/keyword/certain targeting) that didn’t work well and affected the average adwords campaign statistics that you see at the report columns under the Campaigns tab.

Here’s an example of a campaign that brought a conversion at a price that’s 350% higher than the account’s target price per conversion, but a moment before I disabled it I applied a segment that will show me from which devices the wasteful traffic came in:

adwords-optimization-mobile-segment1-1024x220

Aha! Mobile traffic made up 80% of the entire campaign traffic, with conversions 3 times more expensive than desktop.

This of course gets me to drill down and investigate what exactly is the problem with mobile traffic, because just saying to mobile didn’t work well without any further explanation would be a bit irresponsible of me (and also doesn’t really answer the “why” question).

Since I already know that applications are quite often a money drainer, I straight away went to the placements report and applied a filter that showed me only the traffic that came in from apps (Placement contains = app) – and here I find 1,200 almost entirely wasted clicks that brought a single conversion which I suspect was of no great quality:

filter-clicks-from-app-1024x35

Did the campaign fail? Nope

Was it mobile then that didn’t work? No to that too.

Then what is the source of the problem? – Apps. And here’s a logical answer to the “why” question that I’m looking for.

Do you understand what I’m saying? The data in this case doesn’t help me much if I don’t understand the logic that stands behind the numbers, the context which will offer a logical explanation to the numbers and values.

Only once I know that applications aren’t working can I proceed to take the necessary optimization action, and exclude the placement ‘adsenseformobileapps.com’:

Screen-Shot-2015-12-28-at-12.44.23

So after we’ve understood why we need to find the “why”, let’s take a look at the reports and the metrics that will help us accurately identify the source of the problem for each of the campaigns components:

Second Step – Optimization at the Campaign/Ad Group Level

Did you see that a certain campaign wasn’t meeting your targets? No problem. Let’s get to know the metrics that can help us recognize what exactly isn’t working and how to fix it.

Remember that our goal is to identify the exact source of the problem, therefore the reports stated below should first be applied at the campaign level and only then drill down to the ad group level to narrow down our examination.

Tip #7 – Devices

First off, as I showed you in the previous example, find out how the different devices are performing individually. Is the failed performance being reflected across all devices or is it being caused by a single device type?

To find out, apply the Device Segment and see where the problem starts:

campaigns-segment-by-devices

If you’ve recognized that the problem is within a certain device (desktop/mobile/tablet) you’ll need to drill down and check exactly what isn’t working with it.

Tip #8 – Networks – Search Partners

Did you know that not all of your clicks come from Google’s search engine? There are other search engines such as ask.com, aol.com and others Google products that have Google’s search engine built in (Google Maps for example), and your ad can also appear there.

For the most part, your campaign’s performance in the ‘real’ Google will be quite similar to its performance within the search partners, but just in case it’s important for us to apply that segment in order to get an additional insight to the source of the problem.

Here’s an example from a campaign in which the CTR was higher within partners, but the conversion rate was 30% lower, which got me thinking whether or not I should continue showing up there:

adwords-segment-by-network

Only after you’ve seen the statistics and decided that you’re better off disabling the Search Partners option, will you be able to go ahead and take this optimization action. Go to campaign settings and uncheck the Include Search Partners box under Networks.

search-partners-checkbox

Tip #9 – Search Lost IS (budget)

Another statistic that’s worth checking at the campaign level is the Search Lost IS column, which will show you the percentage of potential impressions that you lost due to insufficient budget:

adwords-campaign-search-lost-budget

If you can, go to the CEO and ask him to increase your budget (assuming the campaign is reaching its targets and the conversions that it generates are relevant and profitable enough for you).

Tip #10 – Dimensions > Hour Of Day

Remember I said earlier that you must identify the exact source of the problem?

It’s true that you can look at the ‘Search Lost IS (budget)’ column as “There isn’t enough budget, let’s add some more”, but we can also be more precise and identify the exact time of day in which we’re out of budget and treat it accordingly.

In order to reach this statistic go to the Dimensions tab, select Time > Hour of Day and you’ll be able to see at what time exactly you were out of budget:

adwords-hours-of-a-day

Now you can take a much more precise optimization action – decrease bids within hours that spend a lot but aren’t bringing good enough results, or create a separate campaign for hours that suffer from an insufficient budget, but you know are more profitable and are worth giving a separate budget.

Similarly, you can apply the same method on the different days of the week, and identify if the budget only gets depleted on a specific day for example and then create a new adwords campaign for that day with an augmented budget.

Tip #11 – Accelerated vs. Standard Delivery

In case you do not have the option of increasing budget and you still want your ad to be served throughout the whole day, make sure you’ve selected ‘Standard’ under ‘Delivery Method’ in the campaign settings, and Google will attempt to spread your budget equally throughout the day:

delivery-method-1024x199

Alternatively, if you see that your campaign does not take advantage of the entire daily budget you’ve set for it, consider changing the delivery method to Accelerated and maybe raise the bids of certain keywords that according to Google are ‘Below First Page Bid’:

adwords-below-first-page-bid

Tip #12 – Search Lost IS (Rank)

This statistic shows you which campaigns are losing impressions due to low ad rank.

This may not indicate that something is wrong with the campaign’s settings, but what it will do for you is point out which campaigns have a problem with one (or more) of their keywords, therefore you should prioritize to examine those campaigns first (providing they’re important to you/spend enough money).

Screen-Shot-2015-07-23-at-9.30.42

Third Step – Optimization at the Ad Level

Try and reach statistical significance

If you have 2 ads, one of which has 10 clicks and a 20% CTR while the other has 20 clicks with a 25% CTR, don’t rush into conclusions. A good rule of thumb is to wait until you have 100 clicks and only then make an assessment, or alternatively use this calculator to find out if your data has statistical significance:

ab-significance-test-1024x875

Tip #13 – Strategically Test Your Ads Using the A/B Testing Method.

An A/B test is as much an action of research as anything, and like with any research, you must first come up with an assumption, and only then test whether it’s correct or not.

If you A/B test between the phrases “buy now” and “buy today” it’s likely that you won’t get a good answer because the difference between the two as far as the user is concerned is not big (unless you have enough time and traffic to reach statistical significance).

However, if you begin with a good research question, such as “would a long headline perform better than a short one”, or “should I appeal to the emotions or the sense” – it is likely that the A/B test results will be of higher value and teach you about your users behavior, and not just what was clicked more.

Notice the following 3 ad results for the search: “vacation Greece” – the first couple go for the trivial and present vacation packages while the third targets the emotions with the word “discover”:

adwords-results-greece-vacation-1024x603

Tip #14 – Was The Test Unsuccessful? Try And Rephrase Your Ad

Did you not manage to reach statistical significance in your A/B test? Make drastic alterations or rephrase your ad completely. Break away from your old message and try a completely new one.

Tip #15 – Didn’t The Ad Work? See If There Were Differences Between The Keywords.

Your ad group will generally consists of more than one keyword, and the statistics of the ad that you eventually see are the averages of all the keywords.

When you examine the performance of you ads and notice one that worked better/worse than the others, make sure you apply the Keyword/Placement segment and see if there’s a specific keyword that is vastly out of the average range or that significantly affects it.

In the following screenshot you’ll be able to see how that average has lied to me, and out of all the keywords in the ad group there was one keyword with a CTR that’s 7 times higher than the average, which of course should be placed in a separate ad group:

adwords-segment-keyword-1-1024x547

Fourth Step – Optimization at the Keyword Level

This doesn’t have to be the final step, but it is the last one as far as the Campaign > Ad group > Ad > Keyword hierarchy goes and that’s why I put it last.

Tip #16 – CTR First!

Take immediate care of keywords with low CTR, because that is the statistic that affects the keywords quality score (QS) the most.

The quality score is a major factor regarding how often your ad will be served, at what positions and how much you’ll pay per click. Generally speaking, you could say that if you have a QS that’s lower than 7, you’ll pay ‘fines’ to make up for it.

In addition, low CTR will cause Google to serve your ad less often for the simple reason that if people don’t click on your ad you won’t be making Google any money, therefore it won’t  be worthwhile for them to serve your ad.

For example – if my product is a Google Tag Manager course, the word “internet marketing” may suggest that the user is interested in the subject, but that’s a very broad term and the relevance gap between it and an ad that offers a “Google Tag Manager course for an amazing price” is very large, and so it’s probably safe to assume that the CTR of the keyword “internet marketing” will be low and therefore move it under a different ad group with a more relevant ad.

[WordStream wrote a post about the how Google calculates the effective cost per click which I highly recommend reading in order to understand how it all works behind the scenes].

Tip #17 – Add Negative Keywords

First of all think which phrases you don’t want to appear under, and add them as negative keywords at the campaign or ad group level.

If you’re selling an expensive product for example, consider adding the words “cheap”, “free”, “discount” etc. as negatives so that your ad doesn’t appear in the results for searches that contain these words.

Notice that you can choose to add them either at the ad group level or the campaign level:

adwords-negative-keywords-1-1024x474

Additionally, go to the Keywords column and select the Search Terms > All view. This is where you’ll be able to see the actual search queries that were used whenever your ad was served.  This will help you identify the times in which your ad showed for keywords that aren’t relevant, and it can also show you the very relevant search terms that triggered your ad through broad or phrase match keywords and you may want to add them as an exact match.

Tip #18 – Check your Search Lost IS (Rank)

Just as we checked this stat at the campaign level, we can view it at the keyword level too in order to find out how many more impressions your keyword could have received but didn’t as a result of low ad rank.

In such a case check whether or not your ad is relevant enough to that specific keyword (if not, put it in a different ad group with a more relevant ad), whether the average position is high enough (if your average position Is low, it might be that people just don’t see your ad and as a result don’t click on it which leads to low CTR), and of course check whether or not your bid is sufficient.

Notice the following keyword, which suffers from a very low CTR, and as a result has a quality score of 1 and is losing 88.16% of its potential impressions (!!!) due to its low rank.

adwords-keywords-search-lost-rank--1024x277

Tip #19 – Check Your Average Position

In principle, average position is a stat that’s worth checking across all elements of the account – starting from the campaign, moving onto ad group and eventually the keyword level.

At least twice per week check your 25 most high spending keywords in each ad group, and perform a bid optimization as follows:

Did you notice that your CPA is higher than your target CPA? Consider reducing the bids of keywords with an average position of 1-2 by 25%. There’s no point in showing up at the top positions if it’s not profitable for you

Alternatively, did you find keywords at an average position that’s lower than 3 and a CPA that’s under your target? Increase their bids by 25% to get more impressions and/or have the ad show in higher positions.

Is your Google adwords campaign not taking full advantage of its budget? Increase the bids of keywords with an average position of 5 and below by 15-25% (providing their CPA hasn’t reached your target CPA)

Is a keyword still not performing well? Make sure that its ad is relevant enough to it, and if not – move that keyword to another ad group with a more relevant ad copy.

]]>