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To join search engine marketing in with the festive spirit, this blog post will provide you with 12 tips for optimising your AdWords Pay per Click campaign.
Day 12 – Budget
Always set your daily budget to an amount that you feel comfortable with. You will often see an alert in your AdWords Account recommending that you increase your budget to receive more impressions and clicks. This is just an advisory and should not be taken as given.
Day 11 – Ad Groups
A campaign can contain up to 100 ad groups, use them! By breaking down your keywords into small, targeted ad groups you will be able to create adverts that closely match the keywords in the group, which should improve your click through rate.
Day 10 – Match Types
AdWords offers you the choice of three match types; Broad, Phrase and Exact. Broad match should be used wisely and must be backed up by hundreds, if not thousands of negative keywords.
- Exact – your ad will only show for the exact search term you are bidding on
- Phrase – you ad will appear for the term that you are bidding on but the search can contain words before and after
- Broad – Google will show your ad for the search term that you are bidding on plus any other search query that it deems relevant
Day 9 – Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are used to help two elements of your AdWords campaign:
- Click through Rate (CTR)
- Eliminate irrelevant searches so your ads show to more targeted searchers
- Budget
- By stopping your ads from appearing for irrelevant searches you will also stop wasted clicks which will conserve your budget.
Day 8 – Split Testing
Never run just one advert in an ad group. There is always room for improvement so run two or three ads which, overtime will indicate the best performer.
Day 7 – Ad Scheduling
Ad Scheduling should be used to tell AdWords when you want your ads to be shown. You can choose specific days of the week and also drill down to actual time periods throughout the day. This is an ideal tool to help conserve your budget and ensure that your ads are only appearing when your key customers would be searching online.
Day 6 – Conversion Tracking
The key performance indicator of the majority of AdWords campaigns is the number of conversions it generates. By inserting a simple piece of code to your converting page, you will be able to see the exact keywords that are fulfilling your goal.
A conversion can be:
- A purchase
- A lead
- An email/newsletter signup
- A page view
Day 5 – Quality Score
Quality Scores are becoming more important and Google use this score as part of their ad ranking algorithm, which determines where your ad appears in the results. For more information on this, please read ‘What is Quality Score‘.
Day 4 – The Networks
Google have three networks that your adverts can appear on, Google Network, Search Partners and Content Network. Analyse the results you get from each network which will indicate whether any of the three are not working for you.
Day 3 – Landing Pages
Drive your visitors to the most relevant landing page based on their search term. If a visitor sees what they want on arrival to your site, they are more likely to buy from you.
Day 2 – Google Analytics
Google AdWords and Google Analytics are like brothers and work extremely well together identifying trends in how your visitors interact with your website.
Use Google Analytics to review:
- Landing page bounce rates
- Unique page views
- Average time spent on site
- Number of pages visited
- Highlight any organic phrases that convert
Day 1 – Google Website Optimiser
If your AdWords campaigns are generating a high CTR but you are just not seeing the conversion level you need, the next thing to look at is the actual landing pages on your website.
Google Website Optimiser is a free tool that allows you to run small or large tests on different variations of your web page. The simplest of changes can result in a significant increase in your conversion rate. For more information, please read ‘What Tests Should I Try On My Landing Pages‘.
Samantha Noble
Samantha Noble is the Marketing Director at Koozai; having worked within the marketing industry for over nine years, Sam has a plethora of marketing knowledge. With a strong understanding of digital marketing techniques, Sam will be covering all aspects of search and the industry in general.
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5 Comments
Steve 24th December 2009
A great tool to optimise your online business is a web analytics provider such as clicktale to optimise your conversions. The analytics show you aggregate behaviours of your website as well as real time videos of their journey through your site. To top this off there are heatmaps of clicks, hovers, mouse and eye movements. So dont waste your money on SEO bringing people to your site unless you are going to employ an analytic provider to convert those shoppers to buyers!
Sam Noble 5th January 2010
Thanks for your comment Steve. I completely agree with you on using an Analytics package to monitor how visitors interact with a website. Sending visitors to a website which doesn’t convert will simply mean that you are throwing money away!
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James 3rd October 2012
This post has absolutely nothing to do with Christmas, and how strategy should be shifted to account for this.
Samantha Noble 3rd October 2012
Hi James,
Thank you for your comment, although I am not sure you understood the reason for me writing the post.
It was put together back in 2009 and was aimed to give readers an optimisation tip for the 12 days of Christmas. It was never meant to be a post geared around what changes should be made to your strategy in the lead up to Christmas.
Apologies for any confusion caused.