12 Hot Tips for Google Adwords

Tip 1

A good tip of the trade is if you are using manual bidding to use bids like “$0.61” over the well rounded “$0.60” that way if there happens to be another person also using manual bidding and they type in “$0.60” your bid will increase your ad rank at a higher position to theirs as 95%+ of bidders just use well rounded figures. This of course is only true if you have the same Quality Score as the other bidder. Remember Quality Score is a equally important as your bid!

Tip 2

To draw attention to your ad it is often best to include something that will draw customers in. The easiest way to do this is by offering some kind of special like “your product only $# each until ##/##/####”. Do you have any specials that you can offer as a hook? Try and offer some kind of positive differentiating factor of your product of service like “great quality”, “low cost” or “fast delivery”. If customers in your industry are particularly price conscience maybe be up front about the pricing of your product/service to avoid people who are after a cheap product/service and click on your ad only to find out that you are way out of their budget. Remember the best way to get the most out of your dollar is by filtering customers on the Adwords side of things and not through your website! That is, use your campaign targeting tools, clever keywords, clever ad text to get rid of junk enquiries not through detailed explanatory information on your websites landing page. The second part of your ad text should be some kind of call to action like “call us today” or “get a free quote” or “get a quote now” or “buy online now” as this will make your product/service more accessible to the customer like you are offering them something for nothing. A good formula to use for your ad text is as follows: [What] – what you are selling [Qualifier] – the hook or offering [Why] – why they should choose you [Call to action] – how the customer can act upon the offer

Tip 3

See how people are triggering your ads by seeing the search terms people are using to trigger your keywords. This is probably the most important maintenance task you can do. This can be done in the “Keywords” tab and pressing the “Details” button and then the “All” option. Go through this list and if there are any searches that aren’t related to your business create a negative keyword to filter this out or if worst comes to worst maybe change your original keyword to a phrase or exact match. I have already created a very big list of negative keywords to try and filter out as many junky enquiries as possible.

Tip 4

Relating to tip 3, at a minimum you should always aim to use either “phrase matching” or [exact matching] keywords; generally speaking broad matches are just too wide in scope. The only exception to this is if your keyword is actually very specific and it is one word like “veterinarian” or “locksmith”. For you “locksmith” is by far going to be your most important keyword, it’s a lot more important than your keys, locks and bolts keywords that’s why I have given the keyword it’s very own ad group and unique ad text. Also remember you don’t need to create additional keywords for plurals of your keywords like “door locks” for “door lock”, Google will automatically trigger your ad for the plurals of your keywords so you you don’t need to enter all these varieties!

Tip 5

Use the first page bid estimate as a guide for putting bids down on your keywords to avoid putting down a bid so high you will get overcharged or so little that your ads will never get triggered. If you get the warning “low search volume” for a keyword it is probably good practice just to delete the keyword – as valuable as you may think it is.

Tip 6

Ensure somewhere on your website landing page it mentions your keyword! In your websites meta it should also mention your keyword(s) – this has already been done for you. It’s fine to have images on your website but just make sure all your text isn’t contained in images as Google of course can’t index this. Try and make your website/content not too heavy that it takes ages to load. If your website was designed by Northern Beaches Websites this wont be an issue, but on the content side of things try not to have hundreds of images or embedded videos on the page as Google doesn’t like this.

Tip 7

Monitor Adwords at a minimum of once a week and even more frequently for your first few weeks so you can monitor your progress and changes that might be occurring in the bidding environment with your competitors. Try not to change too many things simultaneously otherwise if something proves to be very successful or unsuccessful it might become difficult to accredit what caused this. Although keep in mind you can always checkout the “Change History” tool under the “Tools” menu item. It should take around 10-30 minutes a week to monitor your campaign. In saying this you can go crazy with it and spend hours upon hours but this is generally completely unnecessary. I recommend keeping things simple; don’t have too many keywords, too many ads, too many ad groups and you should really only have 1 campaign.

Tip 8

Ensure your keywords are what your customers think they want from you and not what you want them to search for. This sounds obvious but when you have been around your own product/service for an extended period of time it is easy to fall into this trap. Understand your customers, survey what they think your products and services are called by asking them.

Tip 9

Remember you can have multiple ads per an ad group so definitely do this! Have around 2-3 ads per an ad group and see which of your adds has the highest CTR and then use this as a starting point for optimising your ad text. I have already setup 3 ads for each of your ad groups.

Tip 10

To improve the CTR of your ads use keyword insertion. Keyword insertion allows you to put the customers search term inside your ad text automatically. To do this simply put this snippet {KeyWord:Default Keyword} in your ad text. Where it says “Default Keyword” in this snippet, replace this with your own default text if no keyword can be placed in the ad.

Tip 11

Pause or delete your poor performing keywords, ads and Adgroups as your quality score takes into account the CTR of your whole account. Although of course only do this where it makes sense, e.g. don’t delete your most important keyword!

Tip 12

If you are feeling advanced you can also do “Experiments” and this allows you to try out things on your account like new keywords, ads etc. on a scheduled basis. You can enable this from your campaign settings.

Article by Martin Gibson