8 Top Tips for Making Adwords Work
We ran a successful seminar on return on investment with Google Adwords at the British Library IP Centre this month. As a follow-up we thought we’d undertake the slightly daunting task of trying to condense 4 hours of Thomas’ ramblings into 8 top tips. These will ensure that you not only appear at the top of Google but you pay the least amount of money for it.
Google presents AdWords (it’s paid for adverts) as easy, simple and quick to setup. A great image from The Register demonstrates a businessman about to tackle a campaign and presented by a Google engineer with just a single button, meanwhile behind the scenes this slightly convoluted system tweaks and skews your results
In truth Adwords is a behemoth of a program, it has functions and features that take days to master. It is though a great advertising tool, and with time and monitoring you can get great returns on investment, here are our top tips (bear in mind they assume some knowledge of Adwords);
Tip 1 – Click through Rate (CTR)
Your CTR is how often your ad is clicked on when it appears in Google. So if Google display your advert 100 times and it’s clicked on once your CTR is 1%
If you’re not on the content network then your CTR should be at least 2% (10% in very targeted ads), so stop or change any adverts that are getting your worst CTR
Tip 2 – Know your keywords
Google will help you when you choose your keywords by carrying out what is called ‘matching’. It does this in two ways;
Phrase matching; this means that if you choose ‘car insurance’ you’ll come up if someone types in ‘insurance for my car’
Broad matching; this means that if you choose ‘car insurance’ Google will try and match it to related phrases so you’ll come up under things like ‘motor insurance’
They can work, but even if they do you lose immediate visibility of what people are typing into to Google when your ad appears. We have paid for people to visit our website having typed ‘victim support London’ into Google when we were bidding on ‘it support london’
Our tip is to start with exact matching on and diversify once you have this working
You can control it by surrounding your keywords with [brackets] so
- keyword = broad match
- "keyword" = match exact phrase
- [keyword] = match exact term only
- -keyword = don't match this term
Tip 3 – Ensure relevance
Google loves relevance; when someone types ‘car insurance’ into Google it wants
- The advert title to be relevant to ‘car insurance’
- The advert text to be relevant to ‘car insurance’
- The page that the advert leads to be relevant to ‘car insurance’
- The adverts in the same group are relevant to ‘car insurance’
This means you can’t simply choose 20 different keyword/phrases to advertise on, point them at your homepage with the same advert and expect great results
Targeted is much better, choose a few keywords and phrases using exact matching, design dedicated landing pages on your website if you can with relevant content
Check your CTR (tip 1) and check your page relevance using https://AdWords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Tip 4 – Ad Quality is king
Your AdQuality is a score given to your advert by Google about how good it thinks the add is, essentially it multiplys your cost. So if you have an AdQuality of 1 this is going to cost you 10 times more per click than if you had an AdQuality of 10
Google is slightly 'wooley' about what causes AdQuality, but essentially it boils down to CTR and relevence. If you relevence isn't good, then the AdQuality will go down and you'll pay more per click
AdQuality is visible on the ad level and has to be turned on in columns, stop any advert that falls to 4 or below in Quality
Tip 5 – Carry out split testing
After you have tweaked your ads so you’re know what you’re bidding on, that the relevance is good and you know your CTRs. Then look to split testing, this can be on anything, the only thing to ensure is that you know what’s working and stop what doesn’t.
- For example you could setup two ads
- With the same keywords/phrases
- The same advert text
- Leading to the same landing page
- But with a different ad title
These will provide a different CTR and thus you can try and track what works and what doesn’t
You can also try running the advert at different times of the day, and different geographical locations.
Even the slightest change within adverts will make a difference. Be wary though of your relevance and if you’re going to try split-testing very different keywords/phrases don’t put them in the same ad group
Tip 6 – Turn off the Content Network
The content network is basically when your ad appears on someone else webpage rather than within the Google search results
It can work very well, but it can also work very badly. If this is the only thing you are going to ‘split test’ then do this.
You have to turn the content network on and off at the campaign level not the advert level
Tip 7 – Lose yourself in the content network
The content network does work, but not for everyone. If you want to get the most out of it, then you’ll have to devote a few hours to trying and tweaking. Websites share with Google
- Age details of users
- Sex details
- Income details
- Geographic location
So you can choose to target specific demographics, and sepcific websites so you can just target the www.telegraph.co.uk for example or see how this performs agains other news sites
You can also run exclusions such as ‘conflict and tragedy’ to ensure that your advert about air travel isn't put next to an article about an aircrash.
You can specify ‘below the fold’ or not, so that the ad only appears when the user doesn’t have to scroll to view it.
You can specify ‘frequency to particular users’ so that if a user hasn’t clicked on your ad after it appearing it doesn’t show it to that user again.
Tip 8 – Never Assume
Assumptions about web users are a good start, however;
“When you assume you make an Ass out of U and Me”
Start off your campaigns with what you think, but never assume!
One assumption B2B marketers make is that they shouldn’t run their AdWords outside of business hours, however
Less people bid for B2B phrases outside business hours so the cost should be less
Even though the majority of people looking for B2B services search within business hours, who are those minority? Maybe they are more your customers rather than your competitors customers!
Never assume, just becuase you think it won't work doiesn't mean it won't and the best thing is using split testing you can try and track quickly, cheaply and easily.
Operating outside ‘the norm’ can yield great results; track and try things the best thing about PPC is if you have defined your goals correctly you can stumble across great ‘outliers’ very easily
If you want more then sign up for our Adwords seminar
