AdWords Tips & Tricks
20 March 2016

AdWords Tips & Tricks

AdWords is complicated, very complicated, and there are lots of things to consider when setting up an AdWords campaign. Here we've listed a few of our favourite tips and tricks. The kind of things we often find when we review a client's existing campaign. If you're familiar with AdWords you may know many of these anyway but hopefully there are a couple of ideas here that can help you refine your campaigns and extract a little bit more value.

Always Perform Split Testing

You can setup multiple Ads within an Ad Group. We recommend always having at least 2 Ads. These Ads should have different wording. When you have multiple Ads Google will pick one each time it decides to display your Ad. If you let this run for a few weeks you can then see which of your 2 Ads performed better.

Then you can look at both Ads to see if you can determine why one is performing better than the other. Maybe it will be obvious, maybe it won't. But either way you should pause the worse performing Ad and create a new one (using whatever you have learned so far if possible). 

You should repeat this process at least every month. This way you are constantly refining you Ad text, and homing in on the perfect Ad text. Make sure when you are performing split testing that you are considering not just click through rate (CTR) but also other factors such as conversions and profit per impression. 

Do Not Look At Your Own Ads

So many when I'm talking to a client about AdWords they do a Google search to bring up the Ad on their browser and start refreshing it a few times to see where it appears. Don't do this! You are destroying your Ads value.

Just because you aren't clicking your Ad doesn't mean it's not costing you money. Every time an Ad is viewed Google records an impression. Google also counts the number of times an Ad is clicked. The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions is called the click through rate (CTR). This is a crucial metric Google uses to determine how attractive your Ad is. It feeds into a metric called Quality Score. By lowering your CTR, and therefore lowering your Quality Score your Ad will show less often, less high on the page and on average it will cost you more.

Of course you want to see where you Ad is, so use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool built into AdWords. This tool is there just so you can look at your Ads, how they appear, where they rank, without triggering an impression.

Do Not Use Broad Matches

When you set up keywords you can choose between:

  • Exact Match - this is where the keywords have to match exactly word for word with what was searched on
  • Phrase Match - this is where the keywords have to appear in the same order somewhere in the search 
  • Broad Match - this gives Google a lot of discrection over how to match the term

We often see clients choosing broad match, because their Ads will therefore appear in more searches. The problem is that your Ad will almost certainly be showing in lots of searches that are irrelevant to the product you are selling. This could lead to you blowing a lot of your budget on irrlelvant clicks, and will almost certainly be lowering your CTR (and Quality Score).

Unless you really know what you are doing, and why you are doing it, don't use Broad Match. Just don't. Instead set up more keywords (Phrase or Exact). This way you are in control of where your Ad shows (and even better you get more data on just which keywords are really delivering results).

Do Not Combine Search & Display Network Campaigns

AdWords gives you access to two different networks. The Search Network are all the searches done via Google search engine. The Display Network are Ads that appear in websites themselves. 

These two networks are totally different.  An Ad written for each should be totally different too. You would use different keywords, different Ad text, different bids. 

Still we see campaigns set to use both networks. This is just throwing money away. The most common outcome of this is your Ad gets loads of irrelevant clicks on the Display Network and you hit you budget each day. This is losing you lots of opportunities for valuable clicks on the Search Network.

The simplest solution if you're new to AdWords is to just ignore Display Network entirely, at least until you're comfortable with Search Network and are making a decent return on it.

Use The Targeting Options 

This one is particularly important if you have a small budget. Use the targeting options, all of them. Use geo-targeting to make sure you Ad only shows to people in the region you server. Use day parting to make sure your Ad only shows when your customers are more likely to be searching online. Use device targeting, particularly if your website or service is not as easily accessible on mobile devices.

Targeting is good. Everytime you narrow your focus you increase your Ad Quality and reduce the chance of irrelevant clicks. Google will never run out of people doing searches (it has at least 1,000,000,000 regular users).  It's important not to look on AdWords as an exercise in trying to get as many clicks as possible (not unless you have a massive budget to play with). AdWords is about trying to get clicks that are from the right people, by weeding out irrelevant searches and clicks.

These are just a few ideas on how you can improve your campaign. If you'd like us to take a look at your campaign and see if we can advise any other changes that might be beneficial then please give us a call  01509 852 188 .

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