Google Adwords is a large platform that offers a wide array of possibilities. It allows you to market to potential clients that are searching for solutions that you specialize in. It does sound a bit like the Eldorado or the Klondike. However, while it is a great tool to generate opportunities, it is still very complex and, in fact, many companies are wasting huge amount of money on Adwords.
Today we will cover certain elements that will help your Adwords campaigns to reach positive ROI and to maintain such performance.
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Take advantage of the negative keywords and don’t let them take advantage of your budget!
Many advertisers are reluctant to exclude their brand from certain query. While I understand the famous saying that no publicity is bad, I also understand that every budget has its limit…
To be able to achieve positive ROI and to increase your quality score, we have to exclude the terms that are not catering to your product or service offering. By excluding term like “cheap” and “free” for your high ends products, you reduce the number of total impression which in turns raises your click-trough rate, increases your quality score, decrease your cost per click and ultimately increases your ROI.
The negative keyword tool is a must and should be monitored weekly to exclude the irrelevant query that reduces your budget for very weak converting chances.
2. Make smart use of match types to keep control over your budget and campaign performance.
Again, many advertisers are also reluctant to use Exact match because they want to make sure to appear in as many queries as possible, so they use solely the Broad match.
While it sure does have its advantages, the broad match option is not recommend when starting a new campaign. What happens is that you end up showing on searches that are not necessarily relevant to your product offering, thus unnecessarily increasing the number of impressions, which end up diluting your click-trough rate. You then end up lowering your quality score and having to pay more for your keywords. Focus on Exact keyword to maximise your chance to increase your click-trough rate.
3. Make sure to use the Keyword details reports to skim underperforming keywords
Something that we often see is that advertisers tend to let go once the campaign is running. In fact, the real work starts when the campaign is launched, and we managed to gather some data.
Now that we have more or less a week worth of data, we can start to analyse the performance of our campaign. Using the keyword details report, we can see which keywords are not performing and only generating impressions. We want to get rid of those since they are not generating clicks, which negatively impact our click-trough rate.
Remove those keywords and keep on tracking their performance so that you only keep high performing keywords.
4. Use quality score per keyword to determine which to keep and which to ditch!
Your quality score is out of 10, and it is the direct indicator of how much you are going to pay for a keyword.
The less you are performing on your quality score, the more you will pay to appear using this keyword. What you will want to do is to remove the keywords with low quality score and to make sure your keywords are organised thematically so that your ad matches your keywords the best you can.
5. The last but no least, landing pages optimisation
How many times did I observe ads redirecting to the company homepage? If I am looking for a blue kayak and I click your ads, I expect to be redirected to your blue kayak page. If you send me to your home page, the odds of me quitting your site are very high.
Take the time to create custom landing pages. If you are already organizing your keywords by theme, it is then already way easier to come up with landing pages custom built to your themes.
In conclusion
Adwords can bring you valuable business but can also make you budget disappear if you are not careful when setting and tracking your campaign. The presented tips will enable you to reduce the amount of unprofitable impression to increase your click trough rate, which is one of the major criteria evaluated by Google.
If you have any question feel free to ask, I will be more then happy to answer.
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