By R P Chapman
In the current economy the pressure’s on to make our marketing budgets go further. You’ve already cut back everywhere you can think, but those sales targets aren’t getting any smaller. What else can you do to improve the ROI on your spend?
It’s time to look again at your AdWords campaign. The search market is competitive, ever changing, and your best opportunity for maximising the limited budget you have left to get the most sales you possibly can.
Considering the volatility of search, there’s always something you can do to improve your AdWords campaigns so you should consider these tips not only as a project to help you through a tough economic climate, but as an ongoing strategy for improving your budget ROI.
Top 10 AdWords Tips
- Create Narrowly Focussed Ad Groups
Particularly relevant when working on long tail terms, make sure your ad groups are narrowly focussed with each one being variations on a single keyword.
- Test Conversion Before Making Volume Changes
Use split testing (where you run the changed copy and the original in parallel) to make sure changes you’ve made are effective before rolling the change out where you have high volumes.
- Keep Relevance High Through the Journey
Make sure the Keyword searched for is highly relevant throughout the journey from search, to Ad, to Landing page so that the visitor feels more like they’ve found specifically what they were searching for, improving the possibility that they’ll convert greatly.
- Don’t Follow the Crowd
Just because everyone else is using the same tactic, doesn’t mean they’re right. If everyone else is advertising on price (as an example), test something different. Using something like a discount percentage or offer of free delivery will make your ad stick out from the crowd. Try a few variables (including a priced one in this example) and see which is really the most effective for you.
- Continually Develop and Test New Ideas
Even if you’ve found the perfect Ad for today doesn’t mean it will still be tomorrow. The market moves on, competitors copy each other, change their tactics, and so do the searchers. A good example of this might be the very poorly distributed Nintendo WII games. When there’s stock everywhere you’ll find these games advertised on price. When they’re scarce they’re advertised on availability. And so it follows with all products that are subject to supply and demand.
- Use Negative Keywords Effectively
Not used anywhere near as much as they should be, negative keywords can really push up your CTR by getting non customer searchers out of the mix right from the outset. An example here might be setting a negative on “free” if you’re trying to sell an e-book, getting rid of all those people looking for free e-books who were never going to buy your product anyway.
- Keep Your AdWords Account Clean
You really need to analyse and monitor your AdWords account on an ongoing basis to get the best performance out of it. If it’s awash with thousands of redundant keywords, spotting the things you need to concentrate on is harder. Get rid of zero impression keywords regularly to ensure you stay focussed on the data that matters.
- The Misspelled Gold Mine
Misspelled words can be a dream to your CTR scores. The competitive index of misspelled words is almost always lower than the correctly spelled version so you should really try and get every variant you can find. Look out for easy tricks like no spacing between words, common keyboard typos, etc.
- Consider the Total Cost of Your Ad
You should never forget your ad spend contributes directly to your cost of sale and if you’re forced to bid too much to get in the position you want to be, then it’s time to cut that ad and try some different strategies. Don’t lose sight of the profitability.
- Continually Optimise Your Ad Copy
How your ads are written is vitally important to how well they’ll convert and is a topic in its own right. See the related Writing Killer Adwords Ads for much more detail on this subject.
These AdWords tips should be used regularly to keep on top of your AdWords campaigns, so it’s worth revisiting them often to make sure you’re really getting the very most you can from your work here.
