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AdWords remains the quint essential method to gain from targeted audience. However, merely having an AdSense account and posting ads is unlikely to do wonders. Follow these tips and tricks to get the best results out of your AdWords campaign.
Optimise the budget
Success is very often directly proportional to the amount of money invested in the AdWords campaign. As a rule of thumb, larger investments lead to better bids, and a wider spread. However, by following some smart strategies, smaller budget campaigns can get maximum bang for the buck. Budget and bid optimisation are not just about spending more; they are about spending smarter.
The obvious aim in ad and keyword bids is to make the ad show within the first three ad placements available. Apart from increasing the amount of bid by a certain amount, add bid modifiers based on location and device. This strategy helps to win placements when users search on mobile devices, or when users are in a particular area, such as near your physical store. Likewise, to avoid wasting bid money, it is a smart strategy to use bid modifiers to decrease the bid amount in certain areas, far off from the store, or where the target audience doesn’t frequent.
It pays to give serious consideration to local traffic. Google estimates that 50% of mobile users and 34% of tablets or desktop users are most likely to visit a store within a day of conducting a local search.
Organise things neatly
Dedicate a separate budget for each campaign, preferably categorised by geography.
Google rewards relevant content. To leverage it, creating Adgroups, with tightly themed subjects helps. For example, create adgroups “men’s shoes”, “women shoes”, “children shoes”, and more, on the campaign “shoes”. This facilitates better targeting. Create multiple ads within the same adgroups, for Google to rotate ads. Assess spend on each individual adgroup, within each campaign, and get insights into which ads perform better over time.
It is important to keep in mind that people who click on ads want specific results. For conversions, make sure the click leads to the specific product page. While call to action is important, the obvious ones, such as “Call Now”, or “Click Here” are now too clichéd, and Google has actually started to penalise advertisers who use these.
Analyse keywords
Analyse keywords to find out which ones are more successful in generating clicks and converting visitors into customers. Expand on keywords that deliver the strongest Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), keeping in mind that what works today may fail tomorrow. Do not forget to delete underperforming keywords to optimise the budget, and add keywords that drive irrelevant traffic to the negative keyword list.
Leverage Dynamic Remarketing
AdWords launched Dynamic Remarketing in September 2014, allowing advertisers to add dynamic content to text ads. This dynamic content can be price, inventory, countdown to a specific event, and so on. Make sure to upload a data feed of such relevant product information and set bids based on information contained within such a data feed. Google grabs the information it requires from the website, and feeds the information to target audience.
Leverage Shopping Campaigns
Shopping Campaigns, formerly known as Product Listing Ads (PLA), display the exact image of the product, and outperform text search ads. To enable this feature, include a good quality image with the data feed of product information.
Test
Never underestimate the importance of testing. Testing is a regular process in any successful online marketing campaign. Give the campaign time to go viral. Cutting your losses before three months is generally considered acting in haste.
This article was originally published in 4 September 2016. It was most recently updated in November 28, 2022 by
