Top 20+ AdWords Tips
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- Written by Jordan McClements.
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Do your keyword research.
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Make Your Website As Good As It Can Be.
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Use Conversion Tracking.
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Use Google Analytics.
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Make sure your landing page is right.
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Do NOT control your budget with your ‘budget’.
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Have tightly themed Ad Groups.
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Use (or at least test) a call to action in your AdWords adverts.
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Always have at least 2 different adverts in each ad group.
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Use different keyword match types.
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Use negative keywords.
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Optimise Separate Campaigns For The Display Network.
- The Display Network is a whole different animal to the Search Network.
- It’s worth having separate campaigns with separate bids for your Display Campaigns.
- You can have separate advert text for the Display Network.
- You can set up a vast array of Image Ads / Rich Media / Flash ads. Here’s an example of what an image ad on the Display Network:
- You can now increase the relevancy of your ads by using Category Targeting as well as contextual targeting.
- If you site gets enough visitors to specific category/product pages, a Remarketing campaign will probably give you your best ROI. e.g. if someone visits your Blue Widget page, you can set up an advert that mercilessly follows them round the internet saying `PLEASE COME BACK AND BUY MY BLUE WIDGET, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!`. You can also put a cap on impressions for each unique user so you don’t end up *really* annoying them!
- Google also recommend having more tightly themed ad groups for the Display Network, and they now provide a tool which helps you construct ad groups that are more suitable for the Display Network with the ‘Contextual Targeting Tool’ which you can find under the ‘Tools’ tab in your AdWords account.
- Finally, I for one am always telling people that the Search Network is better than the Display Network for most things, but there is no denying that it is becoming increasingly important. For more information on this see There’s A Perfect Ad For Everyone and Display Advertising Will Become A $200 Billion Industry.
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When Looking At AdWords Account Performance – Be Sure to ‘Segment’ Your View.
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Use Google Conversion Optimizer (CPA bidding).
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Use ‘Enhanced CPC bidding’.
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Use ‘AdWords Campaign Experiments’.
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Use Geographic targeting
(and make sure your ads are tailored to the target market).
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Use Ad Extensions.
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Use Customised Alerts.
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Use Google Merchant Center.
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Make sure your prices are competitive.
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Use An Auto-Responder.
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Use Google Web Site Optimizer.
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Use Google Checkout.
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Get Glowing Customer Reviews (AdWords Seller Ratings).
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Have a look at all the reports available to you.
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Use a free AdWords voucher.
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Use Adwords Editor.
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Consider importing your AdWords campaign into Yahoo and Bing.
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Consider using Google AdSense.
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Don’t Listen To People Who Tell You You Should Forget About PPC / Google AdWords And Concentrate On SEO.
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Take Everything You Read With A Pinch Of Salt.
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If you are writing a ‘Top 20 Tips’ guide, then make sure not to include more than 20 tips!
Not all of these tips are directly related to Google AdWords, but all of them are important if your are thinking of spending money on Google AdWords, and many of them are important if you are thinking of spending money on Pay Per Click or any other form of internet marketing.
Use the excellent, free keyword tools provided by Google.
http://www.google.com/insights/search/
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox.
Though bear in mind that the AdWords Traffic Estimator Is Not Necessarily Very Accurate.
If you have a big online competitor that already runs a Google AdWords campaign, check out:
http://www.keywordspy.com/
to give you a good idea of the adverts and keyword that are already working well for them!
Small changes can improve your conversion rate substantially, meaning, for the same AdWords spend you can make more sales or generate more leads.
For one example of how a small change to your web site can make a big change in your conversion rate see the following post How A PPCNI Client Improved Sales By 16.2% By Altering Their Checkout Process Slightly.
A good place to start on how to improve the conversion rate of your web site is with the following document from Google: www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/conversion/make_your_website_work.pdf
Other sites worth checking out:
http://www.marketingexperiments.com/
http://www.getelastic.com/
At the very least you need to track how much each lead or sale is costing you, and if you have an eCommerce site, make sure your shopping cart passes data to AdWords and Analytics. This way you will be able to see (almost) exactly what your return on investment is for individual AdWords adverts and keywords, and which traffic sources are worth most to you:
goo.gl/ZIMXM
You’ll be able to tell how much each visitor from each source is worth to you (not just your AdWords traffic). You’ll also be able to see where people are coming from, and where they are leaving your site from, and reporting on organic traffic may throw up some great new keywords for your AdWords campaigns. If you have e-commerce tracking set up, it can also show clients details of sales that can be indirectly attributed to AdWords e.g. an increase in sales related to searches on their company name as shown above.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
This is covered partly in the Google document in point two. Basically if your AdWords advert is for ‘Blue Widgets’, make sure that the destination URL for that advert is your ‘Blue Widgets’ page, NOT your home page, and tell your visitors what you want them to do when they arrive!
You can save a lot of money by controlling your advertising spend with your bids rather than your daily budget. The message above should read ‘Attention! Clicks are currently costing you more than they should be!’
See :
http://www.ppcni.com/save-thousands-year-adwords-bill/873/
If you sell green widgets, and blue widgets, then make sure you have a separate Ad Group for each. Don’t have too many (loosely related) keywords in each Ad Group. In fact, in some cases, there is merit in having just one keyword in each ad group so you can make your ads laser-targeted, though this may be overkill if you are working with thousands of keywords with fairly low search volumes.
‘Buy Now!’ ‘Download A Free Trial Now!’, “Sale Must End Soon!” May look down market and tacky, but if it doubles your Click Through Rate, then you would be stupid not to include this type of call to action in your advert text.
(And always be testing new ads). If you can create 2 similar adverts, and one advert gets even a marginally better Click Through Rate than the other one, then you are ‘quids up’!
The 3 points above are directly related to improving your Quality Score. In a nutshell – Click Through Rate is the most important factor in Quality Score. If you can increase your Quality Score, then you can reduce your Costs considerably. This is a topic about which much has been written (and a lot of what has been written is utter nonsense). If you want to understand more about it, a good place to start is Understanding & Improving Google AdWords Quality Score by Redfly Marketing.
‘Broad’ match can be very, well, broad, so if you are in a competitive market, and don’t have a big budget, you may be best to start with just ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match types, or even just ‘exact’ on its own (though this will get you very little traffic compared to ‘broad’). If you are using different match types, then, generally you should bid most on ‘exact’, less on ‘phrase’ and less still on ‘broad’. But this will vary depending on your campaign(s) quite a lot. If you have had conversion tracking implemented properly for a long enough period of time, you can view the relative values of the different match types in Google Analytics under ‘Traffic Sources’ ‘AdWords’, ‘Keywords’ (select ‘Match Type’ instead of keyword from the drop down list).
You should also consider using ‘Modified Broad Match’ :
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2010/07/newkeywordtargetingfeaturerolling.html
If you are using any match types other than ‘exact’ then negative keywords are a great invention. e.g. if you sell all colours of widgets apart from red widgets, then a good negative keyword for you would be ‘red’.
If you are just starting out with AdWords and/or you have a limited budget, Turn Off The Display Network!
More often than not, you’ll find that it will convert poorly compared to the Search network. However, if you are already having astounding success with the Search Network, and you still have some money to spare, then it’s probably time to tun your attention to the Display Network. But please bear the following points in mind:
Depending on which view you are in, you should see a little ‘Segment’ drop down box near the top of the screen which allows you to segment your view by network or device. You may find that ‘Search Partners’ doesn’t work as well for you as Google Search. You may find that ‘Desktop and laptop computers’ works better for you than ‘iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers’. If the difference is huge – then you can always exclude the offending network or devices, though bear in mind that if you are using Conversion Optimizer, it *should* take differences in conversion rates across networks and devices into account when adjusting your bids.
If you are opted in to the ‘Search’ network, you’ll probably also find that ad groups / keywords that seem to have a terrible Click Through Rate at first glance, actually have a really good Click Through Rate on ‘Google Search’. NB – A Poor CTR on ‘Search Partners’ won’t have a negative effect on the ‘Google Search’ part of your campaign.
Once you have built up enough conversion history in an AdWords campaign you can enable ‘Conversion Optimizer’ or ‘CPA Bidding’. This is a great time saver, as you no longer have to keep a close eye on all your bids to ensure that you are always making a profit. You just tell Google ‘I am prepared to spend a maximum of £5 to sell a blue widget, now go off and get me as many sales as possible without going over budget.
It can also help you get more conversions from ‘Search Partners’ by adjusting your bids at the search ‘network’ level – something which is not possible with standard CPC bidding:-
http://www.ppcni.com/google-adwords-conversion-optimizer/477/
More information on AdWords CPA bidding:-
http://www.google.com/adwords/conversionoptimizer/
If you’re not getting enough conversions in a 30 day period, you will not have the option to use Conversion Optimizer. The next best thing is Enhanced CPC bidding. See :
http://adwords.blogspot.com/010/08/increaseroiconversionswithenhanced.html
For further information, and here is a link which briefly describes the difference between the 2 bidding options above:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py? hl=en&answer=162731
These can be really useful for testing a multitude of different things. e.g. You can test different CPAs. A Lower CPA will give you a better Return On Investment, but will it give your a higher profit? There is only one way to find out!
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=28565
If you ship physical products outside your own country, you’ll find that separate campaigns for separate countries can work better. e.g. if you are targeting the Republic of Ireland, you’ll probably find that ‘Free Ireland Shipping’ in your ad text works better than ‘Free Shipping’. You’ll probably also find that “Save €’s” works better than “Save £’s”.
There are 5 different types of Ad Extensions.
Product Extensions are important for e-commerce sites that have a Google Shopping Feed.
Location Extensions and Phone Extensions are important for advertisers that have physical stores, or want to allow people to ‘click to call’ a phone number from a mobile device (with full browser).
Social Extensions allow you to link your AdWords account to your Google Plus Business Page which should make your ads stand out better for anyone who has anyone in their Google Plus circles that has interacted with your business page. Further info here – AdWords Social Extensions.
One which can significantly increase your Click Through Rate regardless of what you are advertising is ‘Ad Sitelinks’. If your ad is relevant enough to the search that has been performed and your bids are high enough, then Google may display Sitelinks under your ad. See: http://goo.gl/KlmeO for more information on Ad Extensions.
Remember the tip earlier on about not controlling your budget with your budget? In an ideal world, once you are sure you are getting a good return on an AdWords campaign, you would set the budget high enough that there is little or no chance of it ever being exceeded, but it is sometimes difficult to get clients to agree to this strategy.
You can set up AdWords customised alerts for host of different things, but I have found it most useful for alerting me when a daily budget is about to be exceeded.
See Understanding AdWords Alerts, Announcements, Notifications for further information.
If you sell physical products, this allows you to set up a feed to Google Shopping, which means that your products can appear in the ‘Google Shopping’ results free of charge:-
It also allows you to display product images in your AdWords adverts (Product Extensions):-
In October 2011, Google also made Product Listing Ads available to all users in the UK! :-
There is a fair amount of work involved in setting up Product Listing Ads correctly, and currently only CPC bidding is allowed rather than CPA bidding, but it does allow you to double the amount of screen real estate you can occupy, and if you stock a huge number of products, you don’t have to manually create an individual advert for each one… http://www.google.com/merchants/
This is *the* most obvious point in this list, but is sometimes overlooked. If you are selling exactly the same product as Amazon for £5 more, and you are not adding any extra value, then no matter how great your AdWords campaign is and no matter how great your landing page is, your conversion rate is not going to be good!
If you sell a consumable product that gets used up on average after 3 months, make sure your customers get an email 3 months after purchase asking them if they would like to buy some more.
If you don’t already have an automated ‘abandoned shopping cart’ email, then get one set up as soon as possible.
If you don’t already automatically ask customers for positive reviews after they make a purchase, and have had time to try their new purchase out, do it now!
If you have an e-commerce web site that does not allow the use of auto responders, get a web site that does!
Some very interesting further reading on shopping cart abandonment can be found here – seewhy.com
Rather than guess what works, test what works and find out for sure!
http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer
If implemented properly, this allows you to have a ‘Google Checkout’ badge next to your AdWords adverts which (according to Google) can increase Click Through Rate by 10%! http://checkout.google.com/
. But you don’t just have to take Google’s word for it. I have checked on some pretty large campaigns and found that Google Checkout badges increased CTR by 10.3%.
See this post for more information on what has changed with Google Checkout Badges. Though there is still *some* advantage in using Google checkout in that you can get Checkout badges on your items in Google Shopping results. It is also going to become increasingly difficult to ignore as it transmogrifies into 
.
But, most importantly, it is still one of the easier ways to …..
This can increase your Click Through Rate and your Conversion Rate by showing seller rating stars beside your AdWords ads. If you saw the same product at the same price from 2 different retailers, and one of them had lots of 5 star reviews, who would you buy from? See Increase Sales With AdWords Seller Ratings for further information.
These used to be in the ‘Reports’ tab, but this is being phased out in favour of providing similar information from the Campaigns, Opportunities and Dimensions tabs. A particular favourite of mine is the Dimensions tab – where you can quickly view statistics by date, day of week, hour of day, and geography to name but a few.
There are lots of these floating around. If you get your campaign set up a an AdWords qualified expert or AdWords qualified company, then they will be able to give you a £75 voucher as part of the deal. If you are in the UK and you join the Federation of Small Business they will send you a voucher every single month (or at least they have with me!) You might even be able to find one cheap on eBay.
Google have also started giving £50 vouchers with Google ‘Engage’ which seems pretty easy to qualify for :
http://www.ppcni.com/google-engage-free-adwords-vouchers/998/
At the very least, you should be able to claim a £30 voucher:
http://www.ppcni.com/free-google-adwords-vouchers/.
You’ll also find that if you advertise for a while and spend some money, and then pause your campaigns for a long enough period of time that Google will email you a £100 voucher to try and persuade you to start advertising again! These vouchers are valid on any account of any age as far as I can tell.
In the UK, in November 2011, Google started sending out huge numbers of £50 vouchers for Google AdWords Express to local businesses. It looks like these vouchers can be applied to and AdWords account of any age, provided you have not already applied a promotional voucher to that account.
If you want to become/stay and AdWords Qualified professional, don’t want to pay to sit the AdWords exams, and are lucky enough to have an account manager at Google, ask them nicely if they will generate you a voucher code for the Google Testing Center (worked for me…).
This program can be a huge time saver if you are working on medium to large sized accounts. Download it and learn how to use it! (Though if you use Linux you’ll need to install WINE and use the Windows version) – http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/
They make it relatively easy these days, and Microsoft support in particular make Google support look embarrassingly bad. Also, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing should be merging in January 2012 in the UK & Ireland (and already have done in the USA), meaning you’ll only have one non Google campaign to look after.
This one is very far from being a no brainer, but if done correctly, you may be able to claw back some of the money you have spent on AdWords without affecting your own sales too badly. See Google Think Retail AdSense PDF for further (admittedly very biased) information from Google.
For information on how I made around £20,000 from Google AdSense from a web site that I worked on in my spare time, see How To Make £20,000 From The Google Display Network.
It’s simply not true that you can forget about PPC and concentrate on SEO to get traffic to your web site. Apart from the fact that SEO can take a *long* time, and PPC gets you almost instant traffic, there are a lot of misconceptions around about how effective PPC is compared to SEO. For more details, see Should I Forget About PPC And Concentrate on Search Engine Optimisation?.
There are many ‘experts’ out there who would pass off opinion as scientifically proven fact. Even Google employees are not infallible. There are no people outside of Google who have a 100% understanding of exactly how AdWords works (and very few people within Google I would imagine).
I’ll give one example which I have read time and time again (it even appeared in a guest post on a very reputable PPC blog who shall remain nameless). “Start out with high maximum CPCs – this will increase your Click Through Rate and therefore your Quality Score!” – Errr, no it won’t. It will almost certainly increase your CTR. It’ll definitely increase your costs. But it won’t increase your Quality Score…
You’ll also see a selection of AdWords case studies on the internet which have nowhere near enough data for the results to be statistically significant. e.g. if a study shows that one version of an AdWords ad has 30 clicks and another has 33 clicks, this is *not* conclusive proof that the second ad will always have a 10% better Click Through Rate!
PS – While some of the above may read like a press release from Google themselves, please remember that Google is a PLC, and as such, it’s main aim is to make as much money as possible for Google!
Links and references:
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PPCNI is a Google AdWords Certified Partner based near Belfast, Northern Ireland.
**Click Here To Get A Free Google AdWords Voucher (£30 or $75) !**
Comments
Jordan, great read with excellent links to additional information.
Maybe you should rename it to the 20+ or something Google Adwords tips.
Aha – how 20 ‘+1′ and a bit?
You have a very useful weblog I’ve been right here reading through for about around 20 minutes. I am the novice as well as your publish is actually useful for me.
Thanks.
Always nice to be appreciated.
Please stop it Jordan. This is far too useful. You are giving away all our secrets.
Seriously, this is a very good round up to push account holders in the right direction.
We both know though that there is a lot to it and outsourcing is the best option for most businesses so they can get on with what they do best.
If you have the time and are technical enough to follow all of the above and implement it all properly, then you definitely don’t need to pay someone else to do it…
It’s a similar situation with my tax returns. I could probably do as good a job as my accountant *if* I kept up to date with all the latest tax rules, and spent 40 hours making sure I did it 100% correctly, but I have no intention of doing that!
Thank you for all the information, very useful tips!
Thanks. You are most welcome.
Nice list Jordan, very useful.
One quote I saw recently from SEOmoz: “Organic drives 90%+ of traffic (but garners only ~$5 billion of investment in 2011)”. Interesting take on importance of good SEO and relative budget allocations.
Yup -you cannot ignore SEO. But I will say that as time goes by, Google are making it more and more difficult for SEO guys/girls to get seen at all. In a lot of cases the first organic ranking is below the fold now! It stands to reason that Google will do everything they can to increase clicks on AdWords ads. Whether some of these tricks are fair or not is open to debate. I’m just glad I make a living from PPC and not SEO
Interesting comment Jordan. I just searched on a medium resolution screen (800 pixels high) and found seven Ads but only one organic listing visible without scrolling down. Search engine or Ad engine?
Google Analytics will show the screen height for visitors so that might help in any decision about expediture, but PPC is certainly looking good.
Chris that’s a bit of an ‘edge case’ though – these days it’s mainly mobile devices on such low resolutions, and many sites configure design for mobile anyway. And searching google on mobile (i.e. not ‘desktop’) shows no ads (currently!)
It’s a balance then. I agree with that!
Hi Darryl, you have prompted me to take another look.
Looking at Google Analytics again for branded-usb-promo.com which sells promotional usb, business to business about 29% of new visitors from Google have a screen height less than 800 pixels. Those are the visitors likely to see 7 Ads and 1 organic listing before scrolling down. So SEO is worthwhile for that website.
Figures will differ for consumer websites but that puts things into perspective. I’d say, think long term about your SEO strategy to get high up for some relevant keywords but use Adwords too.
Oddly enough when I did a Google search on an iPhone all I saw was Ads before scrolling down. Also Google Analytics says only 4% of visits were from mobile so Google Analytics is a great place to start before deciding your priorities. No doubt each case will be different but its worth checking. Cheers.
Guys – you definitely will see AdWords ads on mobile if the search has ‘commercial intent’ (usually a couple at the top and a couple at the bottom)..
Excellent work !!
Thanks for the idea Michael about renaming the post to “20+” – I’ve finally gotten around to doing just that!
Hi Jordan
It was great to meet you at the SEO meetup. I can see now why Michael had so many good things to say about you because this is a fantastic article. You clearly know your stuff!
Ah stop… You’re making me blush. Nice to meet you too by the way.
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