The Secret to Creating Successful Adwords Campaigns

Are you frustrated by the results of your Adwords’ campaigns?  If so, you’re not alone.  Adwords’ increasing complexity can be daunting. Adwords’ is constantly evolving and it’s important to keep up.  Last year saw Google roll out a new Adwords’ algorithm plus extensions and this year there have been changes to how Quality Score is computed.  It is very difficult to manage campaigns of any size, on a part-time basis.  Constant monitoring is essential.

Getting help with your Adwords campaign

It costs less than you think to have someone like myself to manage your account and work with you and there are no long contracts or false promises. I personally charge a fixed management fee per month and i do not take a commission on your click spend, you pay Google direct and it’s very straightforward. You need to know how much your clicks are costing you so with me it’s all simplified and transparent.
Pop me a message and we can have a look to see how i can help you get cost effective leads from adwords. Don’t worry i will be upfront about what you can expect to achieve, as i don’t ask for a tie in contract it’s in my interest to make you money to pay for the work i do!

The Secret to Creating Successful Campaigns

Creating a successful Adwords’ campaign requires extensive testing and measurement.  Any change or refinement should be followed up by a test and measure process so you can gauge whether your change has been effective. This should be your mantra for all campaigns. This will also help you discern whether problems are coming from inside or outside your account.  It’s good to get into the habit of making a change and testing and measuring the results. However if you change too much at once, you can make more work for yourself.

Why do some Adwords’ Campaigns Under-Perform?

There are many reasons why an Adwords’ campaign doesn’t meet its targets.  Some causes are more obvious than others. It’s these more common and basic problems I am going to focus on today.  Campaign and ad statistics hold the key in most cases.
Faults with ad copy and key word selection and management are rife. It always surprises me the number of businesses who don’t use marketing psychology when setting up their campaigns. The psychology of customers should really guide both the selection of keywords and crafting ads and landing pages.  Testing and measuring all are essential.

Are you getting the Right Visitors?

The performance of keywords should be ruthlessly evaluated.
This year Adwords’ changed the way in which exact and phrase match keywords trigger ads so that they now use something called ‘close variant matching’. I said at the time businesses will need extensive lists of negative keywords. If you missed this, and didn’t adjust your keywords accordingly then you may be getting traffic you don’t want.  Adding negative keywords can improve the performance of your existing keywords.  This is something you can test and measure.
It can also help to remove any broad match and modified broad match keywords.  I am not a fan of these.  It’s likely these will generate a disproportionate amount of impressions to clicks. Compare their performance with phrase and exact match keywords.
Related to this issue of broad match terms, you should avoid using head terms in your campaign and instead focus on terms your customers actually search for. This will mean using phrases of two words or more and it’s a good discipline to switch everything over to phrase and exact match but under pinned by negative keywords.
Finally, it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, you should avoid using ambiguous phrases.

Do your Ads Stand out from the Crowd?

Do you split test your ads? You’d be surprised how generic ads can be for even quite competitive terms. It’s always a good idea to look at the ads displaying for a term, before you design your own and then to develop Ad Groups in pairs you can split test.
Many ad titles are very similar if not the same so there is no easy way for searchers to discriminate between ads. Your ads must be distinctive while at the same time achieving the highest quality score possible.  Having done extensive customer and keyword research it’s a pity to through it away by producing sloppy ads.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are often the poor relation in Adwords’ campaign development. You simply must create a landing page that has a distinct call to action visitors could reasonably expect.  My personal view is each campaign should have a bespoke landing page. Get it wrong and customers will bounce. Adding Adwords’ conversion tracking code to your landing pages is a must-do. You must know what happens to customers once they have clicked your ad.