Adwords is like a double edged sword. On one hand it gets your product reach large audiences online, while on the other it might sting you with your advertising dollars. If you are not careful with campaigns, lots of money gets wasted and may go into drain. Trust me, this is coming from me, having used adwords for more than 10 years.
I am putting up some very useful tips here and you might want to pay attention to:
1. Set a daily budget
Start off your campaign with a daily budget. You can specify the recommended budget by Google here, but my advice is always start small and later you can increase the amount.
Remember to multiply by 30 days to calculate monthly cost. If you specify $3/day then it would cost you $90 a month minimum.
The Rule of Thumb is the monthly cost is always greater than the minimum because of clicks received are totally variable on daily basis.
2. Turn off Display Network
When you start your campaign, turn off the display network and use search network to save your adwords money. Quite often, for certain niches, display network usually exhausts over 90% of your daily budget and ads don’t show up on search network. Search network gives you maximum ROI than display network but keep playing around. It is a good idea to create separate campaigns for search network and display network.
3. Research and Pick Right Keywords
First do research and pick the right targeted keywords before you kickstart your campaign. There are some excellent keywords tools available in adwords like Keyword tool, Traffic estimator and Ad Preview. Build a good list of keywords to target!
4. Ad Quality Score
Writing great ads is crucial to attracts people and make them click, thus improving the CTR. See an example of very well written ad:
The Ad quality score is made of 3 factors
- Relevant keywords
- Domain name
- Landing page
Google says..
Improved Quality Scores can impact your spend in several ways:
- High-quality keywords cost less for each click.
- High-quality ads can show in a better position without costing more.
- More clicks can fit within your set budget, allowing your ad to show more often.
If your quality score is high, then it means your ad performs very well above your competitors even though they bid more. This means ads with high quality score with lowerbids, outperforms other ads with high bids, keeping your costs low.
5. Cut down unwanted countries
You dont need to show your ads in countries which you dont want. This will cut down impressions and hence clicks, thus saving you valuable advertising dollars. Remember All countries are enabled by default.
6. Switch to Manual Bidding
Manually bidding CPC consumes less money than automatic bidding, because you control the cost-per-click. First start of with automatic bidding and once you are quite experienced with CPC, placement, conversions switch to manually bidding and enter the cost per click in the Google interface.
7. Eliminate Low performing Keywords
Eliminate all keywords, performing poor CTR and focus on your ad groups with high click through rate. This way poor keywords dont consume clicks at high CPC. Keep an eye on the quality score as well.
8. Use Conversion Tracking & Analytics
You will be running blind if you dont make proper use of conversions and Google analytics.. Switch on conversion tracking and analytics for your campaigns. Grab the piece of conversion code and paste it on your landing pages to know about conversions and how much it costs per conversion. This way you know about traffic, clicks, impressions and cost-per-conversion.
9. Use Ad Extensions
Do not hesitate to make the full use of ad extensions with your ads in search network. People who search love short embedded links at the bottom and thus possibility of more clicks improving the CTR.
Dont forget that the landing pages must point to the same domain. If you use different domains for main url and extension, your ad will be disapproved.
10. Control Keyword Targeting
There are 4 ways to control your keyword targeting. (Broad, Broad Modifier, Phrase or Exact). If you wrap with “[]” your ad shows up for exact searches, whereas if you wrap your keyword with “” it becomes phrase match and no wrap means its a broad keyword.
Exact matches gets you maximum accuracy in search results, but the audience is minimum reach. Similarly broad match has minimum accuracy but it reaches maximum audience. The phrase match is in between. To cut down costs, you might want to start targeting at exact matching keyword and then slowly move towards phrase and broad matching, depending on the conversions.
11. Landing Pages
Landing pages in your site are the key to your ad performance. Too many people make the same mistake!
Dont point your destination URL to your home page, instead point to the product details page, where there is relevant content matching your ad.
12. CPC Bid limit
If you use automatic bidding, one nice way to control the CPC is using CPC bid limit and specify the amount there. This way the adwords system wont cross this maximum bid limit set by you. If you dont set this amount, and there are too many competitors competing f, the bid can go as high as from $1 to $5 per click. Watch out!
13. Negative Keywords
Negative keywords is a great way to fine tune your keywords and target better. Never hesitate to make use of this excellent tool and believe it or it, it will save you lot of money on the long run. Be sure to do proper research using keyword tool on your competitors and negative keywords.
For example, if you are selling health insurance, you dont want show your ads to life insurance, travel insurance, car insurance etc. So the negative keywords are “-car, -travel, -life”
14. Domain Names
Picking a brandable keyword rich domain is a key to success with adwords and save lots of money. Google recently puts domain names on top page adwords ads, letting users know which sites they are visiting.
Dont pick spammy domains, which will hurt your reputation as an advertiser.
15. Display Network Targeting by Age/Gender
If you are showing ads in display network, you can filter your audiences by age and gender. For example, if you are selling insurance to elder people who are older than 40 years of age. It is highly unlikely that youngsters who are under 30 yrs of age, buying a insurance policy. This is a wise trick to pull off if used properly . Remember, this works only in display network.
