Top 5 Money Saving AdWords Tips

Don’t let your ad budget balloon out of control. Learn the top five tips to running cost-effective Google AdWords campaigns – strategies you can implement today and reap the savings and performance benefits from tomorrow. Elizabeth Marsten runs down her top five tips in this quick five-minute tutorial.

These are some methods you can go into your AdWords account right now, and apply. And see a significant difference in performance, in a positive way of course. First up, you’ve got to separate the search and display networks at the campaign level. Search means that someone typed into a search box, and hit Go. Display means that your ad is showing alongside content on a webpage, like an ad in a magazine.

Each network behaves differently, and has different definitions of success, and their quality scores are calculated differently. So, do yourself a favor, and never do this. Always separate them. It’s the number one place, I see people waste the most money, hands down. So what’s that look like? If you go into your Google AdWords account, open any campaign, open the settings tab, and here under type, click edit and you can see whether or not you have your search network only displayed, or search network with display select.

In this case, you want to separate them, so search network only. And hit Save. You’re good to go. Our next one, is to use mobile bid modifiers. By default, mobile devices inherit the bid, that you set for the ad group, unless you change it, after you save a new ad group. The setup wizard conveniently leaves this little detail out. If your site looks awful on a mobile phone, or doesn’t convert well. You want to at the very least, lessen the amount of the bid, or turn it off completely. Let me show you how to do that. To change your mobile bin modifier. Simply open a campaign. Open one of your ad groups, and click settings.

See this gray button here, that says devices? Click that. And it’ll show you computers, mobile devices with full browsers and tablets with full browsers. Go over here, to the bit adjustment column, to change that. Choose from the drop down > Decrease by, and put in 100%. What this will do, is essentially opt us out of showing ads, on mobile devices. If you wan to be on mobile, but just not to the tune of the full-fledged bid, at the ad group level, put a different number in, say like 50, for 50%, to bid half as much. In this case, we’re going to go ahead and leave it as 100.

Click Save, and there you have it, a mobile bid modifier. So, excellent. What’s the number three tip? Send visitors to a relevant landing page, not just the home page. If someone came to your site, on the keyword dog collars, then you should drop them off on a dog collar category, or product page, for goodness sake. You wouldn’t like it if you drove all the way to the store, and asked where the maple syrup was, and the store clerk just said, thanks for coming in. It’s here somewhere. Best of luck to you. Do that, and you can just watch your page search clicks get wasted, as people bounce back, to the search engine results page, in the hunt for their elusive item.

Our next tip, is to focus your spend, rather than spreading it too thin. You can’t buy, all of the keywords all of the time, you just can’t. So, let’s take a look at what that looks like, in a Google AdWords account. Go to your campaigns, and here, I’ve set up, the unfortunate situation of what it looks like, to spread your budget too thin. Taking your budget, and splitting it across multiple campaigns, say, with $5 here, $3 here, maybe $10 here, is a sure-fire recipe, for frustration and tears. Focus your budget. Spend the money where it matters.

Cut out keywords that are not working, you just have to. Alright, the last one has to be good, so, what is it? My next and final tip, is I want you to enable conversion tracking. Pease do this. Please. If you can’t track at the very least what keywords brought a sale, even if you don’t know the amount of the sale. You might as well throw your money down a well, and make a wish. The attribution method is pretty much the same. So, let’s walk through how to do that, in Google AdWords. From here, click the tools tab, and hit select conversions. Click the red, add new conversion button, and name your conversion.

Something like. Sales, or transactions is a good idea. Your source, is going to be a web page. Like your thank you page, your receipt page, or your submission received page. Could be a call on site, a mobile or tablet app download as well, or you can import. For the purposes of this tip, we’re going to go with the webpage. So, hit Save and continue. Here, we’re going to choose, our conversion category. In this case, we’ve gone with a purchase and sale. Here we’re going to set our conversion window. If you know that your sales cycle, is shorter or longer than 30 days, feel free to change that here. Otherwise, you can leave it as the default.

From here, if you don’t know your size markup language, you’ll need to ask your developer. But by default, you could probably leave it as HTML. Conversion value. You happen to sell one thing, you could enter that amount here. Otherwise, it’s optional, and you should leave it blank. Your tracking indicator, is actually something, that people don’t see on average, however, it is required. You can choose a single line or a two line layout, but if your site’s background, isn’t white, you might want to change it here, so that it blends in more seamlessly. From here, we’re going to hit Save and continue. Now, if someone else makes the changes to your code on your website, you can click this button here, enter their email address, and it will email them this block of code.

If it’s you that makes the changes, click the, I make the changes to the code button, here. Now, you have your block of conversion data code. You can paste this in, between the body tags on the receipt page, thank you page or submission receive page. Then, hit Done. Now, you can see there are sales transaction conversions here, the source’s web page, the categories of purchase or sale, because we haven’t actually installed the code on our website yet. These were just a few quick tips, to get you on the right track, with your Google AdWords efforts.

If you’d like to learn more, be sure to check out PPC Fundamentals with me, Elizabeth Marsten here on lynda.com.

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Tips for AdWords Beginners

When you’re first starting out with AdWords there are so many things you need to know and understand that it’s almost impossible to grasp them all.

To help you get started with your new AdWords campaign I’ve written a list of all the helpful knowledge that I have compiled over the years. Granted, all these tips are not necessarily beginner friendly, but they’re good to know and you will one day find out why you needed to know them.

Ad Copy

It’s Not Just About One Metric

When optimizing your AdWords Ad Copy it can be dangerous to look at only one of the key metrics:

• CTR

• Clicks

• Conversions

• Conversion Rate

• Cost Per Conversion

• Avg. Conversion Value

If for instance you only look at CTR, then you will focus on the ads that draw in a lot of clicks. Many of my  ad tests have shown that the ads having the highest CTR don’t necessarily have the best conversion rates.

To make sure you get conversions, you need to analyze your main metrics and detract the users who won’t be paying the price of your product or who are unable to get it delivered.

You need to take all the main metrics into account and get a great balance between high click volume, high CTR and conversions at a profitable cost per conversion.

Relevance is The Key

Working with AdWords is all about relevance. CTR (The percentage of people that click your ads, divided by the amount of people who see it) is the key metric that determines whether or not your AdWords Ads are relevant.

Maximizing your relevance has several advantages:

• Lower CPC

• Higher CTR

• Higher position for a lower price

I advise you to read this post if you want to know more about how to increase your AdWords ad relevance

Remember a Call-To-Action

A Call-To-Action is something that you’re asking the user to do. It’s a term that you’ll hear a lot in  online advertising.

Some of the most popular Call-To-Actions in AdWords ads are:

• Call Today!

• Order Now

• Get Your Free Estimate

• Book Your Trip

• See Pictures and…

• Find Out Why We’re Best

• Buy Online for Only…

• Contact Us Today

• Claim Your Promotion

• Search for your … here

Including a Call-To-Action serves two purposes:

1. You direct the users to perform a specific  action on your website
2. The user knows exactly what he can do on your website. If the user is looking for info, then he won’t be likely to click an ad that reads “buy here”.

Use the Most Appropriate Landing Page

Ensuring high relevance between the search term and AdWords ad is just one part of the relevance game.

Once a user clicks on your ad you need to take control and make sure that they’re taken to a landing page that matches their query, where they can quickly locate all the necessary information they need.

Ad Extensions are Mandatory

Ad Extensions were first introduced in the late 2009 and have since become a crucial to increasing your ad space in SERP results and increasing your relevance.

Ad Extensions can be set up manually, or you added automatically to your account if you meet certain criteria.

The ad extensions we recommend small business owners to absolutely include in your campaigns  are sitelinks and callout extensions.

Always remember to include Ad Extensions

Keywords

Don’t Use Broad Match

Broad match is the most commonly used match type in Google AdWords. It’s also the most volatile match type.

You have very little control over what search terms your ads are appearing for because your keywords may be accompanied by other random queries.

Looking through some of our Clients campaigns that have been using broad match keywords in the past, we found a lot of examples on how bad it can be.

It’s Not All About Long Tail Keywords

Don’t get me wrong – Long tail keywords can work great and creating a lot of content to catch the long tail searches for your organic campaigns is an amazing strategy, but with AdWords you can afford to think broader.

By strategically using broad match modifier and phrase match keywords you’ll be able to discover the long tail keywords that actually have enough volume to be worth spending time on.

One-Worded Keywords Rarely Work Out

One-Worded keywords attract searchers so early in the buying funnel that they’re not worthwhile for rookies or even for intermediate AdWords advertisers.

You Can Add Instances of the Same Keyword in Different Match Types within the Same Campaign

Don’t skimp on match types when adding new keywords to your campaigns.

Add the keywords in all the appropriate match types and find out what match type works best for each specific keyword.

Negative Keywords Are Not a Choice

Even though I would like to say that opening new AdWords accounts without Negative Keywords is becoming a rare practice, it’s really not the case.

Adding negative keywords to your campaign is just as important as adding regular keywords. Adding them is a MUST, not an option.

Use Negative Keyword Lists If You Have More Than One Campaign

The introduction of negative keyword lists means that you can add negative keywords that will apply toy our entire account.

Negative keywords lists can be a huge timesaver and will optimize all your campaigns in one go instead of having to do it one-by-one.

Account Structure

Your account structure is the foundation of your AdWords campaign. In the beginning, you might be able to build whatever structure you like, and it might work just fine.

But when you start adding more keywords, and ads things will start becoming messy and you will wish you created a more organized campaign from day one.

… click on image for all Google AdWords tips for the beginners

All these tips are not necessarily beginner friendly, but you will be glad you learned about them one day