Google Adwords enables businesses to reach out to new customers as they search and browse the web, provides immediate visibility, is flexible for any budget, and delivers in depth analytics for optimising campaign performance.
To get the most out of Adwords, HMA’s Senior Marketing Manager Fiona Higgins shares her top ten tips.
1) Understand the link between keywords, your ads and your website.
Google is all about relevancy and when a customer searches for something, they will find websites that are relevant to their search. Ensure that when setting up adwords, your keywords relate to your ad content and the landing page you are sending visitors to is relevant to those keywords. Google will evaluate this using a quality score from 1-10.
2) Keep your ad word list short but have lots of ad groups.
When setting up a campaign, you will have the option to set up Ad groups. Ad groups are just sets of ads, keywords, and placements within a campaign. Instead of having one big list of keywords, set up ad groups with just a few targeted keywords and match these with a relevant ad. The more relevant the ad, the higher the click through rate (CTR).
3) Don’t send visitors to the homepage; send them to a specific landing page
It’s important that once a visitor clicks through to your website, the page they reach is relevant to their search. Consider your content on every landing page and optimise these to improve your return on investment.
4) Consider match type settings to better target your ads
Keyword match types allow you to control who sees your ad. Within the set up, you can specify whether you would like your ads to show for searches similar and relevant to your keywords (broad match), show for searches that include your keywords or close variations (broad match modifier), show only for the exact phrase or close variations (phrase match), or show only for those searches that match your keywords exactly (exact match). Search volume for the more targeted match types may be lower but you should see a better click through rate due to relevancy.
5) Add negative keywords
Negative keywords are useful as they prevent your ads from appearing for search terms which may be unrelated to your business, therefore improving the quality of your traffic and reducing costs.
Google explains this using the following example:
“Let’s say that you’re an optician who sells glasses. You’d want to prevent your ad from showing to someone searching for or visiting web pages that contain terms like “wine glasses” and “drinking glasses”, since that person isn’t likely to buy a pair of your eyeglasses.”
6) Use ad extensions
Ad extensions, such as a telephone number or address can improve the visibility of your ads as they often appear at the top of the search results, give visitors more reason to find out more and improve CTR.
7) Consider different ad types
There are different types of ad placements available on Adwords – Google search, the Display Network and mobile allowing you to reach potential customers whether they are at their desk or on the go.
8) Consider timing/location
Consider editing your geo settings to focus on only those regions where you want to reach potential customers, as well as scheduling your ads on days which are relevant to your business. If you are advertising an offer or promotion, always set your campaign to switch off automatically on the last day.
9) Use dynamic keywords
Consider setting up dynamic ads as part of your adgroup campaign as these automatically match a person’s search term with your ad title. When using this feature, make sure you set a default keyword so that search terms which don’t fit within the 25 character limit still have an ad to show.
10) Track everything
Most importantly, once you’ve set up your adwords campaign, review it on a regular basis. Look at those keywords that are performing well and turn off those that aren’t, review the quality score of your keywords, make adjustments to your ad’s content and landing pages, and review your ad schedule to identify and optimise your campaign to times of the day and week when your ads get the best results.
If you would like further support on Google Adwords, please do not hesitate to get in touch.