Google Adwords 5 quick tips

By now, most marketeers have discovered Google Adwords as a bona fide means of driving web traffic and generating new business leads, but are they getting the most out of their Adwords campaigns, learn from our experiences to get better results...

The following five points are designed to help you maximise the number of quality visits to your website, whilst streamlining the efficiency of your campaign:

Firstly, spend some time with your Adwords stats pages and get a good feel for how your campaign is currently working. Focus on the stats from the last six months and learn which keywords are working well for you and which ones aren’t. Check the relevance of all keywords and remove those that seemed good a year ago, but have not since pulled their weight.

Create a realistic wishlist of things that you’d like your campaign to achieve (e.g. lower average cost per click, more unique visits, lower bounce rates, etc), then prioritise these in order of importance to your business. This list should be saved and referred to in future months as a benchmark. Also, make a note of your key findings and any changes you’ve made to the Adwords campaign to keep a 'crumb trail' of activity. It may also be helpful to keep either a screen grab or printout of the Google stats page to assist with your benchmarking.

As with all ad campaigns, first impressions are crucial. The words you use for your Google advert are likely to be the first major touchpoint that the prospect has with your company. They must be engaging and relevant, and accurately reflect your business and its personality.

Take the customer journey from Google to your website, running through each of your keywords to make sure that your ad text is relevant to the keyword and that it stands out from the crowd.

Note: It may prove beneficial to manage several different Adword campaigns, one for each of the different services / products your company offers.

Take another look at the keywords list and check to see if you actually need all of them. For example, if you type “specialist publications” into Google, our company comes top of the natural search listings; so really, we don’t need a sponsored link here. As you’d expect, if we included this as an Adword, users would most likely click the sponsored link rather than the natural link and thereby sacrifice more of our precious advertising budget!

Sound obvious? It is, but test it for yourself and see how many top blue-chips are still sponsoring their own names... amazing!

You might also consider sponsoring different versions of your own company name or sponsoring your own company’s website, but check through your list of keywords first, and you can make strategic decisions as to which ones you actually need. This should be done on a regular basis, as your search engine optimisation (SEO) improves.

Think about timing. Unless your business operates around the clock, it’s unlikely you’ll need to have your keywords active outside of normal working hours.

As you’d expect, keyword campaigns can be activated or deactivated as and when required. Here at specialist, our audience is predominantly UK based businesses, hence we only run keywords during normal business hours (give or take a couple of hours to cover the most dedicated…).

This simple change can, and will, make you dramatic savings, (particularly if you have a company name that attracts a ‘different type’ of global audience to the one being targeted – e.g. specialist publications).

Finally, once you’ve made all the alterations / updates to your Google campaign, set a time to return to it and review your wishlist. Keep a track of where you are on a monthly basis and make sure that you are achieving your objectives as you move forward. As your goals are reached, set new ones to ensure continuous improvement and help you keep one step ahead of your rivals. Good luck!

If you’d like us to take a more detailed look at your Adwords campaign contact Mark Cherry on 0117 925 1696 or by email.

Mark Cherry
Commercial Manager