Old School Secrets for a Great Performance on your Adwords Account
Change is always good, yet sticking to some old good habits can improve the results of your daily activities.
There is no proven formula for the success of an Adwords account. However, there are some best practices and tricks that can help you to have a higher success rate.
I will share with you some of the best practices I learned when I started my career as a digital marketing strategist a long time ago:
1. Have a clear goal.
What do you want from your account? Is it leads? Online sales? Brand awareness? Define the goals and objectives of your Adwords account just as you define them for any business. This is essential in order to determine which type of campaign you will create.
2. Build a solid campaign from the get-go, it has more opportunities to succeed.
For a search campaign:
A solid search campaign is formed with ad groups that contain highly themed keywords that are relevant to each other and to their ad copy. Make sure the landing page of each ad copy is relevant to the keywords and the product/service category that you are advertising for. If possible add deep linking to increase your Quality Score even more.
Some methods to find the right keywords are brainstorming, keyword planner, competitors research and website content.
Check your negative keywords list: Make sure it does not have any term that could potentially block some of your keywords to be triggered.
Ad copies: Take your time thinking on a good ad copy that conveys the adequate message to your targeted audience. The description and the message are important, but also, make sure the headlines are aligned with the keywords. The more you include your keyword, the higher your CTR will be and hence higher Quality Scores and lower costs.
Check your settings: Make sure you are targeting the right location, the right audience, and the right language. Set an ad scheduling wide enough that allows you to collect sufficient data and then you start adjusting it based on results.
Start with the right bidding strategy for your devices based on the services and products that you offer. For example, if you are advertising for pizza delivery, you know that most customers will search for you through mobile devices; therefore, you set up a positive bid adjustment for these devices from the start.
Set an adequate campaign bidding strategy from the start. I personally prefer to start with manual CPC, this way I have more control over the costs and CPCs of the campaign. Once data is collected you might start adjusting the bidding strategy and change it.
Create appealing ad extensions to make sure you create customers’ interest in your business.
For a Shopping Campaign:
Segment your shopping campaign as granular as possible. Your Merchant Center needs to be on point so that when you import all the data it is properly segmented. I personally love product feeds from Shopify, they are very organized and ideal to create structured product groups.
Add negative keywords to block all those irrelevant searches and check on your settings as well.
For a Display Campaign
Make sure you select the targeting method that is relevant to your products or services. Create a banner that depicts the unique selling points of your business, and make sure to adjust your settings properly as well.
3. Tracking installation:
If you are not so coding savvy, find an expert to help you with this. Having a proper track of every single valuable action of your account is essential to be able to evaluate its performance and success.
4. Optimize your campaigns carefully:
Don’t look only at the high level of the account, look into every single detail. We tend to forget about DETAILS. These are the essence of success. Think of every possible outcome and optimize according to that.
The information provided by Google Analytics is extremely useful as well. Make sure you have your analytics account ready and set up correctly.
5. Don’t optimize it every day❗
It’s counterproductive. If you do this, you won’t be able to measure if the changes you applied are taking a positive effect and giving you positive results.
6. TEST
Testing is the key to find the right combination for the best performance. Be alert of any new Google products that you think might work for your industry and test it. Test new keywords, new ad copies, new landing pages and monitor their results afterward.
Those are some of the best practices I have learned through my entire career as a digital marketing strategist; however, the world of Adwords is so complex that there is something new to learn every day. It is important to stay on top of the updates but applying some old good best practices has helped me to achieve better results when doing my job. Hopefully, they are helpful to you. If you would like to add any other one please comment below.
Originally published at www.hitedigital.com on January 3, 2019.
