Following are the most basic and proven best practices you can use to effectively manage your AdWords PPC campaigns and generate results.
AdWords campaign objectives
The most important component of all successful PPC campaigns is to know clearly the objective/s of the AdWords campaigns. Well defined campaign objectives help measure how effectively the campaigns are being managed and enables advertiser to take necessary actions if required.
Example: You have an e-commerce website and want to sell auto parts online.
Objective: Sell online to buyers, increase sales, revenues and profits.
The above objective really doesn’t provide details of what should be the cost per conversion, the marketing budget, the minimum number of conversions required etc. A better defined objective compared to the above one:
$25,000 advertising budget requiring 500 conversions per month at maximum cost per conversion of $50.
Flesh out in detail what you want to achieve and for how much. It should have the details of how much you are willing to spend per conversion, how many conversions you require per month minimum, what is your monthly marketing spend etc.
Tracking conversions
Use AdWords tracking code to measure and track conversions. Without proper conversion tracking system in place you won’t be able to determine the actual value of your PPC advertising spend which means you are prone to make poor decisions. AdWords also allows advertisers to track revenues as well as offers different conversion tracking codes for measuring different user actions.
Google Analytics
Use Google Analytics, a free analytics tool which will help you understand how visitors behave on your website. This information can be used to make effective business decisions helping you achieve online marketing objectives. Click here for more details: Linking AdWords and Google Analytics
Further Google enables you to link AdWords and Google Analytics account allowing for import of PPC data in to analytics offering great insights in to visitor behavior. For importing other vendor PPC campaign data check this link on how to tag your urls: Google Analytics URL tagging
Keyword match types
AdWords provides different keyword match types allowing advertisers to determine who sees their ads and for what types of search queries. Click here to learn about AdWords keyword match types. Also AdWords lately introduced modified broad match resting more control with advertisers as to how they want to reach potential buyers for misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings.
The use of various match types depends upon your target market, campaign objectives, budget, geographic regions you want to target etc. Hence understand their application and use them prudently to get the maximum ROI.
Negative keywords
Another feature of AdWords that’s often not utilized effectively is the negative keywords feature. Negative keywords are keywords that you don’t want your ads to show up for and the best part is you can add them at your campaign and ad group level. You can reduce costs, unqualified traffic and improve your campaign performance by having a well researched Negative keyword list. Another advantage is having your ads show up for only relevant search queries leading to improved click through rate which influences your quality score and helps reduce cost per click.
AdWords introduced a new feature called sitelinks. You can add up to 10 different pages of your website at your campaign level. If you ad qualifies to show up in the top 3 positions then these site links will show up. AdWords states that advertisers using sitelinks have increased their click through rate by 30% on average. All it takes is 5 minutes to add these urls and viola, you get more clicks.
Testing ads
One of the features at the campaign level is ad testing feature. You can set your ads to show evenly or can chose to show the top performing ads. If you don’t have budget then I suggest choosing to show your top performing ads allowing AdWords to choose the better performing ad. If you are testing then I recommend choosing to show your ads evenly and select the better performing ad with little more accurate statistical data.
Repeat
In order to have your PPC campaigns perform continuously, you as an advertiser need to continuously test and analyze data, make changes and use best practices to improve the campaigns on periodic basis. This ensures that you aren’t in for any surprises and allowing your campaigns to perform.
So start optimizing your PPC campaigns and get results.
Traian has almost a decade experience in SEO and he is the founder of Pitstop Media, a Internet Marketing services based company that provides SEO Services to SMB clients around the world. For more information visit http://www.pitstopmedia.com
