A little while ago, I wrote a blog titled ‘How to Set up the Perfect Google AdWords Account in 3 Hours’. Hopefully you’ve done that, and are ready to take your account from basics to brilliant with these 5 top tips.
1. Quality Score
This is a formula that Google use to decide whether your keyword, ad and website are well-connected, relevant and designed to provide a good user-experience for their millions of searchers. They’ll give each keyword a score between 1 and 10 based on those factors. The higher your score, the less you have to pay for a good position on the search engine results page (and remember that the higher your ad appears, the more likely it is to get clicked on). Here are the best ways to get a 10 every time…
- Split up your keywords into really focused Ad Groups. Include the keyword in your Ad Headline and again in your Ad Description and URLs.
- Also make sure your keywords are all over your landing pages, and optimise those as much as possible. Landing pages should be clear, easy for Google to interpret and a true representation of your business, as depicted by the keywords you’ve chosen and the ads you’ve written.
- Include all variations of your keyword (e.g. plurals, misspelling) on Exact match, rather than relying on Phrase or Broad match. Google deem Exact match to be more relevant, so will reward you with a better Q.S.
- Work on your click-through rate. The higher it is, the happier Google are. The formula for a good CTR is simple really: keywords that are really relevant to your business + an arresting ad that includes the keyword & says exactly what you do & don’t do.
2. Include all of the Bonus Features
The nuts and bolts of your AdWords account are what will really drive success, but there are some nifty little extras that can boost its performance too, and make your ad stand out from the crowd. They are:
- General Settings. Head to the settings tab and ensure you’ve selected the right basis for your account. For example, is focusing on ‘clicks, manual maximum CPC bidding’ working for you? Or do you have enough conversion data that you could switch on ‘focus on conversions’ using CPA bids instead? Or is it time to run an ‘Experiment’? Where you can request that a small portion of your traffic gets to see a different ad so you can test whether alternative messaging might work? Don’t just stick to the tried and tested when it comes to your account settings, but make use of all Google’s cool features.
- Ad Extensions. There are 8 of these in total, and they all appear alongside your ad (depending on what else is happening in the auction when your ad is being served). They range from ‘Location Extensions’ where you can include your address beneath your ad (great for physical shops, potentially limiting for national online suppliers) to ‘Social Extensions’ where you can show how much support your business has got on Google Plus beneath your ads. Explore each Extension and include the relevant ones.
- Target the right people based on where they are, what day & time they’re looking for your product and what device they’re searching on. The ‘Dimensions’ tab will give you more information on this and the ‘Settings’ tab will allow you to target them. If you’ve got a mobile-friendly site, definitely target users searching on mobile devices, as there’s still a great untapped potential here.
3. Remarketing
Remarketing is when a user visits your website & a little cookie gets dropped on to their computer. Then, when that user is visiting another website (e.g, youtube.com), an ad that you’ve created can be shown just to them. Remarketing clicks are much cheaper than search ones, and conversion rates tend to be high because people have already had a good look round your site, and the remarketing ad they see just reminds them to pop back and buy.
It’s really easy to set up. To start collecting users just go to Shared Audiences and generate a tag that needs adding to every page of your site. Once 100 visitors are on the list, you can start showing them remarketing ads as they make their way around the web. To do that, set up a new ‘Display Network Only’ Campaign and select the options below. Work through the set up process and you’ll find a fantastic tool that will build a great display ad for you by accessing your website. Easy!
4. Focus on YouTube
Within AdWords you can also set up a Campaign that allows you to advertise on YouTube and encourage people to click through to your website. There are 800 million people visiting YouTube every month, so it’s a fantastic market to capitalise on. We wrote a blog recently all about how to do it.
5. Copy your account to Bing/Yahoo! Ads
I may be a bit biased here (I used to work at Microsoft for the Bing Ads team) but there’s a lot of value to be had within these alternative search engines. There’s less advertiser competition so clicks are far cheaper and it’s much easier to get your ads at the top of the page. And it’s super easy to copy your AdWords account. Simply set up a Bing Ads account & hit the ‘Import Google AdWords’ and it does the whole lot for you!
Thanks for reading, and don’t forget, if you need any help with your marketing, we’re the only team to get in touch with!