3 Adwords Tips You Need to kick start a successful Google Adwords campaign

Amazing underground hipster rock bands don’t become popular by being all hush hush about them, spreading the word and sharing the love is what it’s all about! At Lupimedia we believe that some secrets are best shared, so we are going to give you 3 key tips to success for Google Adwords.

Lupimedia have been working with Adwords since 2009 and have learnt some of the best tips through practice and have delivered great results for our customers. Have a go at these Adwords tips for yourself to see how you can improve your Adwords results or if you don’t have the time and want to commission a Google Partner professional then get in touch.

Let’s kick things off…

1.

You need to plan, plan harder than you’ve ever planned before, think of every angle, every perspective and connect it all together. The dream result in an online advertising channel is to jump in and immediately be successful, but that takes preparation. Before you storm the castle you must have thought and developed every way of reaching the walls, getting to the other side of them and wooing the princess (or prince).

We appreciate you’ve probably already seen this tip somewhere else and that’s for a good reason, every experienced Adwords manager knows this is the most crucial point and none of us writing these blogs can stress enough how it should be taken seriously and not shrugged off (rant, over). 

Let me break it down for you and show you the granularity of proper PPC planning. One of our clients provides computer support for both businesses and domestic clients, focussing on the domestic for a moment we took a deep look into the sort of situations potential customers would be in and what they would be searching for. This meant we categorised the target market into target groups and then sub groups, for example people who’s computer is going slow; some of those people are looking for computer repair to solve the sluggishness issue, while other people don’t know the cause and are looking for answers rather than a computer technician. These two sub groups would search in different ways. e.g. “computer repair, slow computer” and the others “whats slowing down my computer?” targeting these two searches uniquely is the best way to capture both potential customers. It is at this point the Ad text should offer an answer to their search e.g. “Speed up your slow computer, low cost onsite technicians near you”  and on the other hand “Slow Computer? We can help, years of experience have taught us why!”.

The more granular you can be, the better. If you have a website that sells novelty pencil cases don’t think of just one target market of people who want to buy a novelty pencil case, think about the other groups and sub groups like people buying a novelty pencil case as a gift for someone else, students that want an awesome novelty pencil case to boast about, school kids who need a pencil case and want something cool and others who are just getting a novelty pencil case as a joke. With this planning you will start to find your account structure, your main aims and target market will decide your campaigns, your groups of people will tell you your Ad text and your sub groups will prompt different wording of Ad text.

2.

You need a tidy account structure. It’s a simple aspect of making a successful account and you may not see the impact of it but it really will improve your management. So as you will have heard from many movies since the America’s Benjamin Franklin first used the phrase “Time is money” it can be said that using time efficiently will not just save you time but money invested also. This is especially true with Adwords because if your time is spent improperly then you Ads will continue to perform badly and all the time costing real money per click. Don’t be fearful of this, use this knowledge to your advantage, 10 minutes spent organising a clean and coordinated account may save hours upon trawling through incorrectly formulated Campaigns/Ad Groups & Ads.

The most commonly used technique for creating a easily maintained account structure is to mirror that of your websites categories/product types. This works well as you can easily convert your product categories into campaigns and then sub-divide them into Ad groups as per the differences in those products within that category. For example a furniture website would be able to have campaigns such as Bookcases, Tables and Cupboards. Then Ad groups like Large Bookcases, Small Bookcases, Mahogany Book Cases etc. for each campaign.

So the simple version of this point is “Don’t make a mess!” as a messy account means it will take more time to make changes, add difficulty to Ad analysis, conversion tracking, account improvements & edits etc. so why make this harder than they need to be. Simple, smart and sensible… “Time is money!!”.

3.

You need to act on the data the account is acquiring. The key to making an account more successful is to improve it, but don’t rush in and make random changes willy nilly, instead make informed choices through analysis of the masses of data and information collected by the entire Adwords ecosystem of numbers, stats and percentages. It’s quite easy to compare two different Ad groups and observe one has a much higher Click Through Rate and dwell on it for minute thinking “That’s interesting” and then leave it to its own devices. Sometimes the mistake is even concentrating on the better one, but that can be wrong, instead take a look at the ones needing improvement.

Spotting that an Ad Group has a fairly poor CTR is good, acting on that information and actually making an attempt to resolve or better its current performance is the absolute best way to progressively improve the Adwords account. This in turn will save money, improve conversion rates and further the accounts competitiveness. Because there is so much data to play with start with small steps, take a look at CTR and try to reword an Ad with a low CTR, check back on it and compare 2 days before and 2 days after, if it looks better leave it to see how it looks with a week before and a week after. In the meantime take a look at something else, why is the CPC higher on the weekend, maybe act on those stats and increase the budget on the weekends or schedule Ads not to run on the weekend depending on whats best for your company.

You don’t have to delve tooooo deep into trend analysis if you don’t have Neo from The Matrix reading eyes that your teenage son does then simply don’t worry about it, instead play a game of spot the difference with different Ad Groups or Ads. A great stat for this is the ‘Percentage Served’ (% Served - column) as you can see for example two Ads one at 75% Served the other at 25%, well why is that? Take a look at the wording, whats the difference, maybe there is something about the wording not being specific enough or not hitting the keywords or phrases your customers are searching for.

To Summarise:

1. You’ve got to plan, like an Adwords Batman.

2. It’s far more civilised, to be Adwords Organised.

3. Act on your analysis, and it’ll be Adwords Fabulous.