53 Killer Tips to Google Adwords

53 Killer Google Adwords Tips

1. Match Your Ad to Your Keywords

The major keyword you are trying to match should be in both the headline and description, and even your URL link. This will give you ad a higher quality score, make the keywords bolded, and is far more likely that your customer will click on it.

2. Avoid Low Performing Keywords

Clean out low scoring keywords after a couple of months. In addition, the keywords "buy" and "purchase" are considered low performing - use "get" or "download".

3. Avoid Competing Keywords

Google has said that

only one ad per advertiser is displayed on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include duplicate keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Identical keywords compete against each other, and the better-performing keyword triggers your ad”.

4. Identity Powerful Words in Ads

Some keywords have been shown to have good pulling power! These include:

5. Experiment with Different Keyword Order

Experiment in making your keywords display in different order eg "Tango Shoes" and "Shoes for Tango". Sometimes tiny changes in keyword orders can significantly affect your CTR.

6. Identify the Entire Keyword Set

Look at your competition and use Google’s keyword tool to ensure you have all the right keywords… don’t just assume you know the right keywords to use. Missing out important keywords can significantly reduce your customer set.

7. Use Long Tail Keywords

Long tail keywords are three-to-four-word phrases that are specific to your product. They are low cost, and work well because visitors using these search phrases are often further along their purchasing process, which can result in a higher conversion rate.

8. Concentrate on Your Ad's Headline

Five times as many people read the headline than they do the description lines and display URL. Ensure this is superb!

9. Use Punctuation and Spelling Properly

A single exclamation mark is allowed, but Google will not allow bad spelling or double question marks for example.

10. Keywords at the End of Your URLs

Ensure that the displayed green URL has your keyword at the end. For example www.verytangostore.com/Tango-Shoes is much more effective then www.verytangostore.com

11. Correct Landing Page

Your ad’s destination page does not have to be your home page – and in fact should NOT be if for example you are advertising a product, and there is that product page in your website. This is considered an important factor by Google. Make sure the landing pages for each ad group are highly relevant.

12. Clean Out Low CTR Ads

Delete or improve ads that have low CTR (click-through-rate). This is very important as it measures how many of your ads were actually clicked on. The statistics on ad CTR are as follows:

• Less than 0.5% is considered extremely bad, and in fact your ad is disabled after it receives a thousand impressions.
• Less than 1% is considered bad.
• 1-2% is mediocre.
• Greater than 2% is pretty good.
• A CTR greater than 4% is fantastic.

13. Start With a Reasonable Budget

Start with a low budget and experiment for a while before you increase your spend. Ensure that your CTR is good AND your conversion rate is good. If your ROI (return on investment) is satisfactory then increase your budget, so long as your ROI stays high.

14. Beginners Should Automate Bids

Beginners should select "AdWords will set my bids to help maximize clicks within my target budget". In addition, note that "CPC bid limit" is optional but is highly recommended. This frees you from micro-managing bids.

15. Advance Users Should Manually Set Their Bids

Once you become an advanced Adwords users, use "I'll manually set my bids for clicks", which will give you most control. It allows you to specify different bids for each ad group or for individual keywords. Bid higher for terms that have been converting well.

16. Use Alerts

Use custom alerts (which can be sent to your email) to track changes without going into AdWords continuously. For example, if your CTR has decreased by 1%.

17. Separate Search Network and Content Network

Separate your Search Network (google.com) and Content Network (banners in other websites) by duplicating a campaign.

18. Understand How to Create Campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads

Understand Campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads perfectly:

• Campaigns focus on completely different categories – for example "Clothing" and "Kitchenware".
• Ad Groups are sub-topics within a campaign, for example (using the Clothing campaign) "Shirts" and "Suits" – they focus on different products and tight themes.
• Ads focus on highly specific keywords.

19. Split Test Ad Groups

An excellent use for Ad Group is for optimizing your ads via split testing, which means rotating between slightly different ads to work out which one works best. For example, within a single Ad Group set up 4 similar ads for the same set of keywords (you will need to ensure you set them to rotate evenly) – and see which one has the best CTR. You can then starting changing and adding ads to improve them.

20. Use Targeted Ad Groups

If you have one ad group with many keywords, split it into multiple ad groups with smaller sets of keywords. You can then modify the different ads to better fit the various keywords.

21. Look to Create New Ad Groups

Within existing ad groups, look for keywords that can be used to start new ad groups with their own ads and landing pages. This allows ad groups to have ads and landing pages more relevant to their keywords – giving you a higher Quality Score, lower CPC and higher Conversion Rates.

22. Understand SEO

You should use SEO techniques to ensure your website is up to scratch, for example add the best performing keywords to the Title and Description meta tags on the relevant landing pages.

23. Understand Plurals

Make separate ad groups for keyword plurals - this will provide better bolding (Google does not bold plurals, unless keyword is plural).

24. Use Match Types Wisely

Understand what the keyword match types are in Google and use them wisely:

• [Exact match]: will match only your keyword. For example [tennis shoes] will only match a search for 'tennis shoes'.
• "Phrase match": will match any search that contains the phrase in that order. For example "tennis shoes" will match ‘tennis shoes’, ‘red tennis shoes’ and ‘tennis shoes photos’.
• Broad match: will match any word within your phrase. For example tennis shoes will match ‘tennis shoes’, ‘tennis’, ‘shoes’, ‘red tennis and blue shoes’, etc. Be extremely careful when using broad match as it can sometimes match absurd keyword searches.

25. Use Negative Match Types

Negative matches (for example -free) are very powerful. If you are using Broad or Phrase matching, this can eliminate bad matches.

26. Lower Your Costs by Getting Google Rewards

AdWords rewards advertisers that write highly relevant ads and who find good and relevant keywords, ahead of the ones that bid more but don't take targeting into consideration.

27. Format Ads Cleverly

The first line should be a call to action ("Get Beautiful Tango Shoes Now!") - another words, your big benefit or dramatic promise. The second line should be your value proposition ("Free Delivery World Wide, Top range").

28. Capitalize

Capitalize the first letter of every word (except words such as and, then, and, of). This can improve your CTR significantly.

29. Have Patience

Be patient – your ROI on your ads may not be apparent immediately. You might lose some money first before your campaign gains traction.

30. Try Misspelling

Go for wrongly spelt keywords like tangoshoes instead of tango shoes. Could get you lots of traffic at negligible cost!

31. Do You Use Questions?

Use questions in your ad – they will arouse more interest.

32. Use the Three Dots (...)

Three dots can sometimes work very well… they naturally tell people that there is more information waiting behind the ad.

33. Experiment with Tiny Changes

Tiny changes can sometimes make a huge impact to your CTR, even as simple as changing a word like “move” to “moves”. Experiment.

34. Be Unique

It has been shown that between an interesting and a unique ad, the unique ad will often win the user's attention. Keep this in mind.

34. Use the AdWords Editor

The AdWords Editor is an application you download to your desktop that you can use to manage your campaigns easily and offline.

35. Target Geographical Campaigns

You could try duplicating campaigns so that one campaign is generic, and the other targeted for a location and has the location in the keyword and headline.

36. Make Good Use of Abbreviations

Instead of and use &. You are very limited in how many characters you are allowed.

37. Use AdWords Alongside Organic Searches

Even when your organic search results are good, consider keeping the AdWords campaign going… it increases the chance of a click.

38. Don't Use Company Names

Do not include your company name in the ad unless it is extremely well known. These ads have negligible CTR.

39. Make Use of Conversion Tracking

The whole point of Adwords is to get people to get to your website and buy your goods or services. Knowing the CTR is not enough - you need to know your return on investment – so use the Conversion Tracking software that Google provides free of charge.

40. Track Your Ads Over Time

Make sure that if you change your strategies – for example trying to optimize your ads – you know whether they are improving or not!

41. Use Keywords That Are Value Related

A lot of searches have keywords in them that are value related - use these and you will get more hits. Note that we are talking here about matching keywords, not about your ad text. For example: in your ad group for tango shoes, add tio the keyword list the phrase "cheap tango shoes". This will match you with those users who have put that in their search query.

42. Use the Search Query Report

Run Search Query Reports in AdWords to show the specific keyword searches that your ads appeared for. You can use this to further refine your ads. This can be done by going to the ‘Keywords’ tab and selecting ‘See Search Terms… > All’. Often you will be very surprised which search terms (and which have not) have brought up your ads.

43. Look for the Magic Number: 200

200 is the magic number for both ads and keywords:

• You can judge the CTR performance of an ad or keyword once it has had 200 impressions.
• You can judge the conversion performance of an ad or keyword once it has had 200 clicks.

44. Make Use of Dynamic Keyword Matching

This is somewhat advanced but very powerful, and can provide a natural increase to your CTR because it appears more relevant to the user’s search and is bolded for the user’s keywords. The rules are as follows:

• You create your keyword list as normal eg: diamonds, rubies, yellow tourmaline birthstone, blue topaz.
• In the title (or text) you use curly braces to denote dynamic keyword matching eg: Unreal {keyword: gemstones}.
• When one of your keywords is matched, it will be replaced in the title (or text) UNLESS it goes over 25 characters eg: diamonds will match "Unreal diamonds"; rubies will match "Unreal rubies"; yellow tourmaline birthstone will match "Unreal gemstones" (as it would have exceeded 25 characters).
• Furthermore, you can capitalize eg: Unreal {Keyword: gemstones} will capitalize every match.

45. Use Frequency Capping

If you are using the Google Display Network, then Frequency Capping limits the number of times your ads appear to the same unique user. You can specify a limit to the number of impressions you display per day, per week, or per month for an individual user.

46. Know Your Competitors

On a regular basis, do a search on your own keywords and look at your competitors' ads. Learn from them and evolve your ads. Use tactics to make them stand out. If all your competitors are offering 10% savings, offer 15%. If your competitors have ads with long lines, make your ad short.

47. Avoid Expensive Keywords

This one is somewhat counter-intuitive, but in the AdWords game, it is about ROI (return on investment) not CTR. This may mean that certain keywords - even though they are extremely popular - should be avoided, because they are highly competitive and cost a lot. The analogy is putting your physical store in the most upmarket street in town - lots of passing traffic, but the rent may be too costly too justify it. Sometimes the less popular (and cheaper) keywords are best.

48. Make Your Ads LESS Appealing

This one is another one that makes no sense until you realise that the idea is to have BUYERS click on your ad, rather than just anyone. You lose money if someone clicks on your ad and but does not convert into a sale. This means that ideally you want to make your ad attractive ONLY to those people who actually would buy on your website, which may mean making your ad less attractive to filter out non-customers. For example, one way of doing this is to add a price for your product. Those customers looking for a cheaper price would not click.

49. Double and Triple Check

Make sure the links to your ads work, your landing pages are not broken, your site has all its pages, there are no spelling mistakes, etc.

50. Promise the World

People are more likely to click on your ad if you promise them something that is (almost) too good to be true.

51. Over-Deliver

If your ad promises big things, and then you don't deliver to expectations - you will lose conversions. Don't just deliver on your promises - OVER deliver!

52. Ensure Your WebSite Is Professsional

This one is so obvious it shouldn't need to be said - but it is incredible how many websites look like a high-schooler has put them together. If you can't get your website looking professional, it's a sign of things to come for the customer...

53. People Love Low Costs

Almost all online customers are price conscious. Half of consumers believe they’ll find the best deals online - and they are looking for the best deal. Keeping this in mind, focus your ads on low prices, good values, and promotions. For example: "10% off all shoes" or "Buy one get one free".