Top 5 Elements for a Successful AdWords Campaign

When it comes to AdWords there are a ton of features and tweaks you can do to your campaign. These can get confusing and might even waste your time and have no noticeable results from implementing them. When you’re new to AdWords or simply are not that tech savvy here’s what you should pay attention to improve performance:

1. Conversion Tracking

When someone clicks on an ad and gets to be a customer means that this click “converted” the user into a customer. A conversion then means money, we want that. You can track conversions with a code on the website generated by AdWords or simply by migrating a “goal” on analytics into AdWords. Simply put, we track the page that appears after a purchase or a lead on a contact form.

With time you’re going to start getting valuable data. You can view these conversions per keyword, ad, campaign, etc. So you can measure the performance of each of them.

If a keyword is costing you $100 per conversion and another is costing you $1, pause the one with the higher cost. We can get more budget for clicks for that other keyword that is generating cheap conversions. There are some other things to consider like the time scope but that is material for another article.

2. Call Extension

The year is 2015, smartphones are ruling and are with us all the time. Sometimes writing an email is not fast enough to get the service or product, so we call. AdWords brings this awesome feature that lets you call straight from the ad and can help you measure it. From taxis to veterinarians, all kind of businesses can benefit from this cool feature. Don’t worry, this extension can also show on desktop.

Google lets you do call tracking on the ad and on the website. The main drawback from this is that you have to change the phone number to a trackable one. Some clients are ok with this, others are not.

Don’t worry, there is a little trick that will help you track them even if you’re not changing the phone to a trackable one. If you want to know the calls per keyword also known as conversions, click on “Segment” and then “Click type”. Now you’ll see if the click was a “Click to call” or a regular click.

3. Campaign Structure

Google’s main goal is to show you what you’re looking for fast. That is why we rarely go over the first page, Google gets you there quickly. So, the more theme related things are to Google, the better your performance will be. If I want to buy red roses I want to land on a page with roses, it’s that simple. So the ad has to mention “roses” somewhere, the keyword also needs to have “roses” and the ad group has to be “rose” related as well. It doesn’t stop there, the ad has to land on a page with the roses.

Google uses this information to generate the “quality score” of every keyword. The more organized things are, the better the score, ad rank and a low cost per click. As a result your campaign will get more clicks with the same budget.

4. Optimizing the Bidding on Keywords

This you have to do regularly. Your keywords are like the seed of your campaign, you have to water them for them to grow.

There are several ways to get your keywords out there. It mostly depends if you’re trying to target mobile users or desktop. Mobile ads show only on the top two positions so you have to bid extra on them. Luckily AdWords gives a tool that let’s you do a special mobile bid so you can increase the bidding only on these devices.

Your goal is then to be between position one and three, which are the ones on top of the page. Bare in mind that if the cost per click is too high is ok to leave them on position four or five. Sometimes bidding too much is bad, it depends on the industry.

Remember to check for conversions and bounce rate as well as the recommended top page bid given by AdWords. Once you finish doing all the changes, let the campaign rest for at least seven days to make more changes.

5. Negative Keywords

Well, this is basic but it could mean a world of difference specially if you have some broad keywords around. Negative keywords are like a filter and they also work like regular keyword matching. So there are exact, phrase and broad. AdWords gives you by default an exact match when looking on the search terms report. I recommend selecting only the keyword that is the most irrelevant and adding it as a broad negative keyword.

This can also work the other way around, maybe you added a negative keyword that is blocking an important keyword. It is good to check them and delete them so everything can work smooth.

I hope that this little guide can help you give your AdWords campaign that extra performance you’re looking for. There are so many more things to take care of but this will give you a good start.