Adwords Pay Per Click

Like the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, in the land of pay per click marketing (PPC), Adwords is still king. This is due mainly to the amount of traffic generated. For many businesses it's a very cost-effective solution for adding customers with offices, recommendations and repeat business still important or valuable, just not a necessity.

I'm currently working on a campaign that has a return on investment of 50x the advertising cost - an enviable margin. It's a niche area so there is a limit to the total number of clicks that can be achieved but it provides a very nice income for the site owners, thank you very much.

When fine tuning the campaign, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to try to step outside myself a little and consciously examine some of the things that I do to ensure maximum bang for buck.

I started to realise that setting up a crude campaign without a good understanding of how Adwords can be tweaked is really the equivalent of carrying water in a leaky bucket. Depending on the how leaky the knowledge of the person setting up the account is, only some water will get to the destination.

So here's my top ten little things for getting the most out of a campaign:

  1. Set a budget and keep it relatively low until you've done some experimentation. it's difficult to simulate an Adwords campaign so you really do need to pay a little to see what results you can get.
  2. Add Google Analytics to your entire site or web-stat.com which is excellent. This allows you to see where people go when they reach your website. If most people leave in 10 seconds on the homepage then the site (or business) needs a rethink before you spend any more on advertising.
  3. Add conversion tracking to your Adwords and Yahoo accounts. This involves adding a short piece of code to your conversion page. This tells the Adwords software what the visitor typed in as a keyword for a successful search. The conversion page is usually the referral page of your contact form or an order form. Depending on the number of clicks, you will over time get a picture of which keywords convert and which don't. Dump those that don't especially if they cost a lot in clicks.
  4. Try to match the title of your ads to the most powerful keywords – the ones that give the biggest number of conversions. Let's say one of them is 'Blue Suede Shoes' then the title of one of your ads should be "Blue Suede Shoes" or perhaps a more general "suede shoes". Anywhere this appears in the ad will then appear as bold text which will encourage searchers to click.
  5. Make sure the ad matches the site. Don't say "Golf Clubs from £80" if all your clubs are over £150. You've then spent money on getting someone to your site that wants to spend £80 and can't.
  6. Make sure the ad goes to a relevant page. It is very important that the words in your ad appear on the target page (the page you go to when you click). The main words in the ad should appear in the content and if possible in the browser title and meta description for the target page. Google then assesses the ad as more relevant and will usually position it above an equivalent but less relevant ad.
  7. Check out the competition's ads. I'm not encouraging copyright theft here, just saying if you're fairly new to Adwords type into Google your most effective terms regularly to see what appears. The higher placed ads are often the most successful so try to get some ideas there.
  8. Experiment with click costs, you don't always get better results with greater costs. You may find that at a lower cost you get more clicks within your budget. Use the bid simulator on the Keywords tab in Adwords to find an optimum price initially once a campaign has run for a week or so. This is a great tool for working out whether it's worth bidding more. I'm not saying to completely rely on this as you will get the best results by making manual adjustments and watching the result you get.
  9. Make changes systematically. Try to avoid changing more than one element at a time so that you can work out exactly what is causing a difference. Make notes and give each change time to assess to avoid random fluctuations. I've often made a change only to find I get a very bad result for a day or two and then it dramatically reverses the next.
  10. Check your PPC campaign as often as possible. If you notice conversion is down, investigate.