12 Tips You Need to Know Before Creating Your Google Adwords Campaign

Marketing Advice - 11.10.16

Setting up an Adwords Campaign

Setting up your first Adwords campaign can be confusing so here are some tips to help you out:

1. Have a Strategy

Having a strategy is the most important part of any search engine marketing campaign.

Defining who your target market is, what impact you want to have and what actions you want your customers to take as well as how to measure performance are all parts to consider when creating your campaign. Without a well-outlined strategy, campaigns can be disorganised and inefficient wasting your time and money.

2. Find the Right Keywords

To be as targeted and as specific as you can, you have to identify the relevant keywords. Put yourself in the client’s shoes and think about what they might search for when looking for your particular product or service and use that information to gather accurate and subject-specific search terms. You can use Google Adwords Keyword Planner tool to help you in your research.

The types of keyword matches you use also have a big impact on campaign success. You don’t want to waste all your budget on irrelevant traffic, right? Different campaigns require different keyword settings so you have to decide what works best for you. Keep in mind negative keyword matching which helps to ensure your ads are not shown for irrelevant searches, saving you money.

3. Ad Quality is Everything to Google

Use your creativity when writing your ads. The character limits are small so you may have to think outside the box to get your target’s attention. Write ad copy that meets the expectation of your users. You want them to click on your ad so always include an attractive offer along with a call to action to make your ad more clickable. A/B testing, running multiple ads to test effectiveness, can help you identify what performs better.

4. Create Multiple Ad Groups

Creating different ad groups for keywords is very important when setting up an Adwords Campaign. It is time-consuming, however, it can be worthwhile for a campaign with a broad range of products or services. The more ad groups you create, the more specific and relevant to the user you can be. This means higher quality scores, lower costs, and better conversion rates.

5. Choose the Right Landing Page

Doesn’t matter how effective your PPC campaigns are at bringing people in, if your website doesn’t provide a good user experience from the get-go, all the time and money invested is wasted. Be sure you backup your campaign with a strong landing page that leads to conversions.

6. Bidding and Budgeting

You don’t always have to increase your budget because Google says so. Although you might get more clicks with a higher budget, your bids will also increase and you will end up paying a lot more money for each click than you did before. Know your budget before you start, and try not to deviate from it without proper consideration first.

7. Choose the Right Delivery Setting

These settings determine how often your ad is shown and how quickly your budget is used. Standard delivery spreads your budget throughout the day but means your ad won’t show up every time your keyword is searched. You may get a lower cost per click but your entire budget might not be used fully. Accelerated delivery uses your budget as fast as possible, it can bring your ads to appear higher and more often on the results page and will usually ensure you use all of your budget, but you will pay a higher cost per click and may use up your daily budget within a few hours. If your budget has run out after the first hour, you know you have space to decrease your bid or increase your daily budget to appear throughout the entire day.

8. Keep Optimising

The more you optimise, the better results you will get. Put aside a small amount of time every day to check on your campaigns. Identify which keywords are performing well and optimise your bid accordingly to get more results with lower costs. Playing around with different ads, adding negative keywords, and adjusting spending can all help improve your results. Never be afraid to try new strategies.

9. Keep Measuring

Click-through rate, quality score, and conversion rates are only some of the metrics that you can gather from your PPC campaigns. Using information from data analytics will help you to make important decisions that will improve the performance of your campaigns in the future. Use Google Analytics for more insights as you’ll be able to see more information like average visit duration, pages per visit, percentage of new visitors, and bounce rate. Don’t forget to set up unique tracking parameters to know whether your traffic is the result of a particular text ad, banner, email or anything you have out on the web.

10. Mobile is Different Than Desktop

Mobile users have different needs and respond and interact with messages differently than desktop users. According to Google running and optimising a separate mobile campaign can increase your CTR by 11.5%. It is vital to ensure you have a mobile strategy before you start any campaign.

11. Lack of Ad Extensions

Make the best use of ad extensions as they provide you with the opportunity of showing extra information outside of the character limit allowed. It helps to improve your ad’s visibility and often increases the CTR of your ads. They provide valuable ways for users to learn more about your business or interact with your ad such as by making a phone call, seeing your address, or quickly accessing links to important pages of your website. Want to know more about ad extensions? You can find some tips here.

12. Do Not Google Your Own Ads

Most people think it's ok to search for their own ads as long as they don’t click on them but this is not the case. Just searching keywords that match your ads and then not clicking on them can hurt your quality score and Click-Through-Rate (CTR) so Google will deem them to be irrelevant to the search terms. The lower your quality score, the higher your cost per click. Instead, use the Adwords Preview Tool to view your ads.

If you’re still at a loss about how to use Google AdWords get in touch with us.