Whether you’re experienced in PPC Advertising or just feeling the water and getting ready to launch your very first campaign, Google AdWords can be difficult to get your head around and to be frank, quite tricky at times. If you don’t have sufficient knowledge and expertise it can take a toll on your time and budget. To avoid that from happening and to make sure your money and efforts are wisely spent, we’ve come up with a few tips that can help boost your campaigns, increase Click Through Rate and drive more traffic to your store.
A negative keyword is a targeting option that allows you to selectively filter out people, based on their search query. Simply put, these are phrases or words that you don’t want your ad to trigger upon. Suppose, you run an online jewelry store. You only sell pre-designed pieces and don’t offer any custom accessories. If you don’t put “custom jewelry” as your negative keyword, you might end up with people clicking on your ads, whose search query is irrelevant to your products. In other words, you have to exclude any words that are not connected directly to your offering.
Negative keywords help you keep your campaigns stay precise and relevant, which means you only pay only for clicks that have the potential of turning into conversions and sales.
Tip: Once you campaign is alive, review the search queries your keywords actually drive, and make those that you don’t think could convert for you into negative keywords (for example “Free..”).
AdWords’ super handy Dynamic Ads (DSA) is brilliant in a way it takes off all the stress from looking for right ad campaign keywords. It customizes your ad and automatically matches each search query with the best ad’s headline, based on what Google deems relevant.
It also matches the search queries with the right landing page and updates the campaigns 24/7. All that is needed from you is to provide your URL and two sentences in your company description. After that, the system will take it from there.
You can also utilize the feature even further by selecting the already well-performing keywords, taking them off the dynamic ads and adding them to a static campaign. What happens then is Google continues searching for best suitable matches, while you put better bids on those keywords you’ve just taken out and improve your Quality Score.
Another cool fact about Dynamic Keywords is that sometimes lets you get around the character count by letting your ads be longer than usual. Sounds too good to be true, right?!
Do you know that only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit? Did you ever wonder how you can get back the other 98%? Retargeting, known in Adwords as remarketing, is an advertising technique that lets you bring this bounced traffic back to your online store by reaching out to people who have already visited the site and could potentially become your buying customers.
It works by placing a piece of code on your website pages and creating a full list of users that have visited your site, by capturing their “Cookie ID”. You can then filter it and select the most relevant leads that you would want to approach and follow them around the web with specifically targeted ads.
The ads are managed in Google AdWords and are shown on web pages visited by your target audience, so no special knowledge is needed from your side. Finally, you regain the user’s interest and they come back to make a purchase.
Tip: Dynamic remarketing goes even further, by allowing you to see what a user viewed on your site, then show the ads tailored to his/her needs accordingly. You ever noticed how you browse Amazon for a specific item, leave it in a cart for a while, and then suddenly you see a banner popping up with a discount on that item? It is most likely not a coincidence.
If you’re going to want to have mobile ads along with your desktop campaigns, you will want to make sure they are optimized and are not just set as default. Let’s have a look at some of the ways you can do that.
I might be preaching to the choir here, but the first thing you will want to do is have a responsive website with a layout, images and a landing page adjusted to a mobile screen size. With users leaving web pages within the first 10 seconds (a person’s attention span on mobile is normally way shorter), you’ll need to offer them an exceptional experience, so it's a good idea to invest some time into it.
Next, you will want to adjust your mobile bids in regards to your desktop campaigns. To do so, analyze your campaigns comparing the conversion rate your have on mobile v. the conversion rate you have on desktop.
Mobile users tend to view ads differently and search using fewer words. That means that you should separate your campaigns and think of mobile targeted keywords/phrases. Some keywords would fit both types of campaigns, however, it will pay off, in the long run, to have it specifically tailored for mobile.
Only one-third of SMBs are using mobile preferred ads (Wordstream), so using them will give you a big advantage over the competition. Keep your messages short and simple, while focusing on your target audience. Use Call to Action extensions and language promoting calls. Adding a phone number to your ad will encourage people to call your business. Don’t forget to include any relevant links to your promotions. What you need is to have all your essential information right in front of the user’s eyes in the most simple and catchy way possible.
This is a little known, but a powerful tactic that can save you lots of money. Let’s say you are a florist operating a small hometown shop. Would you really want to be advertising your business throughout all of the States or in the United Kingdom? (Hint: No, you wouldn’t).
This is where location targeting comes in - by selecting an exact geographical area for your ad campaign you focus only on the region where your potential customers are residing. You can choose a district or a city and then define a radius around it. Simple, but significant, as Don Draper once said.
There you go, I hope the above adwords optimization tips will help you get through the experience and bring some more sales through your PPC marketing efforts!