5 Tips On How To Make Adwords More Effective

5 Tips On How To Make Adwords More Effective

Even with the most attractive website and the best search engine optimisation marketing in the world, it can be tough to stand out from the crowd on the web. With potentially millions of competitors worldwide, Adwords or Pay Per Click advertising (also referred to as PPC) can be this extra push that puts your website on the map.

So what do you need to do? And what would Maxwell Smart do if he was in the same situation?

Getting your Adwords campaign right is not as straightforward as it seems.

Sure, it is easy to set up a Google Adwords account and bid on a few keywords, but as cheap as an individual keyword is, it will still be too expensive if it brings no sales. And then there’s the expensive keywords. You may think they are the best ones because they are supposedly the most relevant, but all too often they are very broad and generic terms that chew through your advertising budget. So it’s important you know what’s required to get your campaign on track, that you are maximising your budget, and that you GET SMART!

To make sure that pay per click advertising works for you, here are 5 tips on how to make Adwords more effective for your business:

1). Use only the most specific keywords. Not only will it make your conversion rate higher, but it will also increase the quality score of your account with Google Adwords, and a high quality score means being charged less for keywords. Also remember to exclude keywords that you don’t want to be featured for. For example, if you are selling high-end products, exclude any search with the term “cheap”.

2). Create small, very targeted groups of ads. Budget limits are set for a group of ads, not individual keywords, so you don’t want one generic, weaker keyword to drain your whole budget before the stronger ones have had a chance. Before bidding, check the quality score of the keywords. You can do so in the dropdown menu of the keywords section in your Adwords account.

3). Make sure that your PPC campaign is supported by well-designed landing pages. Google rewards quality, and it is crucial that the text of your ads be about the benefits of your goods or services. You can have a “squeeze page”, i.e. which includes the option for the visitor to sign up for a newsletter for example, but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of an accurate and compelling description of what your company offers. Add the relevant keywords naturally in your landing pages to increase your quality score, but don’t stuff them.

4). Adwords can be a very cheap and effective form of advertisement, but the trickiest part is to manage your budget wisely, as it can get out of hands very quickly or bring little return on your investment. Before committing vast amounts of money, run a test campaign of about 100 clicks. It will show you whether your ads group would be profitable and help you identify which keywords didn’t perform well and should be replaced.

5). Keep tracking and analysing the conversion rates of your keywords. The internet is a living organism, and like with search engine optimisation, what is working this week may not next month, so it is very important to be prepared to review your keywords selection on a regular basis. You may find out that terms you pay a lot for don’t bring you much return on investment, while some that looked less promising and are perhaps aimed at a more niche market, are the big earners!

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And for those of you who remember the TV Show Get Smart – I thought I’d take you back in time with the video below!