Reviewing your Adwords campaigns to make them more effective

Paid search marketing using AdWords for cost per click (CPC) advertising can be a very effective way to bring targeted customers to your website. By targeting specific keywords, you can capture customers that are in a more advanced stage of the buying cycle and have a need that your product or service can fill. Without proper management, AdWords can get very expensive and, over time, lose its effect. That’s why you need to do periodic audits of your AdWords program. Performing a AdWords audit serves a few functions, but the main goal is to maximize the impact of your campaigns and, ultimately, your costs per conversion and return on investment (ROI). A mismanaged campaign can cost you more money than you need to spend and can also result in missed business opportunities. Below are some…

My experiences in allocating online ad budgets between PPC, Sponsored Stories, Promoted Posts and Facebook Ads

According to a recent Search Engine Land post, some Google customers are abandoning PPC due in part to rising keyword prices. It's an interesting post, and it claims that the majority of PPC companies are, in fact, SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises - SMBs in the US). The final 2012 financial results reported for Google published on January 22nd 2013 show some evidence for reduced competition in that although paid clicks have increased overall globally, CPC has declined significantly, suggesting reduce competition for bidding or fewer advertisers in some markets: Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 24% over the fourth quarter of 2011 and increased approximately 9% over the third quarter of 2012. Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related…

Using cross-matching in your AdWords campaigns to improve ROI

I recently had a conversation with a Marketing Manager who was extremely hostile towards employing automated bidding, either within their Adwords account or via a third party tool. “It doesn’t work” they said “we were stuck into a spiral of diminishing results, and when we switched to an Agency that uses only manual bidding, our results improved significantly”. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this type of story! Many people have issues with utilising any sort of automated bid management technology because they’ve been burn't in the past. However, I’ve never encountered a reasonably sized account that a bid management tool couldn’t squeeze a little more profit out of. The thing to remember is that the technology is only as good as the data it uses. In this case, I took a quick a look at the account in question and it was very obvious…

Practical tips to review and improve an Adwords Campaign

When reviewing an account that hasn't been optimised, it's important for the paid search marketer to review that the basics are right. Bells and whistles are all well and good for later on, but if you fail to grasp the foundation principles of a paid search campaign, you’ll struggle to grow successfully. There are always new, exciting and innovative developments in paid search, all of which can distract you from the crux of your campaign. A strong account structure forms a strong foundation for every successful Adwords account. If a PPC account does not adhere to best practice, the keyword quality score can be restricted, and effective management of the accounts can become a huge, uphill challenge. In this post I give 7 tips that are a core part of my approach to getting more from Adwords campaigns.

TIP 1. Micro manage high converting keywords

Conversions in…

7 quick win ideas for your Google Adwords campaigns

At this time of year, search marketers are inundated with requests to push out new offers, react quickly to competitors’ promotions and, above all, maintain traffic levels and search engine visibility. However, January could be a great time for paid search marketers to beef up and fine-tune their Adwords campaigns in time for 2012 - I'll concentrate on quick wins for Google Adwords. Here’s a list of housekeeping tasks and potential areas for expansion to investigate, once (if) the new year rush quietens down: 1. Run and review search query reports: If you have been pre-occupied with pushing out timely seasonal campaigns over Q4 then you may not have had time to review the actual searches that have triggered your ads. If that sounds familiar, consider running a search query report. You may be surprised at the queries being entered, and by isolating frequently-repeated one,…

New options for understanding Performance by Ad Position

Value/Importance: [rating=3] Source: Inside Google AdWords & RKG Blog

Our commentary

For years now you have been able to use Google Analytics to garner insights on what position your ads were in when they were clicked and so evaluate the impact of position on click volume, quality and revenue. It's important to understand the impact of bidding on position to target the right position which maximises volume against quality shown by conversion rate. We recommend this article by RKG which walks you through a way to test performance by ad position to bid at the right levels to maximise conversion and ROI. This is a summary of their test results:

The RKG analysis is made possible by an update from Google Adwords which we also wanted to…

A New way of reviewing keyword and landing page relevance

Value/Importance: [rating=4] Recommended link: Source - Official Google Announcement

Our commentary

Yet another algorithm update from Google, this time relating to Pay Per Click. The new updates are to help Google set a better Quality Score based on keyword relevance & landing page relevance. Just as a reminder, it's well worth quizzing whoever manages Adwords for you about Quality Score - ask for a distribution of Quality Score for your keywords. Its importance is shown by what Google state in this release: Campaigns with better-performing ads for user queries will continue to see higher Quality Scores, lower average cost per click and higher position on results pages. Google say you can expect a good few fluctuations within your campaigns over the next few weeks, so be sure to wait for things to settle back down before starting to change things. The quality score for a particular keyword remains based…

Its always a popular time of reflection at the start of a New Year & 2011 is undoubtedly no different for most of us. However, I want to look forwards & give some practical recommendations on how you can use new features within paid search to help you in 2011. While I may not be a 100% right in my predictions, a lot of the techniques I'll talk about are already available and you may be missing out - to help I'll link to sources to find out more. Making some bold decisions for pushing your paid search strategy in 2011 maybe just the start to the year you are looking for!

5 techniques to review in how you approach paid search in 2011:

1. Mobile will alter PPC as we know it

The volume of people now using the internet on their mobile phones is continuing to grow as phones adapt & grow…

How do your PPC costs compare? Should you take a closer look at Bing

The latest Q3 2010 paid search market data from Efficient Frontier gives some interesting insights into the big 3 Search Engines. In short it shows an increase in activity on Bing (Up 90% in Q3 2010) & Google while Yahoo saw drops. Why is this interesting? Well, we know that Microsoft have been working hard on Bing to try and claw its way back into the lucrative Search market and the current data is showing positive signs that they are succeeding. * Data from Efficient Frontier report - CPC Graph This is an important trend to recognise as a business. Most people focus their Paid Search efforts on Google due to the volume of traffic available there. This…

Many marketers are using or have tried Google AdWords, the auction style advertising platform that allows you to advertise on Google sponsored search and content networks, commonly known as pay per click (PPC). This guide shares my experience of actively using Adwords as a small business owner who manages their own campaigns. I'll run through the steps to review Adwords to improve traffic quantity and quality to give more conversions. In the second part I'll go into more detail on the optimisation. I have been using AdWords for a while and overtime I have gone through many phases of continuous tweaking and re-structuring to improve conversions and I am always looking at ways to make it a cost effective marketing tool.  Whether you are starting new or have been using it for a while, it is important to understand some key areas within your account to improve the…