How to structure your account, how to set the right campaign settings, how to pick the right keywords, how to write your ads—all of these are important in building effective and successful AdWords campaigns. Whether you are new or veteran in this PPC arena, the following guidelines will help you create an effective campaign and hone it to give you the maximum ROI for your online advertising efforts.
Organise Your Account
Doing so will give your AdWords account a solid framework. This will make it easier for you to determine which of your ads, campaigns and keywords are working and which are not so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
The key step here is planning your campaigns around your business needs. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What does my business offer?
- How is my business different from my competitors?
- What do I want to achieve with my advertising?
- How much do I want to spend per month?
- Who’s my core audience?
- Where do I provide services?
The answer to these questions will give you a clear picture of how you should set up your AdWords account to maximise success.
Once you are clear about your business’ needs, you can then focus on optimising your campaign settings for maximum results.
Create Separate Campaigns for Your Search and Display Networks
AdWords expert Andre Lolk offers two compelling arguments for this. First, if you don’t focus on one network at a time, you will find it hard to see in graphs your click-through-rate (CTR) and Impression trend because you won’t be able to filter the Search or Display Network out of graphs.
Second, the Display Network is essentially a push marketing method while the Search Network is a pull marketing method, both requiring substantially different ads. The former in particular needs a different campaign structure and requires negative keywords to be prioritised as it only allot 50 negative keywords to a given campaign.
Use the Search Partner Network If Possible
Many PPC experts probably advised you to turn off your Search Partner Network due to reasons like generating extra traffic with few extra sales, such as the case illustrated in this article. But before you do so, give it a try first and see how it affects your campaigns.
Search Partner Network is especially recommended if you are targeting a big audience and have an extra budget. Give it a month or two, then after which, analyse the results and performance metrics you’re seeing and decide whether or not it is worth continuing. You might find this SEJ post on how to make Search Partners Network work for you.
Use Specific Local Targets
Instead of covering an entire country or region, focus your AdWords campaigns on the city or area where potential customers are able or willing to drop by your shop.
Doing so will enable you to focus your advertising investment on a location where it will have the biggest returns.
Make Sure Your Ads Appear for User Searches that Uses Your Keywords
Google will give you two options: it will either show your ads intermittently (standard delivery) or make it appear only for searches that match your keyword (accelerated delivery).
There is nothing wrong with the former; however, you could end up pay paying for clicks that doesn’t deliver conversion. The only time you use standard delivery is when you are in a low search volume industry that requires you in the top ads position.
Schedule Your Ads
Know what time of day your target markets are doing the searches, then make sure to set your ads to appear during those times. If most people who search for your products or services convert much higher in the morning between 8 am to 11 am, increase your bidding in this time-frame.
Getting the most of your AdWords requires ongoing experimentation, so don’t be afraid to try new strategies if the above suggestions don’t work for you.
