Maximising Your Adwords Campaigns

• Home
• Articles
• Maximising Your Adwords Campaigns

Advertising on Search Engines has become the the number one place to pay for traffic when it comes down to doing business on the internet. For those that don't know, search engine advertising allows you to buy advertising space that shows up when a user is displayed search results. How come this has become so darn popular? The simple answer, is that it works! Banner ads don't work anymore, because they are very rarely relevant to what the user is looking for, Adwords has the advantage of knowing what the user is looking for, and has the option to show them the most fitting ad out of thousands submitted, increasing the chance of conversion. If you do a search on one of the top search engines, you will see relevant ads usually placed on the side, some are even made to look as if they are part of the search results, however they should be labeled as sponsored. With pay per click, the more you spend logically, the more traffic you will get!

Now in order to maximize the return on investment (ROI) when you are spending money on search engine ads, you have to know which ads are turning into conversions. You absolutely must have a way to track the results of your ads or you will be throwing money out the window and if you don't mind throwing money out the window, please let me know so I can stand outside your office.

There are two things to look at:

• The search phrase that the user searched on
• The ad copy (the wording of your ad)

A good web analytics package should give you everything you need to know about number 1, right down to how much revenue a particular phrase generated. So take that and subtract how much you spent on that phrase and you have your ROI. If it's a positive number, then you should keep advertising on that phrase. The most effective way to advertise on search engines and to make your tracking more accurate is to use exact matches or at least phrase matches, not broad searches. By using exact matching, you can be much more precise in who your ad will reach, thus reducing your cost-per-click (CPC), and increasing your ROI. Furthermore, it makes your web analytics much more useful because you can see how effective your ads are based on exactly what your customers are searching for, rather than for what you think they are searching for. If you want different variations, then add more phrases to your campaign. This can result in having a much larger list of phrases in your campaign, but why spend money advertising on "bike mountain" when what you really want is "mountain bike".

Number 2 is a bit harder because there is no specific answer, but what you can do is try out different ads over different time periods. For instance, in week 1, you try out ad copy 1, in week 2 you try out ad copy 2, then compare each weeks results. Or better yet, if your web analytics product can support it, you can append a special identifier to your ad link that your web analytics product can use to differentiate the two ads and then you can compare results over the same time period. And remember to take into account the number of impressions each ad was given to do a real comparison. For instance, if ad 1 had 500 impressions and ad 2 had 1000 impressions, you should double the results of ad 1 to make a fair comparison. So if ad 1 had 50 clicks, 5 orders and $100 revenue, you should double those values to 100 clicks, 10 orders and $200 in revenue when comparing to ad 2. Google Adwords favors the ad that has the higher click-through-rate, not necessarily the one that has the highest ROI.