Hello everyone,
I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to this community. I found here really helpful and friendly people who don't hesitate to share valuable knowledge on a daily basis in a warm atmosphere.
I joined AffiliateFix a month ago and thought it was time to give something back to you guys (and girls
) in gratitude for all the inspiration and motivation you bring me every day.I’m not an expert, I don’t make loads of cash but I’ve worked quite a bit with AdWords since several years, made mistakes and learned from it. This post isn’t intended to be the AdWords bible but more of a beginner guide. You will (hopefully) learn or refresh some basic and intermediate stuff to follow in order to reach the profitability with your campaigns.
No more talking, here we go:
1) Structuring your campaign
Let’s begin with the beginning: the campaign structure. A good structured campaign will boost your performance. But what is a good structure? It’s both simple and complicated. In order to have a good control and overview on your campaign, you have to separate it in clear groups based around for example interests of your demographics, benefits of your product/service, location of your customers, targeting options of your keywords…
Here is an example for a clothes shop but the same logic apply for a CPA campaign:
The more you breakdown your campaign, the more your ads and landing pages will match your keywords. And thus, your ads CTR and quality score will go up, your CPC costs will go down and finally your CR will be better too.
:fixforums: Advice: if you run on a low budget, don’t create too many groups or target too many keywords since the optimization process will take ages to be meaningful.
2) Campaign type
You certainly have heard of sayings like “Focus on one thing until you master it”. The same principle applies here. If you’re a beginner, I strongly advise you to focus on one and only type of campaign: search only, display, remarketing etc…
For the purpose of this guide (and in the majority of cases), we will concentrate on search network only. At the beginning, when you’re trying to reach a positive ROI, don’t try to run multiple types of campaign in the same time. Each type requires its own skillset and subtleties.
3) Choosing the right keywords
Keywords are one of the most important aspects of your campaign, so choosing the right keywords is crucial for your results.
Firstly, if you have a low budget, focus on long tail keywords. These have less competition and so a much lower CPC. You will also have more clics and more datas to play with for the optimization process down the road. Finally, more targeted keywords imply a better conversion rate and ROI.
Secondly, the keywords match types. Again, with lower budgets, it’s best to focus on exact match since it will allow you to have a better control over your costs and show your ads only on relevant keywords.
If the volume is not enough or you have more budget, you can go for broad match modifier to catch more keywords. However, be careful in this case to watch closely on which keywords your ads are displayed in order to react quickly if you’re on poor performance keywords.
Intermediate level: In case you have 2 matching types, you’re better to create 2 different groups targeting each. For example:- 1 group for “Lose weight fast – exact” with only exact match keywords.
- 1 group for “Lose weight fast – bmm” with only broad match modifier keywords.
After that, you can add the exact match keywords as negative keywords in the second group to be sure that the exact match keywords are shown only in the first group.
4) Write powerful ads
Your ads will aim to qualify your prospects and to increase the CTR through your landing page. Again, a better CTR means a better quality score, ad rank and a lower CPC; everything is connected.
To have a good CR on your landing page, you will have to be as descriptive as possible in your ads. Don't try to fool people to get more clicks, it would not serve you. There’s a difference between marketing and lies. Your ads act as a filter to remove non-targeted people.
Don’t forget to use ad extensions whenever it is possible. Ad extensions give you extra visibility in the search engines and a chance to increase your ads CTR and so on (you know the story by now
).
5) Crafting landing pages that convert
Landing pages are part of the calculation of your quality score, so they must be effective and deliver what the visitor wants. Here are some tips to help you achieve that :
- Make it very clear; the visitor must understand instantly what he has to do.
- Make it simple; don’t ask for their dog’s name if you don’t need to.
- Focus on the benefits for the user, not the functionality or boring details.
- 16 landing page tips you must be using.
6) Bid effectively
Don’t target the first place; it’s not a matter of ego. Very often, the first place is not the most profitable because of all the big companies trying to be “the first”. Ideally, try to be between 3rd and 4th position. This way, you let all the big budgets fight each other and lose ROI. If you can’t show your ads to 100% of the demand, your aim will be to have the more clicks possible within your budget.
Your campaigns are displayed on computers, tablets and mobiles, so check regularly your performances on each device and adjust your bids accordingly. For example, if your offer accepts only mobile leads, adjust your bids to -100% on computers/tablets.
7) Further optimizations
Previous points concerned essentially the launch phase of your campaigns. Now I will show you some variables and optimizations to consider during all the life of your campaigns in order to maximize your ROI.
1) Learning phase: you need to understand now that the first few days and even weeks will serve you as a test and for collecting data. You have to accept this learning phase; very few campaigns are profitable right off the bat.
2) Location targeting: depending on geographic areas your campaigns may have different performance. Be sure to check and adjust your bids.
3) Day/week parting: the same goes for the time of the day and the day of the week. If you notice your CR is poor on week-end, lower or exclude Saturday and Sunday from your bidding.
4) Pause bad keywords: if you see keywords that bring you very little to no conversion, don’t hesitate to pause them.
5) Excluding keywords: during all the life of your campaigns, you will have to check the search terms report to see on which keywords your ads are displayed and exclude all those who are off topic.
6) Tests: again it’s a task you will have to perform on a constant basis if you to achieve high ROI. So always test 2 or 3 ads by group, pause the worst and add a new one. Same principles with the landing pages, A/B test different landing pages, different elements on the page etc.
:fixforums: Advice: Be careful however, too much tests kill the tests. If you don’t have a sufficient budget, you won’t have enough data to validate them and they won’t be meaningful. It’s also the case if you try to test multiple variables on one page, be sure to be able to dissociate the changes from the results. So don’t throw 50 tests/variables at a time.
8) Some words on scaling
Here we are, you spent the last days/weeks optimizing your campaigns and you reached profitability, congratulations! Now is the time to think about scaling and make big cash but be careful though.
Scaling your budget must be done conscientiously and gradually. For example, increase your spending by 30% and check after a few days if the performance is still good.
In the first place, I suggest you to modify only your daily budget. Don’t try to improve the rank of your ads or add more keywords. It could damage your ROI. Once you reach 100% daily visibility with your ads thanks to your budget, you can consider going further and tweaking things but that’s another story.
9) Conclusion
That’s all folks! I hope this small guide will help you in some way. Optimizing AdWords campaigns isn’t difficult at all as you can see, you just need to be disciplined and attentive in order to reach your goals. If something isn’t clear or you want more explanations, feel free to post a reply, I’d be happy to answer as best as I can.
Best of luck !
The Mad French
PS: forgive me for the mistakes and grammar.
