Many people see Google AdWords as a set and forget solution to bringing in more leads. Unfortunately, this is not the case! No matter how well you build your initial AdWords campaign, the optimisations you make along the way are what determines our accounts success of failure. Realistically the AdWords campaign you build to begin with is rarely optimal. As it is not until you start to see keyword data like click through rates and costs per conversions that you are able to understand what keywords are working.
- Search Terms Report: One of the most important things you can keep an eye on, especially when first starting a new campaign is the search terms report. This report shows you all the specific search queries that triggered your ads to show. This is important as it helps you weed out any irrelevant searches and add them as negative keywords. Adding negative keywords regularly is a great way to ensure your budget is saved for relevant keywords that are more likely to lead to a conversion.
- Ad Schedule: Another important thing to consider is your ad schedule: when your ads are set to show. If you haven’t created an ad schedule yet, the best way to do so is to segment for day/hour of day. Then you are able to identify what days and what time of days your ads perform best. You can even go further than this and make bid adjustments for the times in which you see the most conversions coming in.
- Quality score: One thing that is important to keep an eye on the quality score of your keywords. The quality score is a useful diagnostic tool that helps you understand what you can do to improve the performance of your campaigns. It focusses on the metrics of ad relevance, expected CTR and landing page experience. Giving you a good idea of how to optimise your ads to better suit the keywords you are targeting. It is also helpful for optimisations that may need to be made on your landing pages.
As you can tell at this point, there will always be new opportunities to optimise and improve throughout your AdWords campaign. AdWords optimization is not a one-off task!
You need to make it a regular job to see how you can improve and optimise your account. As the time, you put into testing and optimising on AdWords will be paid back with successful accounts and happy clients. Regular maintenance and monitoring of an account is the best way that you can maximize your return on investment. The time invested in optimising your account is worthwhile for the results you will see.