AdWords can be a great tool for getting some extra traffic (and if you’re doing it right, extra sales) coming to your E-commerce. It might be shocking to you that a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing with AdWords. A good AdWords campaign isn’t one that you put in place and just leave it be. It requires optimization and tweaking every so often to make sure that it’s working for your needs.
There are great ways to tweak your AdWords campaign to breathe life into it. I found this great “gifographic” by UnBounce which provides three workouts you can do to trim and optimize your AdWords campaign.
The Slimmer: How to Save Money in 10 Minutes
Karate Chop High-Costing Keywords
It’s time to analyze your keywords again. What can you afford to pause? Look at the keywords in your list that are too expensive in regards to your conversion rate. If you’re not getting the result you want, pause the keyword and allocate that budget towards your highest converting keywords.
Change your Ad Schedule
Some of your days will be better than others. Even if some days are still converting for you, it might be time to get rid of certain days and move your budget from one of your more expensive days to a day that converts the best for you. This can also help in reaching a different audience and diversifying your reach.
Change Geographic Locations
Ever thought those in a neighboring country might purchase from you? Now’s the time to test that market for interest. A great way to do this is to change up your geographic locations on your AdWords account and check out which other regions might be interested. Alternatively, you can always change up regions in the same country to target new populations.
Add Negative Keywords
Look at the types of searches that include keywords that aren’t pertinent to your campaign. For example, someone searching in a specific region that you’re not servicing might hit on your ad with one of your more general keywords. Add the region to your negative keywords to stop showing your ad to people looking for something else.
Lower your Keyword bids
This can be tricky- you want to lower your bids enough to where you’re not paying too much for your CPC (or cost per click) without losing your position on the search page. Test it out and retest to get the right amount.
Change your Offer
Look at the offers on your landing page and make sure that it corresponds to your AdWords campaign. What will you need to change, the ad or the landing page? You want to prevent customers from bouncing off of your site.
The Maintainer: 10 minutes to Optimize your Keywords
Speed Adding Negative Keywords
When looking at your search term report, you can highlight words that might be showing your ads to the wrong people. Simply hit ctrl+F to search for words that you can add to your negative keywords list in a snap.
Negative Keyword List Adding
After using that lovely speed adding trick, add them to the negative keywords list and then apply them to your campaigns. This way, you can customize several campaigns at once.
Bad Ad Pausing
It’s time to trim the ads that aren’t performing. Even if they don’t cost much, focusing your budget on your highest performing (and more importantly, converting) ads will make better use of your budget.
New Champion Ad Creations
Which of your ads worked the best? Create variations of that ad from your top 10 ad groups for the best results. Be sure to label your new ads that you’ll test to be able to easily find and analyze them later.
Bad Keyword Bid Lowering
Sort through your most pricey keywords in descending order and lower the bids of weaker keywords progressively. This will save you money on keywords that aren’t doing much for your campaign.
Good Keyword Bid Increasing
Use the money you saved trimming from bad or weak keywords to bump up your best keywords. If they’re converting well for you, don’t be afraid to put more money on them.
Create and Save Custom Filters
You can create custom filters that make analysis even easier. Looking at piles of data does nothing for you if it’s not pertinent to your campaign goal: if your goal is converting, save filters that show you this so you can maintain these campaigns even easier.
How to get even more Traffic and Conversions in 10 minutes
Increase Impressions
Even if your campaign is working out for you- there’s no such thing as too much business. Look at your impression shares and add more budget to keywords performing at less than 90%.
Competition Spying
There are wonderful tools out on the market to help you find the keywords that your competitors are using. SEMrush is a particularly good tool for lifting your competition’s best keywords and outbidding them.
Broadmatch Keyword Mining
AdWords’ broad match is great for finding keywords that you haven’t already thought of. If your ads are already performing well, it’s time to get into new keyword matches that can also help your potential customers find you. Be sure to create new ad groups for them so you can keep an eye on how well they’re doing.
Increase that Bid Modifier
In your Dimensions tab, you can find what areas are doing the best in terms of geography, devices, and even times during the day. You want to put more budget into these areas to get more of your best quality traffic to your E-Commerce.
Keyword Bid Increasing
If your keywords are performing well, but are in lower positions, it’s time to bulk them up. Allocate more of your budget towards making those keywords your best-placed ads.
Improve your Ad CTR (Click-through-rate)
It’s time to isolate and test ad sections across your ad groups to get the best idea of what works best over your keywords.
Ad Extension Tests
You want your ad to take up as much space as possible, so change your site links, callout extensions, and pull rich snippets to edge your competitors out of view.
AdWords is a fantastic tool for those who know how to get it to work. It can seem complicated, but Google is usually there to help with optimization. It’s easy to let your AdWords campaign go, so keep up on it with these simple, ten-minute tasks to make sure it’s the best it can be. After all, what’s the point in paying for advertising if it’s not working at maximum?