8 AdWords Boosting Quick Tips
Running a Google AdWords campaign? Good. It is by far the best Internet ad spend, with quick results and a lot of market share. But many advertisers fail with it because how fast you spend money. Here are some quick tips you can implement to help your campaigns...
Turn off the content network. Adwords has 3 options as far as where your ads get served: Google search, Google search + search partners (ask.com, etc), and then the Content Network. The content network is all the publishers using Google AdSense. When this option is on your ads will be served on websites with contextually relevant content. You can find many case studies suggesting you don't really get bang for your buck and I can assure you that you will not get nearly as many clicks as from the search network.
Don't send all your AdWords visitors to your homepage. Making a relevant landing page for as many keywords (or at least adgroups) as possible is very important. First off, Google will give you a better quality score if it finds your destination page to be relevant to the keywords you are bidding on. Also, just from a user behavior stand point, you will stand a better chance of converting visitors when you align with their intentions as closely as possible.
Use CSS to layout your landing pages. In a nutshell, you should be able to turn off styles (Firefox-->View-->Page Style-->No Style) and see nothing but text in an organized outline. Google spiders will have a much easier time indexing your page more accurately. This little tweak alone can significantly increase results.
Use analytics. Google Analytics is a free option that also has conversion tracking. I personally like Hitslink.net (free trial). Make sure you track conversions since that's really the bottom line. Clicks, Click Thru Rates, Pageviews, all mean nothing if you aren't converting. It still surprises me to see how many webmasters and publishers do not have a comprehensive analytics system in place, don't make that mistake.
Invest in a keyword research tool. Wordtracker (free trial) and KeywordDiscovery (free trial) are the best options. These tools will help you find the most used search terms with the least competition. I suggest starting with common misspellings. I have been shocked to find how often people search with misspelled terms and you can often bid for these words on the cheap.
Use analytics to find the times of day you convert the best. AdWords now has an ad scheduling option where you can choose which hours of the day (or days of the week) your campaigns will run. If your analytics show that Sunday mornings give you a lot of useless traffic you can make sure your campaign won't run in that period. This will make sure that your budget is only used during times that you actually convert visitors.
Always start with at least 3 ads in an adgroup. I am constantly surprised by how certain ad copy can perform, that's why I test EVERYTHING. Remember: Test, test again, and then test some more. After some time you will find that one of your ads does not perform as well as the others. DROP THE AXE on that ad and try testing a new one.
Add new adgroups to campaigns that already perform well for quick traction. Google tracks your campaign history and favors longer running, high performance campaigns. If you really need to get a new adgroup off to a running start try adding it to good campaign instead of making a new campaign.
BONUS LINK: Here is one of my favorite Netvibes tabs. If you use Netvibes just click this link and you should be able to add the SEO/SEM tab to your Netvibes.
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