Once you have created and setup the many necessary ad groups that make up your adwords account, you may be tempted to think you are now finished- you couldn’t be more wrong! Adwords accounts take consistent optimising and improvements in order to maximise the return on investment that you will receive.

The amount of work that your adwords account will require differs based on a number of things. Clearly, the larger the account, the more work that will be required to constantly update and ensure your ad groups are not being matched against irrelevant keywords, and that the account is converting effectively. Another way to judge the amount of work that your adwords account will require is to look at the number of broad and modified broad keywords in your ad groups. If you have a high number of broad keywords in your account, then those keywords are highly likely to be matched against many things that are irrelevant to what you are offering. This will mean you will need to constantly check to see what your ad groups are being matched against. If you discover a keyword that is not appropriate to what you are offering, then you will need to add it in as a negative to your adwords account.

In order to check all of the keywords that your adwords account is being matched against, you will need to examine your search query reports regularly and ideally schedule them to arrive weekly via email.  This will allow you to  find new ad groups or keywords to use in your adwords account.

For example, you are a company that sells large quantities of office equipment. The broad keyword: “printing paper” is matched against “wholesale printing paper”. You may wish to then create a separate ad group containing the exact and phrase match keywords of “wholesale printing paper”. This will then mean you can write a more relevant ad for this ad group, containing the exact words within the ad. A more relevant ad means a higher chance of it being clicked, which means a higher quality score resulting in lower costs for that keyword. Furthermore, using the search term report to find additional ad groups like this will allow you to discover different thought processes of your potential customers. This will allow your adwords account to reach a larger number of people and increase your return on investment.

To conclude, updating your adwords account using the search term report is highly important. If you do not have enough time to do this on a regular basis, then you are better off using fewer broad keywords when you first set up your adwords campaign. The reason for this is that broad keywords are going to result in more impressions, which means you have a higher chance of being matched against irrelevant search terms.   Of course, if you don’t have time to manage your AdWords account on a continual basis, you’d be better of using a PPC Management company such as ourselves J

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I’ve been asked this question a few times now by our monthly AdWords clients, so have decided to answer it in a blog post.

In an AdWords account, one of the most important factors is quality score.  Quality score makes a difference as to how high your ads appear, and also the Cost Per Click you pay for.  Ideally quality score should be at 7 or above – see the effect on Cost Per Click in the image below, courtesy of Click Equations.

The easiest way to get quality score up is to make sure the exact keywords appear in the advert heading.  This is the way that Google prefers.  It has the added benefit of often increasing conversion rate.  Having the exact keywords in the advert heading is usually impossible if there are a large number of keywords in a single ad group.

Therefore an account will usually be optimised over time to break it in small ad groups.  In each of these ad groups there will be only a handful of keywords, as the adverts for this group need to reflect these keywords extremely closely.

With large accounts, this can result in a very large account with many hundreds of ad groups.  This can appear unwieldy to the client, but it is usually the ideal way to manage a large account.

Questions?  Do ask them here!

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Did you know that it’s possible to schedule your AdWords campaigns so that they turn on and off at certain times of day, as well as raising bids at certain times of the day?  No?  Then read on!

This is likely to be advisable in a number of occasions – for example if you are operating a same day delivery company such as a florist, you may wish to raise bidding in the morning in order to maximise orders before your cut off point for delivery.

In order to set your times of day, you will need to open the Campaign Settings for the campaign in question.    Scroll down until you find the option Schedule – you will note an option marked “Display ads all days and hours”.

Click the Edit button  - a weekly scheduler will now appear.  Find  the option “Bid adjustment”.

Within this option you will need to select the day you wish to change first.  Click where it says “Running all day” and you will now have the option to set ads to run between certain times.  You can also add in a percentage – for example you could schedule bids to be increased to 200% between 9am and 1pm, and then reduce to 100% between 1pm and 8pm.

You also have the option to copy the setting to all days of the week, or just weekdays at this stage.  This can be particularly useful if your company is B2B and you would like ads to run only Monday to Friday.  Do remember to pause the campaigns on the weekend if you are interested in this option.

Scheduling your campaigns can make a huge difference in a number of markets.  For example in the holiday industry, it would be a good idea to raise bids at lunchtimes, when people are likely to be using their lunch break to browse and book holidays.

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Having recently posted on my Facebook fan page that the Return On Investment to aim for with web marketing is 5 times your marketing spend, I received requests to explain further how this might be achieved.  So I’ve written a quick guide to point you in the right direction:

• Invest in your website design.  Don’t expect an AdWords campaign to deliver ROI unless you have a professionally designed website.   There is no excuse for a poorly designed website – I had my AdWords training website www.HelpWithPPC.com designed for just £170 by an excellent company I sourced via www.freelancer.com
• Create landing pages for each product or service you are trying to sell via AdWords.  These pages should be highly focused on just one product or service.  Ideally ensure the vistor’s questions are answered, and make sure you include full contact details including an online form to collect visitor details and allow them to ask you to call
• Ask for a second opinion on your website, and all of your landing pages.  What questions would visitors have?  Do they know where to go next?  Do visitors know what how to make a purchase or leave their details?  The worst website owners are those who have designed the website themselves – ideally you should be asking for a third opinion too!
• Track your online form submissions via AdWords as a conversion and also Google Analytics as a goal
• Set your AdWords campaign up carefully with one ad group per service.  Make sure your keywords appear in the advert heading and ideally elsewhere within the advert as well.  Use some broad match keywords to start with.  Make sure you send the visitor to the correct page on your website, NOT the homepage!
• Check quality scores for your keywords after a short while – how are they performing?  Good quality scores can hugely decrease Costs Per Click
• Track visitors via Google Analytics and possibly other tracking packages such as Get Clicky, which allows you to watch visitors in real time on your website
• Monitor conversions carefully.  Identify new keywords by checking which keywords resulted in conversions.  Increase spending on these keywords if appropriate
• Keep an eye on Cost Per Conversion – work out your profit levels.  Are you making 5 x your marketing spend in new turnover?  If not, continue to work on getting your conversion costs down
• Still struggling?  Try using the Google website optimiser to split test your landing pages.  Test different marketing messages to see if Cost Per Conversion improves
• ROI still too low?  Work on increasing customer value to make more from each customer.  Consider using email marketing to newly acquired customers to increase lifetime customer value.  Or use cross-sell and up-sell existing customers to new products and services, especially where the customer acquisition cost is high.   I have have worked with clients in the flower market who sell 1 bouquet of flowers for £30, the cost to acquire that customer can be as high as £12.  This means they MUST focus on increasing the lifetime value of that customer by using email marketing.
• Bear in mind that for some markets, just one lead per week might deliver ROI.  For example, working with a solicitor where a new client is worth £4000 – if 1 in 4 leads results in a new client, each lead is technically worth £1000.  This means a monthly spend of £4000/5 = £800 will deliver ROI even if just delivering 1 lead per week.

Questions?  Do ask!

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