Improving Your Results
Now that you’re up and running, have the hang of managing your ads, and are measuring your results, it’s time to think about optimizing your account. Optimization can be aimed at getting you more traffic and better leads, lowering your ads’ costs, or improving your return on investment (ROI), among other advertising goals.
Optimization means taking steps to get the results you want by improving your account’s quality and performance, without raising your costs. It can include ad text improvements, changes to your bids, changes to ad targeting options, better organization within your campaign, and more. Here’s some basic tips for improving your account’s quality and performance:
Create successful text ads
It’s not easy to say everything you want to say about your business in just a few words. Focus on the following:
- Highlight what makes your products and services stand out; include prices and promotions.
- Let your customers know what action they can take, using strong verbs like “purchase,” “sign up now,” or “call today.”
- Include at least one of your high-performing keywords in your ad text.
- Make sure to match your ad text to the text that people will see once they reach your website.
Improve your keywords
Once you know how to find data for your keywords, you can identify poor-performing ones and make them work harder for you. You’ll want to improve the relevance of your keywords to help boost their Quality Scores, or modify the match type for ones that aren’t helping you meet your advertising goals. You can also remove low-performing keywords from your campaign entirely.
Focus on improving your return on investment (ROI)
To improve your ROI, focus on improving your conversion potential through attracting the right customers to your business. You can do this by taking several steps:
- Use highly relevant keywords and ad text. For example, if you run a business that specializes in women’s running shoes, try using “women’s running shoes” as opposed to simply “shoes.” You can increase your bid for keywords that show a profit, to increase exposure and generate more traffic, and you can decrease the bids for keywords that aren’t profitable, to lower your costs.
- Use a landing page in your website that’s most relevant to your ad, to make sure customers get what they expect. If you’re running an ad for a particular type of women’s running shoe — say, track spikes — then try to send customers to a page in your site that’s relevant to your track-spikes sale.
- Make sure that your site is easy to navigate.
Improve your costs
Budget and bid optimization isn’t necessarily about spending more — it’s about spending smarter. A critical first step is understanding the relationship between cost and quality. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower the price you pay for each click and the better its ad position.
Once you have a firm grasp of the relationship between quality and cost, you can track your ROI, experiment with your budgets and bids to see what works best, and use performance data to help determine where your dollars will make the most impact.
Organize your account for success
Good account organization helps you make changes quickly, target your ads effectively, and ultimately reach more of your advertising goals. By creating well-structured campaigns by theme or product (women’s track spikes, women’s distance running shoes, and so on), you’ll also have sets of ads and keywords that are directly related to each other, which helps improve your Quality Score. With a well-structured account, you can:
- Determine which ads are creating the optimal conversions (like sales or leads) and traffic.
- Monitor changes easily.
- Maintain better control over budgets and costs.
- Locate specific keywords quickly.
- Easily manage and edit your campaigns.
Get ideas to improve your account
Using the Opportunities tab in your AdWords account, you can get suggestions tailored to your specific account. These include suggestions specific to keywords, bids, and budgets. You can review ideas in the Opportunities tab, evaluate their potential impact, then apply them directly to your account.
Minimize low-value clicks
Are you getting good traffic from your ads but not enough buyers? You can use Conversion Tracking to measure how many people are actually buying or signing up for things after they land on your site. Then, there are a number of things you can do to improve your conversion rate, like adding more specific keywords and negative keywords.
Use Negative Keywords & Placement Exclusions
AdWords system will periodically scan your account to see if certain negative keywords or placement exclusions appear in more than one campaign. If so, they’ll show you ideas for lists of negative keywords and placement exclusions that you can use across multiple campaigns. Since you’ll have a central list of negative keywords or a central list of placement exclusions, it will help you better manage them.
How to get ideas for negative keyword and placement exclusions lists
To get started, you might want to get an idea of how negative keyword and placement exclusions lists work. Let’s say you’ve added negative keywords or excluded placements for one of your campaigns, and you decide that you’d like to do the same for your other campaigns, too. You can create a central list of negative keywords or placement exclusions that you can share among multiple campaigns, making it easier to manage your negative keywords and placement exclusions when, for example, you’d like to add additional ones to your campaigns.
Now, let’s say you’d rather have us do the hard work of finding negative keywords and placement exclusions that are used in more than one of your campaigns. You can get ideas for negative keyword and placement exclusions lists by using AdWords list suggestor. Here’s how:
- Sign in to your AdWords account.
- Click the Shared library link in navigation bar.
- Click Campaign negative keywords or Campaign placement exclusions.
- Select the List suggestions tab. You’ll see a table with negative keywords or placement exclusions that appear in multiple campaigns. Keep in mind that they’ll show you ideas for negative keywords or placements exclusions that appear in any two or more campaigns.
Tips
- To see ideas for negative keywords or placement exclusions that appear in specific campaigns, click the Filter drop-down menu, select Create filter, and add the campaigns you’d like to see ideas for. Click Apply. You’ll see exactly one group in the table, containing all negative keywords or placement exclusions that appear in each of the campaigns you selected.
- To see more details for an idea, click the keyword group or placement group you’d like see more information for. You’ll see two tables. The table on the left shows you the negative keywords or placement exclusions that appear together in the campaigns that are shown in the table on the right.
Add an idea to your campaigns
Once you’ve reviewed your ideas for negative keyword or placement exclusion lists, you can add them to your campaigns. Here’s how:
- Click the Shared library link in navigation bar.
- Click Campaign negative keywords or Campaign placement exclusions.
- Select the List suggestions tab. You’ll see a table with negative keywords or placement exclusions that appear in multiple campaigns.
- Click the keyword group or placement group that you’d like to add across multiple campaigns. You’ll see a detailed view of that group.
- Enter a name for your negative keyword or placement exclusion list.
- Click Apply. A list with those negative keyword or placement exclusions will be added to each campaign, replacing your original negative keywords or placement exclusions.
Note
If you get an error message while adding an idea for a negative keyword list, the most likely cause is that you edited one of your negative keywords after the AdWords system scanned your account last. Try again later, after they’ve rescanned your account, to review and add the updated idea. Keep in mind that the list will be added to campaigns that don’t trigger an error.