AdWords Campaign Management – Wrong and Right
Most mistakes people make in their Google AdWords campaign managements are pretty common, and 90 percent of Google campaigns can be greatly improved with less than an hour of effort. You can save yourself hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars in the hour you spend following our instructions in this article.
And what is the top ranking mistake made by folks in Google campaign management? The big culprit is improper organization of their campaign. If ads and keywords are poorly organized you will have inefficient campaigns and higher advertising costs.
Properly organized campaigns get results from the beginning and are easy to adjust and optimize. Over time this makes a huge difference.
In a utopian world everytime someone typed in a keyword you would have the perfect ad for that keyword. With all those different keywords, you have a unique ad for each one. Say you have two thousand keywords, then you would need to write two thousand ads.
However we don’t live in an optimum world. We can get a good result by clustering keywords that are alike with an appropriate ad.
An ad campaign is the file cabinet that holds all your ad groups, it’s topic is general. An ad group is the smallest unit that has keywords and ads in it. Your ad campaign should always have more than one adgroup.
In Google your account can contain as many campaigns as you need. You can have campaigns in your account with totally different topics. The products you sell may be absolutely unrelated and the websites you send traffic to may be different.
You may choose any way you want to divvy up your ad campaign. When it comes to creating your ad groups however, you have to do it with care.
Most beginners set up their campaigns to look something like this:
Smith’s Telecommunications
Robust Answers for
Your Total Voice Mail Needs
www.smithtelecoms.com
With this as their ad their keyword list has this appearance:
auto attendant
business telephone systems
call management systems
voice mail
voice mail equipment
voice mail service
voice mail systems
Then they send all the visitors to the home page, which has a bunch of different links to “Services,” “Equipment,” “Q&A,” “About Us,” “Contact Us,” etc. What’s wrong with this kind of Google AdWords campaign management?
There are too many different kinds of keywords in the same group. Every one of these keywords needs to be in its own group, along with a list of very similar words and phrases.
Secondly, the keywords and ads don’t match-up because of the problem listed above.
Putting your business name in the headline is a major mistake for nearly every business including Smith Telecommunications. This will make your click through rate really low and therefore you will have a very high bid price.
Is this ad selling Smith Telecommunications? Is that what the customer is looking for? Make your ad reflect the needs of the customer.
If a prospective client is looking for ‘voicemail systems’ he wants to land on a page about voicemail systems. Similarly if someone is looking for ‘voicemail equipment’ he wants to land on one with info on voicemail equipment. These are separate topics. Prospective clients don’t want to hunt all over your page looking for what they want. It is more likely they will leave to go elsewhere.
Structuring your campaign correctly from the start will help this to work out more easily. Proper structuring starts with Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.info) or Overture (http://inventory.overture.com) to get them laid out in small groups of closely related terms. This is how they might look:
Voice Mail Services (adgroup)
voice mail provider
voice mail service
voice mail service provider
voice mail services
Voice Mail System (adgroup)
voice mail systems
voice mail systems for realtors
telemarketing and voice mail systems
phone systems voice mail
home office voice mail systems
home office telephone voice mail systems
Auto Attendant (adgroup)
answering attendant auto system
auto attendant voice mail services
auto attendant
auto attendant phone system
auto attendant software
auto attendant system
auto attendant voice mail
phone auto attendant
There’s another step we need to take before pasting this into a campaign: Consider negative keywords. Here’s a list of keywords that come from “Voice Mail Software.”
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail broadcasting software
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
mac voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
free voice mail software
You really aren’t wanting to have visitors looking for free stuff. You also don’t have anything to do with voice broadcasting or even Macintosh computers. This is a good start on your negative keyword list. You do this by putting a minus sign in front of each of the words on your negative keyword list. This is how your list will now look:
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
Negative Keywords:
free
mac
macintosh
broadcast
broadcasting
So when you set up your ad campaigns, each one of these keyword lists is going to go into a different group with its own set of ads.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment