However, not all of the businesses have achieved its effectiveness because they are lacking knowledge and experience of running PPC campaigns. Many mistakes are made and a huge amount of potential parts of search engine marketing is missed. This leads to fewer sales than they expect and your PPC campaign become a waste to their budget.
1. Have a clear goal for your Google adwords campaign
The most important thing as running an SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign is to have a clear goal.
You should definitely know what is the goal of your client before doing any other things for your campaign. They want their brand known by many people or grow online sales as much as possible. Each goal has its own way to treat based on target market.
For example, if your client wants to focus on their brand, you should pay more attention on Display network (Display Campaign) where you can reach to many customers who have the same interest with the product/service of your client.
While, Search network (Search Campaign) seems to be the best productive campaign to make online purchases because you only target your customers when they search your product/service on Google.
The advertiser needs to identify that goal and know how to measure the result before they go live with their campaign.
2. Set up your Adwords campaign with a proper plan
Many people create their Adwords campaign themselves without a proper plan and lack of knowledge about how to set up a successful campaign, which leads to many problems of their Adwords account.
Some of the most common mistakes are multiple campaigns/multiple ad groups targeting a single product category, keywords duplicated across campaigns and ad groups. These set up can be acceptable if your location targeting is different, but if your location targeting is the same, this can be a big problem.
It’s because Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword. So, there is no reason to duplicate keywords in different ad groups and campaigns. Moreover, some people create so many text ads in their ad group, up to 15 or 20 text ads.
All of these things can lead to a very difficulty in measuring the performance of the campaigns.
The well structured account to be easy to manage and monitor is:
- Use descriptive names for your campaigns and ad groups based on product category or campaign network (display network and search network).
- Make sure one campaign targeting only one product category.
- One ad group only targets one product/service with a group of keyword theme.
- An ad group should contain no more than 4 text ads.
3. Don’t forget to implement conversion tracking
Even your campaign is an excellent set up, your keywords cover all the search term of your customers and your text ads are extremely compelling, without conversion tracking, you can’t measure exactly the performance of your campaign.
In addition, if you don’t have conversion tracking code on your website, you can not know which keywords or text ads are effective and ones are bad to pause. Some actions you can do with Google Analytics, but as an advertiser, you need to know what happened after a user clicks on your ad. Did he purchase your product? If yes, which keyword/text ad/ad group/campaign triggered the conversion.
By this way, you will know which part of your campaign worth to bid on.
4. Choose wise keywords
When you start an Adwords campaign for your product/service, do you know all the keywords that will lead to conversion? I am quite sure that the answer is “No”.
Some keywords bring a lot of traffic to your website without online purchases while others convert sales. Before starting your Adwords campaign, you should know that the principle rule of running a successful campaign is to use the relevant keywords which fit your niche.
You can start adding keywords to your ad group by using some tools, such as Keyword Planners, Uber Suggest, Google Trends and Google, to know which type of keywords customers normally use when they want to search your product/service.
You can add up to thousands of keyword, but not all of these keywords are good for your business. So, remember to add only relevant keywords to the appropriate ad group.
At the first moment of running your campaign, only bid for a small amount of targeted keywords to avoid running out of your budget before ending of the day. By doing this, you can know which keywords are and are not working.
Moreover, don’t forget to use the plural forms of keywords. There’s a possibility that the singular forms are less effective than plural forms. Also, find long tail variations of your keywords. Shorter keywords can bring many traffics to your website, while long tail keywords (3 words and more) receive less traffic.
However, it’s specific to the customer, so cost much less per click and likely to convert conversions.
5. Add negative keywords
Choosing wise keywords to reach your customer is a good action, but adding negative keywords to prevent irrelevant traffic is more important.
Your keyword list can contain some short keywords which can trigger so many search term, which do not relate to your product/service. So, remember to check the Search Term Report to define which keywords are negative to your campaign and add them as negative keywords.
This can help you save cost and reduce bounce rate.
6. Write compelling text ads
Keywords are the first important thing to reach customers, but text ads are extremely necessary part to attract customers to click on ads’ destination URL. It’s also the initial impression of product/service your business offer, which plays a primary role in making conversions.
Your text ads should be complying with correct descriptive information about your product/service. You can add a promotion and a call to action in your description to make it more compelling. However, don’t exaggerate the quality and effectiveness of your product/service, just to make your customers click on your ads, it only costs you with no sale. Be honest!
One more thing, don’t use only 1 text ad per ad group. You should create at least 3 – 4 versions of your text ads to test which one is the best for your ad group.
In conclusion
If you are finding the way to improve the performance of your Google Adwords account, you should not ignore these tips. Try to apply to your Google Adwords campaign and see its performance afterward!
