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Managing Google AdWords Campaigns - Wrong v Right

by Kirt Christensen

Generally the mistakes people make in managing their AdWords campaigns are the same ones made by most advertisers. Improvements can be made with under an hours work. This can save you hundreds and probably thousands of dollars with less than 60 minutes work following the advice given in this article.

Can you guess the biggest mistake made by advertisers on Google AdWords campaigns? That would be Campaigns that are not properly organized. Ads and keywords that are not organized will damage your campaigns and end up costing you big money.

With campaigns put together in the proper way will have good results from the start. At that point optimizing them and making adjustments is a simple task. As time goes on this can make a big difference.

In your optimum campaign, you would have 1 perfect ad for each keyword that is searched for. With each different keyword you would have a different add. With 2,200 keywords you would then need to write 2,200 ads.

In the real world, that’s kind of impractical. So you cluster similar keywords together with a single ad.

Ad groups are the most basic unit of your ad campaign that has both keywords and ads. The campaign is the broad topic containment for these ads. You will need to have more than one adgroup in your one ad campaign.

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 Telecommunications

Robust Answers for

Your Every Voice Mail Need

www.smithstelecom.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

At that point the visitors are all sent to the same landing page with various links to pages called ‘Services’, ‘Equipment’, ‘FAQ’, ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, and so forth. So what is wrong with that way of managing AdWords?

Number one is the variety in the keyword list is too wide. Each of those words should be put into its own adgroup adding in a shortlist of similar keywords/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.

If you structure your campaigns properly from the beginning, it’s a lot easier to make this work. To do this, take all of your different keywords and use Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.info) or Overture (http://inventory.overture.com) to organize them into narrow “silos” of very tightly related terms. They will look like this:

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

Before assembling these into a campaign, serious thought (and work) should be given to negative keywords. These are some keywords for “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

When your ad campaign is all set up every one of your mini keyword lists will be in ito own adgroup with it’s own set of ads.

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