It’s not uncommon for search engine marketers to find it difficult to develop successful pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. In essence, the reason for your PPC advertising failures is primarily a lack of experience and understanding on how to use Google AdWords effectively.
With some basic knowledge and knowledge of AdWords, one can optimize their pay-per-click campaigns for higher performance. Knowing the intricacies of the Google AdWords platform and how to organize campaigns and ad groups cohesively can lead to a much higher return on ad spend (ROAS).
pay per click optimization is essential to maintain success with Google Adwords. Below we have mentioned many strategies to optimize your campaigns for better profitability.
Understanding keyword match types
While it’s an elementary concept in pay-per-click advertising, understanding keyword match types is essential to success. Google breaks down keyword match types in three main ways: broad, [Exact]and “Phrase” match.
In Google search, a broad match can often be extremely broad. For example, for a keyword phrase like “kids military uniforms,” in the broad match settings, your ad may be triggered for searches like “kids army outfit” or “youth navy uniform.” In essence, broad match is very broad, so make sure you know what you’re getting into if you choose to leave your keywords as broad (no “quotes” for phrase or [brackets] for an exact match.)
Using exact keyword matching by enclosing the keyword phrase in parentheses will ensure that your ads will only fire when search engine users submit that exact phrase, and nothing else. By using exact phrase matching, you can better minimize wasted impressions from broad searches and reduce budget-consuming clicks.
Since exact phrase match may not show your ads to the searchers you really want to capture, a great alternative is to use modified broad match. The modified broad is simply placing a “+” symbol directly in front of each keyword (without a space) that you want specifically mentioned in a user’s search query. The “+” symbol ensures that this word, and only very close variations (such as plural and singular variations) are the ones that trigger your ads. So, if we bid on the keyword “+kids +military +uniforms”, our ad will still show for search queries like “kids military uniform” or “kids military uniforms for sale”, not “kids navy uniform”.
Do negative keyword research
Negative keyword research is the effort to identify unwanted keyword variations that lead to unwanted ad impressions. For example, if we are an e-commerce store selling NEW “kids military uniforms”, we would like to implement a negative keyword variation for “used”, “how-to”, or “free” children’s military uniforms.
By using exact keyword match, we don’t have to worry about negative keyword research; however, when using modified broad match, we will need to investigate these unwanted variations. For many marketers, this is a crucial step in the PPC optimization process.
One of the easiest ways to conduct negative keyword research is to open the “View Search Terms” feature. It’s in the “Keywords” tab of the ad group you’re in. Here you can see a list of all the search terms that have triggered your ads over a certain period of time. Taking a look at all of these search queries can be very revealing and insightful in identifying negative keywords to implement in your ad group.
Once you’ve drilled down to the keywords you want to add as negative, simply click the checkbox for the unwanted keyword and hit “Add keyword as negative” which is located above the list of search queries. This will automatically implement the entire keyword phrase as an exact match to your negative keyword list for that particular ad group.
Create tight ad groups (with few keywords)
A typical mistake online advertisers make when developing PPC campaigns and ad groups is poor keyword grouping. In most cases, ad groups with too many keywords are doomed to fail. Since only one ad can serve an entire ad group, only a few closely related keywords should be included.
By targeting keywords into highly focused ad groups, marketers can write targeted ads that are more relevant to the user. In addition to ad text, keyword-focused ad groups allow advertisers to use better landing pages. Creating more targeted ad groups not only increases the accuracy of your ad and your landing page, but smaller ad groups can increase your keyword quality scores and lower your CPC (cost per click).
A solid first step in optimizing your ad groups is to analyze the nature and quality scores of each group. How many keywords are in your ad groups? What are the quality scores of your keywords? How much activity does each keyword receive (impressions/clicks)? How closely related are the keywords in the ad group?
Hopefully, the answers to these questions will allow you to identify keywords in your ad group that can be applied to a new ad group. In larger AdWords accounts with many campaigns, sometimes a keyword can be transferred to a more relevant ad group that already exists. This is a common PPC optimization strategy known as “Peel & Stick”.
Split test your ad text and landing pages
AdWords allows you to run multiple ad variations for each ad group. So instead of creating just one ad for each ad group, try writing three to five ads with different ad copy. By default, AdWords will start showing the best performing ads; however, AdWords does not take into account the importance of statistical relevance or validity. That is, AdWords will start favoring one ad over others only after a handful of impressions and clicks, when more data is often needed to make a valid decision about which ads perform better than others.
If you’re split-testing a number of ad variations, be sure to choose the “Rotate to display ads evenly” option, found in the settings tab for that particular campaign. This way, you can let your ads run for a while before you measure the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your ad text.
Equally important (if not more important) is split testing your landing pages. This may not be an option if you’re advertising an e-commerce store with specific product pages as your ad destination URL. However, for other businesses and industries, testing various landing page designs and concepts is critical, especially for competitive keyword targets. Try testing multiple types of calls to action, as well as using different landing page copies. Another great strategy is to make use of videos and images when relevant.
Users have high expectations these days while browsing the Web, so make sure you optimize your pay-per-click campaigns to their fullest potential.
