Aaron Putnam

If you have ever heard the expression “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”, you know exactly what I mean when I say that close doesn’t count in AdWords. If not, let me explain.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to review a Google AdWords account that was setup late last year and ran for all of 3 months. Unfortunately, after dropping nearly $30K on advertising, the advertiser pulled the plug on the project because they weren’t happy with the results.

Ouch. What went wrong? First, let’s start with what the advertiser did right.

After reviewing the account, it appeared they had followed all of Google’s best practices such as creating separate campaigns targeting different themes and implementing tightly knit ad groups with relevant ad copy. They even threw in some negative keywords for good measure to prevent their ads from coming up for irrelevant queries and went so far as creating custom landing pages for each campaign.

So far so good, right?

Well, upon further inspection of their keyword terms, I quickly realized exactly where the advertiser had taken a turn for the worse. And no, this wasn’t your typical single keyword broad matched scenario that plagues most AdWords accounts. Actually, the problem didn’t have anything to do with keyword match types.

As it turns out, this was simply a case of the advertiser doing everything right but the thing that matters most: keyword selection.

Although they were bidding on relevant terms, they were wrong for their business. Keyword terms that were way too broad and hyper-competitive with no real intent to buy or take action. Keyword terms that pass quality score filters but don’t produce results. Keywords that cost the advertiser $30K with nothing to show for it.

This just goes to show that even if you do almost everything right in AdWords, you might come close to getting results. But as the saying goes, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”.

Insider optimization strategies direct from the Google AdWords team to help improve the quality and performance of your account without raising costs. Sound, practical advice for existing AdWords advertisers and a must-read for anyone managing accounts.

1. Know your industry

Staying up to date with industry trends can help you better organize your campaigns, allocate your advertising budget across different products, time your campaign launches, manage CPC bids, and make your ads stand out.

2. Know your audience

Keeping an accurate profile of your target audience(s) in mind will help you choose the right keywords and ad text to reach that audience, and also help you filter out users who are unlikely to click through or convert for you.

Assessing Your Industry and Audience

3. Evaluate your website and identify your goals

…evaluate your website and identify your goals as you begin to optimize your campaign.

4. Measure your campaign performance

…measure the impact of your optimization so you can clearly evaluate your campaign’s performance before and after the optimization.

Assessing Your Website and Goals

5. Optimize the structure of your AdWords account

Structuring your account effectively will allow you more flexibility in managing your keywords and ad text, controlling budgets, and setting strategic bids.

Account Structure

6. Build and expand your keyword lists

…use keywords and their variations to strategize, target specific audiences, and achieve your advertising goals.

Keyword Basics

7. Refine and target keywords

…target your ads to potential customers and increase your ROI and conversion rates.

Beyond Keyword Basics

8. Optimize your ad text

…test and experiment with different ad text strategies…to help you achieve your campaign goals.

Ad Text

9. Create effective ad text

When testing different ad texts, be sure to control for some portions of the ad text, while experimenting with the other portions so you’ll be able to assess how effective the message you are testing really is.

More on Ad Text

10. Optimize your bids for best performance

…measure results without any special tools by simply looking at your conversions and your position, and then manually adjusting your bids until you achieve your optimal ROI.

Managing and Optimizing Bids

11. Continually brainstorm new keyword ideas

…identify both new keywords and negative keywords that you’d like to add to your account to better control when you would like your ad to appear.

Brainstorming new keyword ideas

12. Improve your ROI using negative keywords

…adding negative keywords to your account can help better target your ads, increase clickthrough rates, and lower your minimum cost-per-click.

More on Negative Keywords