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.
6. Build and expand your keyword lists
…use keywords and their variations to strategize, target specific audiences, and achieve your advertising goals.
7. Refine and target keywords
…target your ads to potential customers and increase your ROI and conversion rates.
8. Optimize your ad text
…test and experiment with different ad text strategies…to help you achieve your campaign goals.
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.
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.
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.
