However much you’re spending with Google on your paid search campaign, however well your campaign is performing, there is always room for improvement. When times are hard and we’re all trying to maximise every penny of our advertising budgets, there’s no better time to open the lid on your Adwords campaign and get the spanners out.

The paid search market can be fiercely competitive, fast paced, and ever changing, so you should be reviewing your campaign on a regular basis as a matter of course. The question is where you should be focussing your efforts to reap the highest rewards without having to reinvent your campaign from the ground up.

In this article, we’ll be looking at 10 tips that you can either implement, or use as a checklist to make sure your current campaign is still on track. However you use these tips, there should be something here that will give your campaign a lift in these difficult times.

So, let’s get straight into the magic, and start addressing those areas of focus for your next campaign review:


1. Create Small, Tightly Focussed Ad Groups.
One common mistake people make when creating ad groups is bundling too many related terms into a single group. Doing this dilutes the CTR potential of some of your terms immediately as they’re going to be poorly aligned to the ad copy before your campaign is even begun.

Instead create smaller groups focussed tightly on variations of a couple of terms that will be equally well served by a well written ad. Ad copy written specifically for a term, particularly in the long tail, will stand head and shoulders above any broad match competition, giving you a huge head start when it comes to attracting the searcher.

It’s also worth remembering that applying this level of targeting should increase your CTR, which will simultaneously improve your quality score, thereby delivering more highly targeted traffic for a lower bid price.


2. Test on Sample Campaigns First
It’s important to remember that not all the changes you make in an attempt to improve your campaign will be successful. In order to minimise the cost of making these mistakes you should look at conducting sample testing for every change (that carries a risk) you make.

The Adwords campaign functionality has a very simple method for split testing different variants of ad copy (for example) so use it to prove your thinking before rolling your change out over your volume terms. Use it and avoid making any costly mistakes.


3. Maintain Relevance over the Whole Journey.
Having made sure that your ad is highly targeted for the keyword searched; make sure the rest of the journey continues to present a high relevance factor also. There’s nothing less cost effective than taking all the time and effort to get someone to click on one of your ads, only to have them bounce straight back out again because the landing page didn’t reinforce their expectation of what they were hoping to find there.

If your landing page reinforces the context of the original search the visitor immediately feels like they might have found the exact thing they’re looking for, before they’ve got into any detail at all. Maintaining this mindset improves the possibility that they’ll convert greatly.


4. Don’t Always Follow the Crowd.
Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean they’re right. In fact, sometimes the very fact that everyone else is doing one thing can make the opposite of the “established truth” a more effective choice for you, providing you’re the only one offering something different of course.

Always try and differentiate your ad from those around you to maximise your potential click through rates. Ideas like testing discount percentages in a price lead market, offering added value services like free delivery, or even incentives for repeat purchases all have the potential to distinguish you from the crowd. So, dare to be different.


5. Continually Develop New Ideas to Stay Ahead.
You can almost guarantee the perfect ad today will be copied tomorrow. The market moves on, your competition spot what you’re doing well and try to emulate you (if you’re successful at it, that is), and of course the demand for your products changes too.

A classic example of these fluctuating demands and trends in competitive search can be found with the notoriously badly distributed Nintendo WII platform. When the latest title is in stock, the market moves toward price lead offers, when supply is restricted they move to availability.

In the example stated above I’ve often seen price lead campaigns that allow visitors to click through to discover stock that doesn’t exist. Don’t get caught out with poorly maintained campaign management. But don’t just follow the established trend, try and set it by being first to market with emerging supply patterns.


6. Avoid Bad Traffic with Good Negatives
When you’re using a broad match for a term it opens up your campaign to much wider possible search combinations than you’d imagined were available. Initially that’s great, but you’ll start to notice performance suffer unless you start to filter out the rubbish that can drag down your campaign performance.

Negative keywords are a core component of a successful keyword list. Adding a negative keyword to your ad group or campaign means that your ads won't show for search queries containing that term. By filtering out unwanted impressions, negative keywords can help you reach the most appropriate prospects, reduce your cost-per-click (CPC), and increase your ROI.

A standard example of using negatives to filter out unwanted searches from your campaign is making the word “free” a negative, in a scenario where you don’t provide a free or trial version of your product.


7. The Importance of House Keeping.
Your prospective quality score on any given term is influenced to some extent by the overall performance and content of your account. Therefore, if you’ve got an account filled with old, long dead campaigns, stuffed with thousands of redundant keywords, that’s going to reflect poorly on your overall performance.

So keeping your account clean and updated is simply a matter of making it easier to manage (which of course it will) but rather an inherent element of how much you need to pay for traffic. If that doesn’t inspire you to have a spring clean, then nothing will!


8. Not Just Spelling Bee Winners.
Not everyone who uses the web is excellent at spelling. In fact, you might be surprised to learn, there’s a huge number of people out there who are actually pretty bad at spelling. The arena of misspelled words can be like a little pot of gold for your campaigns CTRs as who could find some treasures hidden here.

The competitive index of misspelled words (how many people are also bidding for the term) is often much lower than on the standard version of a word, simply because many people just don’t consider the option to bid on a misspelling. Try typing a term several times quickly to capture some likely typos, remove spaces between words, and tricks like that to get you started.


9. Be Mindful of the Total Cost of Your Ad.
When running a campaign it’s easy to get carried away with the pursuit of top spots, allowing yourself to bid more than you’d wanted to get those elusive sales. However, it’s not just about revenue. Make sure you properly contribute the total cost of running an ad against the sales so you can understand your actual Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of every term you bid on.

You should know how much CPA (or effective marketing cost) you can afford to pay to acquire new business so monitor these numbers carefully and regularly to ensure your campaign is good for your profitability, not just your volume of sales.


10. Optimise, Optimise, Optimise.
When you think you’re done, it’s time to start again. No matter how well you’ve written your ads, how carefully you’ve selected your terms, the market has moved on. If you did it well your competitors have probably copied you, if you did it less well you should be looking for improvement anyway.

Your Adwords campaign needs be constantly tweaked and maintained to achieve optimal performance. For more ideas on how to improve your Adwords campaign, try reading some of my related articles that you’ll find elsewhere in this blog.

And remember, these tips are only designed to get you started on the track to running a successful campaign. Once you’re up and running and have found a few new tricks and tips of your own, feel free to share them with our readers here too.

An Introduction to Quality Score

Unlike other paid search programs, Google Adwords doesn’t allow you to bid directly for a position in the paid search results. Instead Adwords allows you to set a limit on what you’re prepared to pay, and then applies a measure of relevance to your ad before deciding where to return it in the results. As an ad runs and builds a history of usage this position can fluctuate.

This relevance is measured by something called a ‘Quality Score’ for the ad you’re running. The Quality Score is a measure of how relevant Google believe the ad being shown is to the keyword being searched.

Getting a high Quality Score is important because it means the keyword you’re targeting will trigger your ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than competing sites with a lower Quality Score.



How Quality Score Works

The formula for how a quality score is generated changes over time but there are a few cornerstones that appear to remain inherently important. The main factors are:

• The historical click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
  
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group
• The quality of your landing page
  
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query
• Your account's performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown
  

In addition to this, there’s that every present mystery factor that Google, in this instance like to call, “other relevance factors” that is worked into the equation. There is also some variation to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bid.



Improving Your Quality Score

You’ll see from the section on how Quality Score is measured that there’s a fair amount of historical data being considered, so you should expect your Quality Score to improve gradually over time as your optimised campaign begins to take effect.

Outside of that, the main issue here is one of relevance so it’s worth spending some time organising your account structure. This will make it easier to manage while concurrently helping you better target your customers.

Think about creating separate campaigns for each of your product lines, resources, or brands. This helps you control your advertising better and make the necessary adjustments to improve your campaign performance. Ask yourself what each campaign’s objective is, then structure your campaign based on this goal.

The next consideration is targeting who sees your ads. Be sure to target only the languages and locations that are relevant for your business. For example if you only deliver within your own country for a product you’ve created a campaign for, make sure you select this, rather than ‘All Countries’.

Take the time to make your ad groups as specific as possible. Build a list of keywords or placements, then separate them into related ad groups. Create ads that pertain directly to that list. For example, if you sell mp3 players, and you've organised your campaigns by brand, create multiple ad groups based on the models of each brand.

Google shows only one ad per advertiser on a particular keyword, so there's no need to include duplicate keywords in different ad groups or campaigns. Identical keywords compete against each other, and the better-performing keyword triggers your ad.

Structuring your account with this level of attention to detail might seem initially like an onerous task, but once you’ve got over the initial hurdle of putting the structure in place your account will be much easier to manage, and you should start to see your goals more easily realised.­­­­­