Google AdWords is the most popular advertising platform on the web, with well over 3 million users at this point. It’s a powerful tool that becomes even more powerful if you know how to use it effectively.
Unfortunately, it’s also rather complex, which can leave many users lost in a sea of keywords and campaigns. How are smaller businesses and startups supposed to take advantage of it without the time or resources to do so? It’s vital that you incorporate SEO into your business’s website, and AdWords is one way to do that.
AdWords can help you drive traffic to your company’s website, which can lead to increased sales and revenue. It’s not a free tool to use, but the returns you can see by utilizing it can be great. Don’t be missing out!
So, whether you use AdWords already or are considering it, hopefully this article will help. We’ve gathered a list of AdWords tricks, tips, guides and advice and put them all on one handy page for your perusal.
Good luck with your advertising campaigns!
Run multiple campaigns
AdWords does allow this, and it’s a perfect way to test our certain keywords and ad designs. If you only ran a single ad campaign, how would you know if there was a better solution or not? The short answer is that you wouldn’t.
So, run multiple campaigns. Run two, or three. As long as your budget covers it, you’re good. Use different mixtures of keywords and ad placements, and see how the results differ. This will allow you to weed out the bad stuff from the good stuff, and only spend cash on what works.
Make sure you’re tracking those analytics so you can keep a firm grasp on progress. Run each campaign for a week or two each, to give them plenty of time to breathe. If you end them too early you could be diminishing their effectiveness.
Work with an AdWords expert
AdWords is rather complex, even for people who have used it a while. This can result in a lot of mistakes being made, particularly for brand new startups. It’s best to take your time, and seek advice if you aren’t sure about anything.
Because at the end of the day, you’re spending money on this thing. It’s tricky to get a solid ROI with Google AdWords, especially considering how meticulously Google regulates it. You could consider working with a provider like SEO Rank Up, or enlisting the help of someone who can get the most out of the platform.
Keyword research
Once you’re ready to begin bidding on keywords in Google AdWords, you’ll need to choose which keywords are most useful to you. AdWords has a built-in tool for this, so you can quickly see which keyword would be best for you to use in your campaigns.
Of course, this all depends on the field in which your startup operates. Only you will know this, and this is where you should start. Whether you use AdWords or another research tool, you’ll need a generic term which you must plug into the research tool.
This generic term will help the research tool generate keywords related to that term. For example, if you ran a video game website, you could input the generic term ‘PS4’. The tool would then return you a bunch of great keywords relating to PS4.
Once you have the keyword results, only choose a select few. The reason for this is that it’s hard to get your site to rank for dozens and dozens of keywords. If you stick to three or four keywords and phrases, you’ll have an easier time getting your site to rank for those.
Pro-tip: checking keyword effectiveness. How can you tell if the keywords you want to use will prove to be useful or not? With so many choices, which will be the most effective for you? Luckily it’s possible to run a little quick test that won’t be 100 percent accurate, but can give you a solid indication.
Start by entering your keyword into Google, surrounded by double quotes. Like this:
“Digital marketing”
This causes Google to search for that phrase, and that phrase alone. Now, note down the number of web results that search term has. This will be at the very top of the page, directly below the search box.
Simply put, the less search results there are for that term, the less competition you have. This means that you will have an easier time ranking for keywords with less competition. Use this as a rough indication of how to proceed. It’s by no means watertight, though. Just a reference point!
Less time sifting through reports
If you’ve had multiple campaigns running for many months, how do you quickly check which is outperforming the other? Do you have to run back through each campaign and manually check? As you probably guessed, no, you do not!
Instead, use the Top Mover report. As the name implies, this report will identify the causes of the most successful clicks and spends of the last few months. It also shows you if things like click through rate have increased, so you can identify the responsible campaigns.
Test campaigns before you run them
This feature is called AdWords Experiments, and it can help you determine the outcome of changes to your campaigns. All without actually making those changes. The benefits here are that you won’t have to make any changes that may not work. Instead, you can test them in a simulated environment to determine effectiveness.
You can test the effectiveness of different ad styles, or landing pages. You can see whether your clicks increase, or your conversions increase. There’s no risk here, and you’re allowed to test a pretty broad spectrum of features.
In conclusion
Nobody said digital marketing and online marketing was easy, and it’s not. It’s a game that will take a while to finish, and you may not ever be truly done with it. But it’s also an incredibly rewarding game if done right, and that will never change.