How to Succeed With Google AdWords Campaign Management

Many different types of businesses can benefit from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Although many people assume that only transactional eCommerce websites use this kind of marketing activity, it’s a good way of increasing brand awareness and driving traffic even for predominantly offline businesses. With the correct strategy, it’s possible to grow your customer base and increase profits, no matter your niche. Part of a successful strategy often lies in applying the right Google AdWords campaign management, as this will be the primary channel that most companies use for their PPC activity. However, knowing what the ‘right’ way to manage your AdWords campaigns isn’t always easy.

Although there are some basics you first need to get right, there are many intricacies that need to be attended to. Your primary goal is to maximize your return on investment (ROI). Hopefully the money that you put into PPC advertising will be returned to you in increased sales and customers. There are many factors that impact your ROI however. In this article we share our top tips for running a successful campaign, and explain why TEA Software can help.

Google AdWords Campaign Management: Basics

As we mentioned in our introduction, there are some basics of running a Google AdWords campaign that you need to know. Whether you’re running the activity yourself, or having an agency do it for you, it’s good to know these details. We’ve outlined the simple structure of how successful PPC activity works, below:

Research

The first steps to be taken involve researching the keywords you want to target. There are many ways you can approach this, but start with brainstorming the words and phrases that best describe your company and what you do. From here, you can use keyword research tools to get related suggestions and information on how completive the keywords are.

Grouping

Keywords need to be grouped into related categories so that you can create coherence in your advertising. It’s important that your groups are relevant and structured, as we’ll see further on.

Placing Bids

You should be able to see how competitive your keywords are, and you should have a budget in mind of how much you want to spend. With this in mind, you can place how much your bids are, how long you want them to run for, and your maximum overall budget.

Writing Ad Content

For each keyword or group of keywords, you’ll need to create some compelling and relevant ad copy. This is an art unto itself, and the text really needs to encourage users who view your ad to click on it.

Creating Landing Pages

Your compelling copy should link through to an interesting, engaging, and relevant landing page. This should encourage users to interact with your site further, and should have some high-quality content on it.

Launching

Once you have all the elements we’ve mentioned above, it’s time for your activity to go live. You can then start to collect data on performance.

Analyzing

Perhaps the most important part of your PPC activity is analyzing how your campaigns are performing. This needs to be done on a regular basis, and you need to take actions to maximize your ROI frequently.

Google AdWords Campaign Management: Top Tips

Your AdWords account’s Quality Score is one of the most important factors that determines how effective your PPC activity can be. Quality Score is a combination of various different factors. It is Google’s way of rewarding companies that produce high-quality, relevant content surrounding their ads. This means that the quality of your ad copy and landing pages, as well as the relevancy of your grouped keywords, can impact how much the cost per click (CPC) of you adverts will be. Below are our top tips for maximizing this score, and creating the best possible pay-per-click ads:

Target Your Ads

It’s sometimes hard to determine what your customers and potential customers are searching for. Running a PPC campaign can definitely help you understand this better, but you should ideally have some insight before you start. You’ll want to not only target your customers based on segments and their search habits, but also keep in mind factors such as geographic location, device, and time of day. A scattershot approach rarely works, so use both customer knowledge and your intuition to better target your PPC ads.

Craft Your Content

We mentioned this above, but the quality of your content is really important. Search engines such as Google are constantly improving their algorithms to provide customers with the most relevant information. Paying for ad space and having bad content to back it up is counterintuitive. Ensure that you take the time to create something meaningful, emotive, and relevant. This applies to both the ad copy and the landing pages the ads click through to. Customers are often searching for a result that answers a question or solves a problem. Make sure that your advert and website do one or both of these.

Structure Your Campaigns

Another point we briefly touched upon was grouping your keywords together. Doing so in a logical and relevant way will help to improve your Quality Score. However, the organizational structure should go deeper than this. Your AdWords account should be separated out into different campaigns. Each campaign should have different ad groups within it, and each ad group should have ad text and landing pages to support it. This hierarchical structure not only makes it easier to track your activity, it can help boost your Quality Score and reduce your CPC.

Test Your New Campaigns

Even with the most detailed research and organization, it can be hard to tell how successful your ad campaigns will be. It’s therefore prudent to test the waters at first. If you get a lot of traffic to certain ads, you may end up spending your budget within a few days or even hours, without achieving any traffic that converts. To avoid this, set your initial daily budget lower than your actual daily budget when you first launch. This allows you time to see what’s working and what isn’t. You can then adjust as necessary.

Analyze and Track Your Activity

The most valuable piece of advice we can give is to use analytics to assess how well your ads are performing. This should be a daily task at minimum. Knowing how customers are interacting with your ads, what kind of traffic is coming through, and whether it’s converting is essential to maximizing your ROI. One of the biggest issues with PPC advertising is clickfraud, where non-converting traffic is purposefully sent through your ads. This costs you money and brings no benefits. Having a good analytics setup can identify and eliminate this threat.

Use Negative Keywords

It’s sometimes hard to determine what kind of search results will incorporate your keywords and thus trigger your ad. Quite often unrelated searchers will see your ads and this benefits neither the customer nor your business. In order to avoid this, make use of negative keywords in your AdWords account. This is basically an exclusion list that will make sure your ad doesn’t show on specified, unrelated terms.

Google AdWords Campaign Management: Choose TEA Software

Hopefully you’re now familiar with some of the aspects that you need to consider in relation to your Google AdWords campaign management. We’re convinced that our own TEA Software can provide a useful PPC solution for any business. Our extensive knowledge and advanced tools can help you monitor, adjust, automate, and make the most of your AdWords activity. Here are some of the main benefits of using TEA:

Automated Bid Management for AdWords

TEA’s automated bid management features can outmaneuver Google’s own automated service. Unlike the 18-hour turnaround time of AdWords adjustments, TEA can predict future sales conversions thanks to real-time visitor engagement. This is far faster than Google’s own service, and means that you can get ahead of your competitors when it comes to buying ad traffic.

Advanced Clickfraud Analytics

We mentioned above how clickfraud can wreak havoc on your Google AdWords campaign management. The illegitimate traffic can cost you money without you even knowing it. TEA will identify suspicious traffic and give a unique threat rating to customers. It can then exclude this traffic and generate a report to send to Google, allowing you to claim back money that was spent on this activity.

Engagement Trends Analysis

One of the most exciting features of TEA is the ability for it to identify trends amongst your customers. It will uncover any obstacles to conversions and identify the areas where your customers are exiting the site. Not only does this give you actionable suggestions to improve sales, it gives you an accurate assessment of your true conversion rate.

Your Partner, Not Just Your Vendor

We want to work closely with you and your business to help you make the most of your Google AdWords campaign management. Our personal approach and commitment to success are just two of the reasons that companies such as Shopping Cart Elite choose TEA for their analytics software. We hope you choose us too, and look forward to hearing from you.