It’s a pretty safe bet that if you are planning on doing any pay per click (PPC) advertising, you’ll be using Google Adwords. Not only is it the biggest PPC program available, it’s also the most effective. Or should I say, it can be the most effective if you pay attention to the basics when running a campaign. The following 6 tips will go a long way in helping you run a smooth and effective Adwords campaign.
1. Stay away from broad matching
At least when you are just starting out. Let’s say you have the keyword ice cream in your keyword list. If you choose “broad match”, your ad could appear for anytime someone searches for either “ice” or “cream”. Your ad could be seen a whole lot more, but it would be very targeted. You may get people looking to have ice delivered to their business or someone looking for a special kind of cream, which would have nothing to do with the term ice cream.
2. Use Dynamic Titles
By using this feature, {keyword:additional title here} will help you gain very targeted traffic because the exact phrase that someone searches for will show up as the actual title of your ad. This doesn’t cost anything extra, so it really makes a lot of sense to employ it.
3. Use Global Negatives
This will help help narrow searches. If you were to use free as a negative search word, your ad won’t appear whenever someone has the word “free” in their search term. Free is only one word you can do this with. You may have other terms in your business that you can think of that you’d wan to use as well. Build a list and use it anytime you use a campaign and you’ll save money and have a more effective campaign.
4. Avoid Content Targeting & Search Network
These are features you’ll likely use at some point down the road, but until you have a complete understanding of how Adwords works, I’d recommend staying away from them. This is also true of any of the other advanced features Adwords has to offer.
5. Different Positioning
Don’t fall into the trap of relying on default positioning for your ads. Be sure to try different positions for various keywords and your ads. You’ve got to know where you ads are going to work the best for you. Of course the only way you are going to be able to do this is to play around with your bidding to move up higher and lower to see what spot gives you the most bang for your buck.
Play around with different ads as well. Rewriting your ad copy several times is a great way to test out various versions of your ads – not only to see which generate the most clicks, but more importantly – the highest ROI.
6. Optimize Landing Pages
Be sure that your landing pages are optimized for the keywords you have in your keyword list. This may sound obvious, but many don’t do this, wasting valuable advertising dollars. For example, if you are selling photographs on your site, you should have separate landing pages for “flowers”, with another for “landscapes”, with another for “sports”.
You want to stay away from using your home page as a landing page because you want to take your visitor directly to the page for the keyword they were searching on. You’re ROI will be substantially higher when you do this, believe me.
Take the time to follow these six steps, because if you do, there is little doubt that you’ll run a far more effective and a far more profitable Adwords campaign.
