(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)
AdWords rewards advertisers who choose relevant keywords and write compelling ads with good Quality Scores. The better your Quality Scores, the less you’ll need to pay for each click, resulting in more profits for you. This ecosystem evolved to benefit users, Google, and advertisers. If the ads on Google were irrelevant and of poor quality, users would get frustrated and not click on them, and Google would lose revenue. From an advertiser’s perspective, when users click on irrelevant ads, they tend to leave your website, costing you money and not contributing to your bottom line. AdWords was designed to encourage high-quality ads, and as an advertiser you’ll reap many benefits from optimizing them to improve relevance.
First, check your Quality Scores to identify low quality keywords to focus on.
To improve your Quality Scores, follow these 10 tips:
Quality Score is a measure of relevance and is calculated by taking into account the following factors:
Quality Score is dynamic and is calculated every time a search triggers your ad. In order to achieve better Quality Scores, you’ll need to focus on tying together all of the various elements that comprise Quality Score. Increasing relevance helps you achieve a better ad rank and pay less for each click. The Quality Score algorithm is designed to reward relevancy and encourage advertisers to create high-quality accounts, which will in turn help you achieve better ROI with AdWords.
The more general your keywords are, the more difficult it will be to obtain a high Quality Score for them, even after following all of the recommended AdWords best practices. In such cases, you’ll need to weigh if the lower Quality Score is worth the traffic and conversions you get from these keywords. Keep in mind that if you continue to choose low-quality keywords, this will hurt your overall account performance.
Your ad position is going to heavily impact visibility and traffic, with the top-ranked ads receiving the most clicks. Obviously, the more competitive your keywords are, the more costly it will be to have your ads show in the #1 spot. However, there are specific shortand long-term strategies that will help you obtain the best possible ad rank.
First, isolate the keywords that are not ranked optimally:
Quickly diagnose your keywords to figure out if they are showing or are restricted by Quality Scores and bids. On your Keywords tab, click on Keyword details and select Diagnose keywords.
To improve your ad rank, you can:
Increasing your bids is the easy fix short-term solution. However, continuing to increase how much you spend on each click when your ad rank slips is not going to be profitable in the long run.
The long-term strategy to improving ad position is to raise your Quality Scores. To improve Quality Score, start with the following:
Your ad rank determines your ad position, or where your ads show in relation to other advertisers. The ad rank formula consists of your Quality Score and your bid:
Ad Rank = Quality Score x Max CPC
Ad rank is calculated each time your ad enters the ad auction. This means that for each new query your ads could appear in a different position.
The higher your Quality Score, the less you’ll need to bid to maintain your ad rank. This strategy helps AdWords ensure high quality ads on Google.com and encourages advertisers to optimize their accounts.
Keyword match types control who sees your ads and how the keywords you have chosen are expanded to match other relevant queries. Using too many of your keywords in the most restrictive match types can limit your traffic, while using too many broad keywords can generate some or a lot of irrelevant clicks.
Determine which keywords you might want to change match types for. Here are a couple of common edits advertisers make:
To change a single keyword’s match type:
To change match types for multiple keywords:
Changing a keyword’s match type deletes the old keyword and creates a brand new keyword in your account. It also resets a keyword’s history to 0, but performance data will still be available for all deleted keywords.
Many advertisers choose to run AdWords campaigns only during hours when they have customer support available. If you have a limited budget, you might want to focus your ad budgets on days and times your customers are most likely to be looking for you.
Determine if ad scheduling is necessary and appropriate for your business. Advertisers that may benefit from this include businesses that operate primarily during specific hours. For example, a website with customer support available to take calls during business hours only, or a pizza delivery service that only delivers evenings.
Review performance by day and hour of day, keeping in mind that you will see fewer clicks and impressions during less busy times, so you have focus on conversion rates and CPA instead. Some advertisers get great conversion rates during off peak hours, late at night and in the early mornings, when fewer advertisers are competing in the ad auction.
Keep in mind how your customers interact with you. If you rely on calls and only have customer support during specific hours, make sure your ads are focused on when you have the proper support available.
To enable ad scheduling:
Ad scheduling helps you control when your ads appear to potential customers. Ad scheduling is set at the campaign level, which means that it applies to all keywords and ads within a single campaign. By default, AdWords campaigns are set to run all days of the week and all hours of the day.
When you set up ad scheduling, keep in mind your account’s time zone. You can find out your time zone by going to My Account | Preferences. AdWords will also reference your time zone as you create a custom schedule for each campaign. You cannot change your time zone.
Expanding your keywords will be one of your main strategies to increase clicks as well as conversions. Just as markets evolve and search patterns change, your keywords also need to be updated in order not to become stagnant. Here we will discuss several tools you can use to build up and refresh your keyword list.
Review your website and compare your list of products and services to your AdWords account. Are your current keywords covering all of the categories you specialize in? Are there other ways to describe some of your key offerings? Who are your main competitors and are they doing PPC?
To expand your keyword list, try one of the following strategies.
To see automated keyword ideas relevant to your website, follow these steps:
Review your search terms report regularly and add any relevant keywords that resulted in clicks and conversions. Click on Add as keyword recipe after viewing your search terms to add them to your account.
Use websites such as spyfu.com to see what keywords your competitors’ ads are appearing on and to download their keyword lists. Enter a competitor’s URL into the search box to uncover profitable keywords you missed.
You can download a competitor’s full keyword list, sort, and filter it, or export it to an AdWords-friendly format. The tool can even organize a domain’s keywords into targeted ad groups so you have less manual work to do.
In addition to entering your own domain into Google’s keyword tool, try typing in a competitor’s website and see what keywords are being recommended.
Adding new relevant keywords to your AdWords account will help drive more impressions and clicks. With new and unique keywords, you can capitalize on previously untapped opportunities to drive new leads and sales.
I remember deciding to pursue my first IT certification, the CompTIA A+. I had signed…
Key takeaways The transformer architecture has proved to be revolutionary in outperforming the classical RNN…
Once we learn how to deploy an Ubuntu server, how to manage users, and how…
Key-takeaways: Clean code isn’t just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects; it's a necessity. If we…
While developing a web application, or setting dynamic pages and meta tags we need to deal with…
Software architecture is one of the most discussed topics in the software industry today, and…