49 Tips on Adwords

September 22, 2007

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Those tips on adwords have been re-collected from forums/sites, as well as my own experience. If you have new ones, please share it with us and let’s create the best adwords tips on the net without buying those useless e-books.

Note/Advice: Some people will not agree with those tips, If you are one of them please comment and say which tips you don’t agree and why.

32 Useful AdWords Tips for Intermediate to Experienced Users: This have been posted by seostew At digital forum. Please note that the copyright goes to this guy. I did not found any site that he is promoting so I can give a backlink to him.

• 1. I would say, be very patient and be ready to lose money before making some. The point is, even with the best techniques, you need to lose some to win some.

• 2. Ignore what everyone else is doing - bid the amount that makes YOU the most money, whether that puts you 1st, 5th or 55th

• 3. Narrowly focused ad groups, each one a variation of a single keyword.

• 4. Go for misspelled keywords and keywords written as one (i.e cheaphotels instead of cheap hotels). There is lots of traffic for these type of keywords at only a fraction of the cost.

• 5. Pick keywords that don’t cost more than they are making you! Track your clicks very carefully and ad groups as much as possible.

• 6. Always track keyword conversion, and split-test both your ads and your landing pages.

• 7. Highly specific long tail keywords, divided into very tightly focused ad groups.

• 8. Extreme relevance between keywords, ad text and landing page content (This works if you are an affiliate marketer).

• 9. High quality landing page with loads of content, bearing links to and from sites which rank high for the keywords in organic search results.

• 10. Continual experimentation for optimization - even if killer results are already being observed.

• 11. Use dynamic ads: they help increase the CTR considerably, thereby bringing down the cost.

• 12. Trial and error to see what makes most money for price paid is always best.

• 13. I would say to make sure you get inside your customers heads.

  for example…

  There are a few types of visitors…

  The browser. The buyer. The person who wants freebies.

  The browser is interested in something to do with a particular product, but isn’t sure if they want to buy. The buyer is searching on laser targeted keywords, usually keywords with the brand name in them and the guy who wants freebies is the kind of jerk that looks for anything that is free (or in marketing, buy through his own affiliate link).

  Let’s take the example ‘Dog Training Guides’. Many affiliate marketers bid on that term, but I don’t. Why? Because visitors are likely to type that into a search engine, come to a review site with the ClickBank product ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ ranked #1. Afterwards, the visitor types in ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ into Google and ends up purchasing from one of the sites that appears for that term. So basically, the site advertising on the keyword ‘Dog Training Guides’ has practically given a sale to the guy promoting ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ under the term ‘Sit Stay Fetch’.

  Here’s a few things you should know…

  IF YOU ARE NOT MAKING SALES
  If you are not making any sales at all then you do not have a crowd that is hungry enough. OR, you are presenting a hungry crowd the wrong product. So in the end they don’t buy from you.
  IF YOU ARE MAKING SALES BUT NOT PROFIT
  If you are making sales but not profit then the vendor’s product is decent but they may not be giving you enough commission. OR, you simply just need to delete your non converting keywords.
  IF YOU ARE MAKING INCONSISTENT SALES
  This is very common with Marketing products where the market is fickle. You need to find out where your traffic is coming from.

• 14. The one thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet (and maybe because I am in a local service industry, not a national retail site) is use lots of negative keywords to keep away non-customers and drive up your CTR.

  I’m a psychotherapist, and use negative keywords like “free” “book” “association” to keep people who wouldn’t be interested in my ad, or who I wouldn’t want to spend my $2-$3 coming to my site.

• 15. Although it is somewhat tedious, I find that having very specific campaigns is more effective than blanket adgroups.

  For example, if you have following products:

  a) Product X Basic
  b) Product X Small Business
  c) Product X Enterprise

  I would have 4 ad campaigns. One for blanketing searches on variation of “Product X”. Other 3 groups would be tailored to the specific products. The ad text should be tailored to fit the campaign so it reinforces what people are searching. Helps grab their attention when there are so many other competition ads.

• 16. I suggest go for a key phrase thats a moderate one. Like if there are 10000 searches for the main key phrase. You go for the one that has abt 3000 searches.. and you’ll get real traffic with lesser investment

• 17. dynamic keyword insertion:
  I have a few ads running with it still, seems to be fine for me. Remember that if the keyword phrase is to long it’s going to use the default phase you use when creating the keyword insertion.

  Also, if you’ve set up the position preference for the top 1-3 placements you may not be seeing the ad because it’s still needs approval.

  When running with the position preference The best the ad can do is show on the right hand side. If the keyword phase in question shows AdWords ads in the blue above the search results those placements will be considered 1,2, and 3, leaving the right hand side to start at 4. This means your ad will never show until it’s be approved because you have it set to only show if it’s in the top 3 and google won’t let the ad show in that keyword phases top 3.

  Not sure if that helps any.

• 18. Best Way to Lower CPC? The easiest ways:
  With adwords, is simple.You must bid high on the beginning, like for the top or second position.
  This way you will get more clicks (although more expensive) but you will rank better on relevancy, and quality score.

  After just a few days you will check that the minimum bid needed for a specific keyword had been lowered. For instance, let’s say you advertise on the keyword youtube. You would want to deactivate content network ads this time…

  Now let’s say that the youtube keyword minimum bid is 1 dollar. The guy on the top position is biding about $ 1.5
  You shall bid 1.55 (leave some cents margin) for let’s say, 3 or 4 days. At the end of day 3-4 you will see that the minimum bid have dropped to 80 cents. You can now lower your bid to 1.45 and still be in the top position due to quality score.

  the whole process repeats itself until the minimum bid for that keyword reaches 20 cents. This way, you can bid 35 cents for that keyword, and still be on the top position, while the other guy is biding 1.50 and in the second place.

  I’ve tested this way several times, with all keywords. Working the quality score is very important. Use smaller groups of keywords and ads and monitor closely. Remove keywords and put them into different ad groups if they do not perform to get the good ad groups well positioned. Bid higher initially to get a ‘forced higher CTR%’. Then gradually lower your bids and hope that your position maintains. But this might take weeks to slowly lower it till you’re paying real low bids & still getting good positions.

  One trick is really to tweak your Adcopy to make it look interesting. There have been documented examples, that between a well-written ad vs a unique ad, usually the unique ad wins. (not across all markets!)

  Eg:

  Auto Loan Quotes
  Get Your Auto Loan Quotes Here.
  Fast. Free. Instant Approval.
  www.yourdomain.com

  v.s.

  Auto Loan Quotes
  .
  Free Quotes - Get Them Here.
  www.yourdomain.com

  This is just an example of how ‘white space’ can be used, and I have seen people with CTR in excess of 10% for ads like this. But if you’re focusing on conversions rather then CTR%, then forget this altogether as they are probably not pre-qualified traffic.

Improving CTR & Conversions

• 19.) Use the core/parent adgroup keyword three times in the ad text and display URL.

• 20.) Bid on all three match types for every keyword/keyphrase: broad, phrase, and exact. (This will get you more clicks for your money).

• 21.) Bid higher on terms that have been converting well.

• 22.) If continual ad performance improvement is one of your goals, on campaign settings, change Ad Serving to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly” from the default “Optimize: Show better performing ads more often. Then A/B split test your ads.

• 23.) Sign up for LowerYourBidPrice’s Winner Alert’s, letting you know which ad wins statistically without having to manually check every adgroup all day long.

• 24.) Use a relevant call to action in your ads (Avoid clichés such as “Click here.” which won’t be approved by Google anyway).

• 25.) Here are 13 calls to action verbiage ideas: Browse our store, Submit Your RFP (RFI), See our client list, Free Shipping, Order today, ship tonight. Download our brochure, Free Consultation, Free demo, Free quote, Free Report, Start now, Call 24/7.

• 26.) Make ad display URLs more relevant by adding a slash /keyword. Example Keyword: Red Shoes. www.companyname/redshoes.

• 27.) Make separate ad groups for keyword plurals for better bolding (note YSM bolds plurals in ads, Google does not, unless keyword is plural and keyword in ad is plural).

• 28.) Use prices in ads if:
  -Lower than competition
  -Competitors are not using prices.
  -You are selling highly competitive commodity item in which people shop on price.

  *May reduce CTR, but improve conversion rate by weeding out a certain percentage of non-buyers.

• 29.) Use specifics in ads: Percentages, names, product specs. Examples: Raise profits by 25%. Cut margins by 20%. Decrease skin oil by 10%.

• 30.) Use quotes & third party endorsements when factual and can be verified by Google. Ebert “Best movie 2007.” Oprah “My top five book.”

• 31.) From time to time use hyphens instead of commas as a slightly less common, and possibly more attention grabbing grammar tool.

• 32.) Use the words New and Free when true and appropriate.

Account Efficiency Techniques and Time Savers

• 33.) Download the AdWords Editor to copy and paste campaigns and adgroups easily (a must before doing #16)

• 34.) Separate & duplicate all campaigns and use one for Google + search partners and the other for the content network so you can see how each is doing from quick bird’s eye view without having to drill into each campaign.

• 35.) Clean out account of keywords with zero impressions after two months.

• 36.) Cross channel all other ppc platforms in order to see clicks and conversions from Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Miva, Business.com, etc, all from your AdWords interface.

• 37.) Download account info into a csv using the AdWords Editor and send it to Yahoo! and MSN so they can bulk upload it. Do this after thoroughly optimizing the account, so your other ppc platforms mirror the same structure and keywords as your efficient AdWords account.

  **Yahoo! is doing this for free just for a limited time because of the platform change. They will accept bulk uploads regularly if you spend 6k a month for three months. MSN only offers you one chance to do this. Give them a call and get the details.

Optimizing & Cutting Untargeted/Wasted Clicks

• 38.) Incorporate account wide and adgroup negative keywords by studying raw query strings which trigger your ads and eliminating non-relevant terms.

Increase Targeted Local Traffic

• 39.) For every campaign, duplicate it. Have one campaign that is manually geo-targeted for generic key terms/phrases and the other campaign for the same terms but with city and/or state added to the beginning or end. Example, one campaign has an adgroup for the key phrase Contract lawyer dallas which shows to all of US, another campaign adgroup had the generic key term contract lawyer, but will only show in Dallas.

• 40.) On the city/state stemmed keyword campaigns and adroups, use the state or city terms in the ad description text for more bolding and higher CTR.

Decreasing Cost Per Click

• 41.) If working with a larger budget, and you plan on constantly improving your ads, bid high to be #1 long enough to allow quality score to continually decrease your cpc.

• 42.) Enable content bids and bid separately for the content network. Typically start ½ - 2/3 lower and bid higher according to conversion rate.

Ad Space Savers

• 43.) Instead of using the word “and” use an ampersand (&). It takes up two less characters and gives you more room to sell.

• 44.) Use certain understood and acceptable abbreviations to save space.

  Using AdWords As Market Research for SEO

• 45.) In the Reports tab, run a keyword report and look at high search impressions (not content targeting) on exact matches. Check for organic competition under those, and put your organic SEO efforts toward those keywords for even more clicks and conversions.

• 46.) Use a savvy analytics supplement to GA and study the raw query strings (GA does not show without special scripts and/or filters) that triggered your Google ads. Use the relevant buffering terms for added SEO as well as specific and relevant keywords for new ads.

• 47.) Keep ads running even when high on organic search for specific keywords. Having an organic listing and an ad has a 1 + 1 = 3 reinforcing each other and increasing the likelihood at least one will be clicked.

  Miscellaneous No Brainers

• 48.) Set up at least two conversion codes. This is a no brainier and belongs on a beginner’s list. If you don’t do this, you are flying blind or basing results on the “gut feeling” email leads and incoming calls are coming from ads and web presence.

• 49.) Apply for pay-per-action and use it. Bid according to how much you are currently paying for leads. If you don’t know that, run a keyword report and find out how much you have to spend before a click turns into a lead. This should be simple if you have your conversion codes set up.

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