4 AdWords Do’s & Don’ts to be Awesome!

Want to improve your AdWords campaigns? Try these 4 tips.

1 – Test, Test, and Test Again

Test everything from keyword bids, to landing pages, to beneficial calls to action. Test and measure. The information that you can derive from testing activities is priceless in that you can learn a lot about user behaviors on landing pages and intent behind searches.

AdWords data is almost real time. It allows you to see quickly how effective or horrible your ads and bids are, and if you need to make quick changes or let it ride to gather more data.

2 – Utilize Remarketing 

Attract visitors back to your site through retargeting ads. This is a great way to re-engage previous visitors ho might have been on the fence and needed a little bit of a push to decide that you are awesome.

3 – Conversion Tracking is a Must

Conversion tracking is essential. Without it, you are wasting money and driving traffic towards a site that you have no idea if it is good or not.

Conversion tracking helps you see what your return on investment or ROI is for each AdWords ads and keywords, and how much it costs to get a lead or sale for your business.

4 – Focus a lot of Time on Landing Pages

Design your landing pages to look professional with clear headlines and calls to action as well as simple colors and easy funnel submissions. Unbounce has a killer landing page optimization program. Check out Unbounce.

AdWords Don’ts

1 – End split tests before statistical validity

“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

Sherlock Holmes

-The Adventure of Copper Beeches

Ending split tests on time is critical. Don’t make the mistake and shoot yourself in the foot and pause a keyword or ad before it has reached statistical validity. Remember to consider holidays and various times of the day before you make any drastic changes to anything.

2 – Bid on singular keywords like car or boy

This is more of a be careful situation. Obviously if your brand name is a single keyword you want to bid on it. The best way to run single keywords is to make sure you have significant campaign and ad group negative lists in order to make it so you don’t blow all your budget on less qualified traffic.

3 – Use Default Settings

AdWords is a great platform to use to test ideas, gather information and promote your brand. However Google doesn’t always have the business owner or advertisers best interest in mind.

Check out John Thuet’s post about Ad Rotation Settings to see an example of making the right decisions in the beginning.

4 – Put all your keywords in 1 ad group

Don’t put all your keywords in one adgroup. Google makes this really easy when you set up a campaign in the AdWords interface directly. Create ad groups using the 1 to 1 to 1 approach we have spoken about before.

By utilizing this approach you will see an increased quality score and a higher click through rate even more than other ad grouping methods. An increased quality score and click through rate improves positions and lowers costs per click, and thus lower CPA and better ROI.

These simple yet effective AdWords do’s and don’ts will help save money, make your campaigns more effective and help you win in Google AdWords.