Some would say if you’re just now
looking to best practices for 2015, then you’re behind the trend and behind
your competition. However, it’s better late than never. Who knows? Maybe your
competitors are just as busy as you and haven’t found time to get up to speed
with online marketing. I run into it all the time. Here is your chance to make
a New Year’s Resolution and get even better with Google AdWords. So what are
the best practices for Google AdWords in 2015? Let’s dig into it.
What Should I Spend?
How successful do you want to be? Have
you heard the phrase – you get more of what you focus on? The amount of money
you are willing to invest in your AdWords campaign is a key factor of what you
can expect to receive. I am going out on a limb here and will say that any
campaign that is under $100 per day is a waste of effort. I’ve seen people
start campaigns on $20 – even $50 per day and not get sufficient clicks to
provide actionable data or conversions. With small budgets, one can quickly see
their ROI decrease. In addition, of course, if you aren’t getting the results
you think that you should be getting, who do you blame? It’s not the cheapskate
who wanted to get big returns from a small budget. Having a small budget can be
like having a beautiful Ferrari F4 and giving it only a quarter tank of gas.
You won’t go very far.
How Do I Build a
Campaign?
Each campaign should
have it’s own budget. When do you create a new campaign? A good rule of thumb
is to separate AdWords campaigns by geography. If you have different cities or
even states where you are promoting different local branches or retail outlets,
etc. it makes sense to differentiate ads campaigns between each store. You will
also want to have a separate search only campaign and a display only campaign
and if you want to perform re-marketing, then you guessed it; you will want a
separate campaign for that as well. The reason for the separate campaigns is that
each of these types of marketing behave differently.
How do I Build an Ad
group?
If you haven’t figured
this out yet, Google rewards relevant content. A best practice is to create Ad
groups with tightly themed subjects just as if you would organize your brick
and mortar store. So for example: a campaign would be Shoes and the ad groups
would be men’s shoes, women shoes, children shoes, etc. Assess the spend of
each individual ad group within each campaign. Within each Ad group have at
least 3 ads; one using dynamic keyword insertion, another using a question and
all of them using at least one keyword from your keyword list and with a strong
call to action, other than call now or click here. These calls to action are
too obvious and Google doesn’t like it and thus penalized advertisers who use
these.
Get Dynamic
In September of 2014,
AdWords launched the most impactful update for e-commerce advertisers since the
release of Dynamic Remarketing. This update was the release of ad customizers,
which allow advertisers to add dynamic content to their text ads. This dynamic
content can be anything from inventory or price to a countdown until a specific
event. This works very well if you have thousands of products that constantly
change. Give Google a data feed of all your product information and set bids
based upon information contained within that feed. With dynamic search ads,
Google grabs the information it needs from your site and you target audiences
based upon that information. Much like with Google Shopping, make sure you
begin with an ad group targeting “All web pages” and set your bids low here. A
low bid is important because it stops DSAs from stealing traffic from existing
search campaigns (something you really want to avoid). The last thing you want
to do is compete against your own ads. Naturally, it also makes sense to take
every opportunity to use ad extensions such as call, call out, location,
social, and review and site extensions. These give your ads more creativity and
differentiate your ads from the sea of sameness seen on the SERPs
Get Shopping Campaigns
If you have products to
sell, you NEED to take full advantage of Shopping Campaigns, formerly known as
Product Listing Ads (PLA). These ads can outperform text search ads because
they show the image of the exact product a shopper is looking for at the time
they are ready to buy. Simply create a data feed with every piece of product
information to display with the product listing including a good quality image
so shoppers see exactly what they will be buying. This is still an underutilized
Google product and can make a positive impact for your overall campaigns in
2015..
Managing Keywords
I’ve written about
keywords in another article so I won’t go into as much detail here. As you
develop your keywords and keep them tightly related to the ad groups you will
quickly determine which terms are generating clicks and converting visitors to
customers. As your campaign accumulates data, you will zero in on the keywords
driving the strongest ROAS, or, Return on Ad Spend. Using the keyword reports,
you will be able to identify and expand upon these top performing keywords with
like-terms. At the same time, you will pause or delete keywords that are under
performing. You will also determine which keywords are driving traffic, which
are irrelevant and need to be added to the negative keyword list.
Since Google got rid of
exact match types in 2014, you no longer need to build exhaustive lists of
plurals and misspellings. AdWords now performs that with broad match
automatically. Google points out that “close keyword variations receive an
average of 7 percent more exact and phrase match clicks with comparable
click-through and conversion rates.”
What about Bid
Management?
Closely linked to your
spend are your ad and keyword bids. Naturally, you want to have your ad show
within the first 3 ad placements available, on average. Ads showing up in the
#4 spot or lower is a strong signal that the ads need to be changed or the bid
needs to be increased. You can tell by looking at the 1st page suggested bid
column. If your ads or keywords are under performing due to constrained budget,
Google will show that in the status column. I like to be in
the 1 – 2 spot and bid
accordingly. You can manage bids with the ads as well as keywords.
You can also add bid
modifiers for location and device. You can increase the bids by a certain
amount and Google will use that bid for the auction. This is helpful to win
placements for searches on mobile devices or for users close to your store and
bring them in to buy. You can also decrease bids in the same fashion. Let’s say
you want to decrease bids as people are further from your store so the ads only
show for relevant audiences within a certain radius from your location, you
would place a location bid modifier on the ad.
At the end
Always Be Testing.
Marketing is about continuous testing. Give a campaign at least 3 months before
calling it a failure. Create a campaign with at least 3 ad groups and 3 ads per
ad group and 7-8 keywords per ad group. This allows you to manage the campaign
and test the separate components such as the headline and description lines as
well as the keywords. Start small with changing one item at a time and tweaking
as needed. These are the best practices (As I see it) for getting even better
results with AdWords for 2015. If you disagree, I’d love to read your comments
below. . I hope you enjoyed the topic.
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