Allocate a budget to test your campaign(s)
Running successful Adwords campaigns relies on a substantial amount of testing and optimisation. In the first few weeks of a campaign it can be difficult to find your “groove”. Until you start receiving clicks on your ads, it can be difficult to determine exactly how much each click will cost, and how much traffic to expect. This is why you should allocate a budget and an amount of time specifically to testing. 2 weeks to a month are usually enough to acquire some solid statistics for your ad performance. You should be adjusting bids and adding/removing keywords in this testing phase.
Choose your Network
Google’s Search Network is great for finding people at the later stages of the buying cycle. When someone is searching for red bicycles, you can put your ad for red bicycles right in front of them. This is extremely powerful from a marketing standpoint. Because of the high quality of leads, the Search Network can be very competitive, which makes it more expensive than the Display Network.
The Display Network is good for raising brand awareness and reach, but not so good for finding buyers. The Display Network displays your ads on webpages, rather than in Google’s search engine. Because of this, users see the ad in passing, rather than specifically searching for your product of service. This makes it good for getting your brand name in front of consumers, but not good for finding buyers.
Choose your Bid Strategy
Using Broad keywords will get you the most traffic, but it is also the least targeted. You may find that lots of visitors that reach your website are actually searching for something different. When you use Broad match keywords, your ads will show for search terms that Google feels are relevant, but may not be. It’s very important to keep an eye on your “search query reports”, adding any bad keywords to your negatives list.
Phrase keywords are more targeted, but can also bring irrelevant traffic. Exact match keywords are the most targeted, as traffic will only find your website through keywords you have specified. Typically, traffic volumes will be much smaller when running Exact match only, but the traffic should be very high quality.
The best bid strategy is to use a mix of all three match types. Your highest CPCs should be allocated to Exact match keywords, as they’re worth the most to you. Broad match keywords should have small bids, as the traffic is low quality, but they can be useful for discovering new keywords.
Zest Digital are a Oxfordshire SEO firm that specialise in online marketing for SMEs.