10 Tips to Maximize Your Google AdWords Campaign

by Krista Scarlett | Aug 2, 2017

Google AdWords can be a fantastic avenue for online lead generation…

But it can also be a difficult road to navigate if you don’t understand the complexities of the platform. The ability to tweak and change almost everything about your ads, keywords, and budget makes Google AdWords a force in paid digital marketing. With great power comes great responsibility and learning—a lot of learning.

Here are 10 tips to help you maximize your AdWords campaigns. We’ve broken these into two groups, “must do” and “should do,” to prioritize the tasks necessary to creating and maintaining a successful AdWords campaign.

Must Do…

Write Cohesive Content

Ensuring that your ad content, keywords, and landing page content provide a consistent message will give your ads a higher quality score. This is a rating of the quality and relevance of both your keywords and ads and is used to determine your cost per click (CPC). A high quality score will allow your ads to rank better while spending less. Lower quality scores will force you to spend more to be competitive.

Research Relevant Keywords

Discovering relevant and highly-trafficked keywords are one of the most crucial components of a successful ad campaign. Using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool allows you to search for keywords and see the local and global search volumes for each keyword. To prevent you from paddling upstream, every AdWords campaign should begin with a thorough keyword research.

Analyze Your Audience

Like keyword research, performing an audience analysis prior to activating your ad campaign is a necessary step to ensure you’re hitting the mark. To analyze your audience, know the geo location you want your ads to appear, the time of day, and days most important or least important to display your ads.

Nix Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are the Joker to your Batman—they’re your arch enemy. A negative keyword is a keyword that you do not want to rank for but is similar to a keyword you’re bidding on. For example, if you have an ad for running shoes, you want to categorize “dance shoes,” “dress shoes,” or other types of shoes that aren’t running shoes as a negative keyword. Weeding these out is a great way to reduce wasted ad spend. Negative keywords can be found in the keywords section.

Create Enticing Offers

Behind every successful AdWords campaign is a quality offer. One of the core fundamentals of Google AdWords is to provide searchers with a piece of premium content in exchange for their contact information. A quality offer can be an e-book with tips, a how-to guide, exclusive content, etc. To ensure your AdWords campaign is successful in bringing in new leads, offer your visitors something that is worth giving their information for.

Establish Conversion Tracking

A common mistake among beginners is the lack of conversion tracking. This is a snippet of code from Google that goes on the thank-you page that appears after a visitor submits their information through a contact form on your landing page. This code will provide an accurate measure of the number of leads you’re receiving from your ad campaign. The conversion tracking code can be found in the Google Tag Manager.

Should Do…

Create Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are small lines of hyperlinked text that appear just under your ad’s content. Ad extensions can be a link to your contact page, product page, about us page, or other useful pages to entice a searcher to convert into a lead. The ad extensions can be found in the ad extensions section.

Analyze the Search Terms Report

The Search Terms Report is advanced, insightful, and your best friend. This report provides real search queries from actual searches and shows what query strings your ad displayed for and the keyword that triggered it. This report is an excellent way to discover new keywords or negative keywords based on actual user data. This report updates every day, so it’s a good idea to make it a habit to check this report at least once or twice a week. This report can be found in the keywords section.

Review the Auction Insights Report

The Auction Insights Report is a competitor analysis based on the keywords you’re bidding for. This report is a great way to spy on your competition for any keyword you’re bidding on and to understand why you might not be ranking very high or not ranking at all for a given keyword. Like the Search Query Report, it’s a good idea to keep tabs on this report once or twice a week. The Auction Insights Report can be found in the keywords section.

Reach Out to Your Google Representative

When you sign up for Google AdWords, you will always have a dedicated Google representative. If you don’t have one, contact Google today and request one. A Google rep is a fantastic resource when you have questions, have trouble with your AdWords campaign, or just need to chat—they’re super friendly.