Optimize Your Campaigns With A Google Adwords Strategy

Google AdWords is a powerful tool to speak out your brand to the public, it also has a lot of features that help you to measure your advertising trip, how far is it going and how to improve it effectively. It is important to what this channel is capable of and how one can make use of it. This article for a Webinar by Ankit Agarwal on Google Adwords will show you how to make ad words work for you.

Yes, you might find an agency or a Google representative who will help you out and give you advice on how you need to optimise campaigns and how you essentially need to have an AdWords strategy. However, always remember that their concern at the end of the day is to make more money and sometimes their decisions will be based on how to make you spend more money. That’s why you have to be aware of at least the basics of Google Ad Words and how to make it work for your certain objectives.

It is not Magic:

Paid Search in ad tech is an effective channel and it performs phenomenally well when it comes to driving traffic to your website and helps to achieve your KPIs (Key Performance Indicator). However, IT IS NOT MAGIC. It will not move the needle towards profitability unless you well plan Your Own KPIs and Marketing Objectives that suit your business. In terms of CTR, CPC or CPA  to measure your sales and know that patience is a key.

For example, CPA (Cost per Acquisition/ lead ) as a KPI sounds great, but does it suit your business? If you are an e-commerce business, you don’t care about CPA, what you care about is revenue and ROI (Return On Investment)

Change your KPIs

Sometimes marketers put a KPI and don’t care to change it through the year. Logically it is not the right decision. Think about it as a baby. You cannot talk to your baby in the same way or give it the same advice as It grows.  Same for your company. It is growing and every time it is passing by a different stage which will have different KPIs and Objectives. Let’s see an example of how KPIs differ from one stage to another in the company’s lifetime.

• If you are a startup who just started on Google AdWords, your KPIs are essentially CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) but as time passes, you can see that you have a good number of leads in hand and now you want them to transact on the platform so the KPIs have to change.

For a start, you can measure on CPC or Traffic that your website receives but after better results you need to shift your KPIs.

Too many are bad as too little:

Yes, we have to measure many KPIs, because the more we measure, the better understanding we get. However, too many of something is bad as too little, as you might end up to optimising conflicting KPIs.

Example:

• If you want to optimise CPA, don’t expect to optimise CPC. Because as long as I can get a 100 dollar CPA I should not be concerned about what CPC is because I could be paying 15 dollars per click but as long as it gets me the target of CPA I should not be worried about CPC.
• If you want to optimise ROI, don’t optimise CPA because as long as you are hitting your ROI goal CPA will come under control and you should not be worried about it.

Being aware of your business goals will save you so much hassle and will put the right KPIs in place.

Consistent actions create consistent results:

• Pull reports, track metrics and changes.
• Recheck results to your KPIs consistently every 2-3 weeks to make sure that you are moving in the right direction.

How to build a great Google Adword search campaign?

• First: Account structure:

Because you sometimes want to go out very fast ‘Account Structure’ does not get the priority it should get, but the reality is that it is one of the most critical aspects of driving success out of ad words.

A recommended Rule of Thumb:

Mirror your site navigation (or the breadcrumbs that you have)

To explain it better, let’s take an example of an e-commerce store that sells electronics these electronics are in the Cameras category, the Cameras are Digital Canon Cameras. So the recommended trick here is to put it clear for yourself on your google account to be able to measure it clearly and easily.

In another form, we have Electronic as my account, then we have  > Camera > digital cameras >  Canon.

You have to have a clear understanding on how you want your account to look like by thinking from a consumer perspective and from a site structure perspective because this will also determine which landing page will you end up using.

• Second Keywords Bidding:

There are 4 types of terms which we can use as Keywords.

Moon Shot terms:

They are not directly related to what you are trying to sell but they are closely related.

Ex: KFC wants to build account structure that has campaigns with bid keywords like Tandoori Chicken

These terms might not be ROI profitable for KFC because they are far off from a consumer's intent but they are relevant if you are trying to establish yourself in the category and you are trying to build that association so that it comes on the top of a customer’s mind.

Competitions terms:

Go after the competition terms. This happens when you find yourself facing a high competition with different strong competitors. Bid on your competitors' terms.

Bid on: KFC competition terms could be Domino's Pizza and burger king

Category terms:

Which becomes more and more relevant. The volume opportunity will start reducing as you go down in the funnel but the conversion probability will increase. That’s why you have to balance your Adwords performance.

Ex - Here are our offers and products so you bid on words like Zinger Fried Chicken

Brand Name:

You may wonder, if someone is searching for my Brand Name then they are aware and they will probably convert into a customer. Why should I spend money on Bidding my Brand’s name?

The answer is:
1- If you don’t bid on your Brand’s Name, your competitors will bid on their Brand’s Name
2- They are cheapest CPC and they convert the best

• Third: Keyword Theming

It is critical, but it is not only about selecting the keyword. It is also about :

• Each Ad Group should have relevant Keywords. Ex: If someone is looking for KFC online or KFC delivery, the search keywords should all abide by this direction. On the other hand, if they are looking for KFC store then it is a different theme, they are looking for places to hang out or go to eat in.
• Max keywords in an Ad Group or theme would be 20-30 keyword. If it goes more than 40 it shows that you clearly lost the theme of the Ad group.
• Start Small: It is not a must that you should know all the keywords you can bid on, you can expand as time passes. 

Match Types:

• Match Types mean how broad you want to match these keywords with the user suggestions/ search ex, Exact Matches, Broad Matches, Phrase Matches and it is very important to understand how to adjust your match types on a campaign level and the bidding part of the match

Ways to set up match types:

• You can create one campaign and then have an ad group with various match types.So we can have Campaign X with Various Match Types and Same Keyword.
• Match types at campaign level: it is the better option and it is because you can not control budget in an ad group level, you can only control budget on a campaign level. If you have the one campaign with a broad keyword or phrase, it takes all the clicks and you have no money left for your exact phrase.
  On the other hand, the match types at a campaign level you can say my broad phrase should spend 30 dollars while my exact should spend 50 dollars (that will be more beneficial and will convert faster) It requires more effort but it is worth it.

Another angle that we have to look for the match types

• The exact match keyword has to have the highest bidding budget and it is called cascading bid. It will have the highest intent because this is what you exactly want your user to go through and it has the most likely hood of conversion. The challenge of broad bid or match could be that they will show for relevant searches with more money spent.

Ad copy: Simple but Relevant

Don’t be overwhelmed by adhering to your brand name or brand communication. Sticking to your brand name is not always important, people do not want your brand name. They want a value or a solution that you promise.

Example - Microsoft

The Search Keyword is ' Microsoft Office Trial '. The first ad is well branded and might seem relevant but doesn't seem exact relevant to the exact search word.
The keyword being searched for is (Microsoft Office Trial)

By inserting the search keyword the ad copy will become more relevant -like the second ad -

This relevancy increases the ad copy Quality Score, increase CTR and thus decrease cost.

Remember to have your ad copy description and landing page all on the same line synced together otherwise it will confuse your user.

Optimization phase

The biggest standpoint from Google Ad words is called SQR (Search Query Reporting) - it is the most valuable yet most underused optimization level.

This phase depends on the stage of your business  Adwords’ maturity. The best case scenario is that it should be done daily if not then weekly (if your account is stable and has been for years).

SQR outcomes:

1- Keywords harvesting:

Harvest for specific customer searches and add those as keywords.

2- Keyword pruning:

Look for irrelevant searches and pause them - negative keyword - reduce wastage.

3- Bonus: Organic search Optimization:

Use SQR to feed your organic SEO efforts. SQR will give you a lot of opportunities in term of understanding what long tail keywords people search and this will make you build a content around it.

It will give you a better understanding of the kind of long tail keyword people are looking for. You can take these keywords and build organic content around it. I will try to make it more relevant or by just applying SQR to my organic piece.

Setting a campaign:

When you set a campaign there is something called ad rotation. You can either rotate your ad indefinitely where ads will show equally. This will be more efficient and makes more sense.

Time and hour of the day

Always make sure that you are operating your campaign at the right time and day that suits your industry. However, if your campaign does not perform in this specific day/time you don’t have to pause your campaign. You can either bid lower on this specific time - if low performance - or bid higher - if high performance.

Location:

Adwords allows looking at the performance of specific cities and locations around the world.

Sometimes there are specific markets where the Cost Per Clicks are expensive and we don’t get enough conversions. On the other hand, if there is another market performing well in a specific region, we can duplicate this campaign.

Bidding strategy

• Automated Bidding Strategy:

There are sometimes automated bidding strategy that you won't be bidding manually for ex you might say I want a CPA of 20 dollars and the system will automatically bid and this is the automated bidding strategy

• Manual Bidding Strategy:

However, these automated bidding strategies are not on bidding campaign because we want to maximize our brand SEO. We don’t want to lose any opportunity for our brand search because if the system sees that less number of conversions coming from a brand name it will not bid on it much and this is not what we want. We never want to lose a chance for people searching for our plans even if it will not convert.

Generic and competition campaigns will get you high CPA that’s why it has to be on automated bidding but this needs Realistic CPA goals. For example if you ordered the system for a CPA of 1 thousand dollars, the system will not spend unless it is sure that it will get you this amount of CPAs. If it can not it will spend zero, so be realistic.

It is essential that you grade your performance of Google ads to know if that hard work you put into your PPC has paid off. Always analyze and strive to do better!