Today I attended a seminar at Google for their advertisers to go through a series of advanced techniques and tools to help maximize AdWords conversion and ROI. Rather than squirrel away this information I wanted to share a few of the ideas that Google put forward to help you with your AdWords account. (Please note: I am going to presume a good working knowledge of AdWords in this post).
Search based keyword tool
Once your account reaches a certain size finding new keywords to target can become difficult. Within your AdWords account is a great tool that scans the web page of your choosing and then suggests keywords that aren’t already in your account including search volumes, suggested bid price and the level of competition for that keyword. As well as acting as a source of keyword inspiration, it can also highlight very specific product related terms you may have overlooked e.g. “Makita LXT231” which typically have low CPC costs and low competitive activity but with a higher conv%
Use brand searches to analysis a campaign’s performance
“Insights for search” is a tool that shows search trends over time for search terms you choose. It doesn’t provide exact figures, but visualizes the data in a graph allowing you to compare multiple keywords over years or months. Because so many people go online to find out more or conduct product/ brand searches after seeing an advert or information about a product/ website, you can use this data to see the impact of a specific campaign or the overall cumulative growth of awareness. You can also compare your performance with your competition.
Burst strategy
This was the big new idea for me and revolves around the idea of short bursts of high spending to hit the top spot for a brief amount of time (say, a day) and then return to your normal bid levels. The thinking behind this is two fold; still grab a share of the top spot’s traffic in expensive industries where maintaining top spot is cost prohibitive over a long period of time, and also benefit from the quality score boost the higher top spot’s CTR% naturally has.
Small changes have big results
One of the areas Google appears to be looking at in more earnest is conversion once someone gets to your website. The thinking being, the more you sell the more you will advertise. Their free Website Optimiser is an A/B testing tool which allows you to statistically compare two changes side by side and pick the best performer e.g. change your call to action from “Contact us” to “Contact me” etc. The examples they used highlighted how seemingly subtle changes can have a big impact.
Don’t overlook local searches
We have dealt with this a couple of times of this blog, and Google brought it up at the seminar as well. With so many searches being conducted using local qualifiers (e.g. “power tools supplier Cambridge”) using these geographic keywords in your list and in your ad copy increase your ad’s relevancy and therefore CTR%. If this is appropriate for you, you should create a series of campaigns based around the regions you are targeting and combine the keywords and ads with the geographic targeting options in the campaign set-up.
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