AdWords Campaign Management - Wrong and Right
Most mistakes people make in their Google AdWords campaign managements are pretty common, and 90 percent of Google campaigns can be greatly improved with less than an hour of effort. You can save yourself hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars in the hour you spend following our instructions in this article.
Can you guess the biggest mistake made by advertisers on Google AdWords campaigns? That would be Campaigns that are not properly organized. Ads and keywords that are not organized will damage your campaigns and end up costing you big money.
When your campaign is organized right you will get the effect you are looking for right off and adjustments and optimization are a snap. This will make all the difference over the long haul.
In a perfect world, you’d serve up a perfect ad for every single keyword someone types in. Since each keyword is different, each ad would be different, too. If you had 2,000 keywords, then you’d have to write 2,000 ads, too.
But for the world that we live in that is not practical. The answer is clustering similar keywords with one ad.
An ad campaign is the file cabinet that holds all your ad groups, it’s topic is general. An ad group is the smallest unit that has keywords and ads in it. Your ad campaign should always have more than one adgroup.
In Google your account can contain as many campaigns as you need. You can have campaigns in your account with totally different topics. The products you sell may be absolutely unrelated and the websites you send traffic to may be different.
You may choose any way you want to divvy up your ad campaign. When it comes to creating your ad groups however, you have to do it with care.
Most beginners set up their campaigns to look something like this:
Smith Telecommunications
Robust Answers for
Your Every Voice Mail Need
www.smithstelecom.com
This is what their ad looks like, with keywords such as these:
auto attendant
business telephone systems
call management systems
voice mail
voice mail equipment
voice mail service
voice mail systems
Then they send all the visitors to the home page, which has a bunch of different links to “Services,” “Equipment,” “Q&A,” “About Us,” “Contact Us,” etc. What’s wrong with this kind of Google AdWords campaign management?
There are too many different kinds of keywords in the same group. Every one of these keywords needs to be in its own group, along with a list of very similar words and phrases.
Number two problem is the keywords and ads don’t suit one another. This also stems from the first problem.
Using the name of the business, Smith Telecommunications, in the headline is a no-no in this case and for almost all businesses. Your click-through-rate is going to be lousy, which will drive up your bid price.
This ad appears to be about Smith Telecommunications, probably not what the clients are looking for. You should customize your ad to address what your clients are looking for.
When searching for ‘voice mail service’ a person wants to go to a page whose topic is voice mail service. Likewise someone looking for equipment will want one on voice mail equipment not voice mail services. By making someone scour your page for the information they want you are making them work too hard and they may leave before they find what they are looking for.
If you structure your campaigns properly from the beginning, it’s a lot easier to make this work. To do this, take all of your different keywords and use Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.info) or Overture (http://inventory.overture.com) to organize them into narrow “silos” of very tightly related terms. They will look like this:
Voice Mail Services (adgroup)
voice mail provider
voice mail service
voice mail service provider
voice mail services
Voice Mail System (adgroup)
voice mail systems
voice mail systems for realtors
telemarketing and voice mail systems
phone systems voice mail
home office voice mail systems
home office telephone voice mail systems
Auto Attendant (adgroup)
answering attendant auto system
auto attendant voice mail services
auto attendant
auto attendant phone system
auto attendant software
auto attendant system
auto attendant voice mail
phone auto attendant
One more thing needs your attention prior to putting together your campaign; Look at your negative keywords. This list of phrases came from ‘voice mail software’.
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail broadcasting software
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
mac voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
free voice mail software
You might not want visitors who want something for free. Your company also has nothing to do with voice broadcasting and you don’t have anything for Macintosh computers. So turn those into negative keywords by putting a minus sign in front of them. The above list now looks like this:
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
Negative Keywords:
free
mac
macintosh
broadcast
broadcasting
So when you set up your ad campaigns, each one of these keyword lists is going to go into a different group with its own set of ads.
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