Some would say if you’re just now looking to best practices for 2015,
then you’re behind the trend and behind your competition. But it’s
better late than never. Who knows? Maybe your competitors are just as
busy as you and haven’t found time to get up to speed with online
marketing. I run into it all the time. Here is your chance to make a New
Year’s Resolution and get even better with Google AdWords. So what are
the best practices for Google AdWords in 2015? Let’s dig into it.
What Should I Spend?
How successful do you want to be? Have you heard the phrase – you get
more of what you focus on? The amount of money you are willing to
invest in your AdWords campaign is a key factor of what you can expect
to receive. I am going out on a limb here and will say that any campaign
that is under $100 per day is a waste of effort. I’ve seen people start
campaigns on $20 – even $50 per day and not get sufficient clicks to
provide actionable data or conversions. With small budgets, one can
quickly see their ROI decrease. And of course, if you aren’t getting the
results you think that you should be getting, who do ya blame? It’s not
the cheapskate who wanted to get big returns from a small budget.
Having a small budget can be like having a beautiful Ferrari F4 and
giving it only a quarter tank of gas. You won’t go very far.
How Do I Build a Campaign?
Each campaign should have it’s own budget. When do you create a new
campaign? A good rule of thumb is to separate AdWords campaigns by
geography. If you have different cities or even states where you are
promoting different local branches or retail outlets, etc. it makes
sense to differentiate ads campaigns between each store. You will also
want to have a separate search only campaign and a display only campaign
and if you want to perform re-marketing, then you guessed it; you will
want a separate campaign for that as well. The reason for the separate
campaigns is because each of these types of marketing behave
differently.
How do I Build an Adgroup?
If you haven’t figured this out yet, Google rewards relevant content.
A best practice is to create Adgroups with tightly themed subjects just
like you would organize your brick and mortar store. So for example: a
campaign would be Shoes and the adgroups would be men’s shoes, women
shoes, children shoes, etc. Assess the spend of each individual ad group
within each campaign. Within each Adgroup have at least 3 ads; one
using dynamic keyword insertion, another using a question and all of
them using at least one keyword from your keyword list and with a strong
call to action, other than call now or click here. These calls to
action are too obvious and Google doesn’t like it and thus penalized
advertisers who use these.
Get Dynamic
In September of 2014, AdWords launched the most impactful update for
e-commerce advertisers since the release of Dynamic Remarketing. This
update was the release of ad customizers, which allow advertisers to add
dynamic content to their text ads. This dynamic content can be anything
from inventory or price to a countdown until a specific event. This
works very well if you have thousands of products that constantly
change. Give Google a datafeed of all your product information and set
bids based upon information contained within that feed. With dynamic
search ads, Google grabs the information it needs from your site and you
target audiences based upon that information. Much like with Google
Shopping, make sure you begin with an ad group targeting “All web pages”
and set your bids low here. A low bid is important because it stops
DSAs from stealing traffic from existing search campaigns (something you
really want to avoid). The last thing you want to do is compete against
your your own ads. Naturally it also makes sense to take every
opportunity to use ad extensions such as call, call out, location,
social, review and site extensions. These give your ads more creativity
and differentiate your ads from the sea of sameness seen on the SERPs.
Get Shopping Campaigns
If you have products to sell, you NEED to take full advantage of
Shopping Campaigns, formerly known as Product Listing Ads (PLA). These
ads can outperform text search ads because they show the image of the
exact product a shopper is looking for at the time they are ready to
buy. Simply create a data feed with every piece of product information
to display with the product listing including a good quality image so
shoppers see exactly what they will be buying. This is still an under
utilized Google product and can make a positive impact for your overall
campaigns in 2015.
Managing Keywords
I’ve written about keywords in another article so I won’t go into as
much detail here. As you develop your keywords and keep them tightly
related to the adgroups you will quickly determine which terms are
generating clicks and converting visitors to customers. As your campaign
accumulates data, you will zero in on the keywords driving the
strongest ROAS, or, Return on Ad Spend. Using the keyword reports, you
will be able to identify and expand upon these top performing keywords
with like-terms. At the same time, you will pause or delete keywords
that are under performing. You will also determine which keywords are
driving traffic which are irrelevant and need to be added to the
negative keyword list.
Since Google got rid of exact match types in 2014, you no longer need to
build exhaustive lists of plurals and misspellings. AdWords now
performs that with broad match automatically. Google points out that
“close keyword variations receive an average of 7 percent more exact and
phrase match clicks with comparable click-through and conversion
rates.”
How to Get the Most Out of Google AdWords
What About Bid Management?
Closely linked to your spend are your ad and keyword bids. Naturally
you want to have your ad show within the first 3 ad placements
available, on average. Ads showing up in the #4 spot or lower is a
strong signal that the ads need to be changed or the bid needs to be
increased. You can tell by looking at the 1st page suggested bid column.
If your ads or keywords are under performing due to constrained budget,
Google will show that in the status column. I like to be in the 1 – 2
spot and bid accordingly. You can manage bids with the ads as well as
keywords.
You can also add bid modifiers for location and device. You can increase
the bids by a certain amount and Google will use that bid for the
auction. This is helpful to win placements for searches on mobile
devices or for users close to your store and bring them in to buy. You
can also decrease bids in the same fashion. Let’s say you want to
decrease bids as people are further from your store so the ads only show
for relevant audiences within a certain radius from your location, you
would place a location bid modifier on the ad.
Testing
ABT – Always Be Testing. Marketing is about continuous testing. Give a
campaign at least 3 months before calling it a failure. Create a
campaign with at least 3 adgroups and 3 ads per adgroup and 7-8 keywords
per adgroup. This allows you to manage the campaign and test the
separate components such as the headline and description lines as well
as the keywords. Start small with changing one item at a time and
tweaking as needed.
These are the best practices (As I see it) for getting even better
results with AdWords for 2015. If you disagree I’d love to read your
comments below.
