How can I improve my Google AdWords campaign?

Great question! I’ve never seen a Google AdWords campaign that can’t be improved, and we’ll often restructure existing campaigns to help maximise the ROI of the account.

Most people often set up their Google AdWords campaigns using the one campaign and one AdGroup with (in some cases) hundreds of broad matched keywords all delivering traffic to the home page of a site.

The real trick to an effective AdWords campaign is to break your campaigns out into small, targetted AdGroups with just a handful of keywords delivering traffic to a relevant landing page on your website.

I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you are Mitre10 and you’re setting up a large Google AdWords campaign. The way to tackle it is to whiteboard the structure first before you jump in and start building.

So one way to set up a Google Ad Campaign for paint might be to do the following:

Campaign: Paint

• AdGroup 1: Interior Paints
• AdGroup 2: Exterior Paints
• AdGroup 3: Ceiling Paints
• AdGroup 4: Automotive Paints
• AdGroup 5: Spray Paints
• AdGroup 6: Paint Accessories
• AdGroup 7: Acrylic Paint
• AdGroup 8: Enamel Paint
• AdGroup 9: Paint Brand 1 (Dulux)
• AdGroup 10: Paint Brand 2 (British Paints) etc, etc.

Each AdGroup should have at least one dedicated Ad, have a maximum of 20 keywords and phrases triggering the Ad and should go to a relevant landing page on your site.

So you can see, it can be a fair bit of work, but the long term benefits in restructuring your account will likely to be improved keyword Quality Scores (meaning your bidding costs for each keyword will significantly reduce and your Ad positions will likely be higher).

The other useful tool to save you money and improve your campaign performance in AdWords is the “Search Query Report” in the Google AdWords Reporting Section.

This can be amazing especially if you’re using broad matched (or “phrased matched”) keywords, because it shows you what search query people actually typed into Google before clicking on one of your Ads.

Why is that powerful?

Well, because it enables you to set up negative keywords in your account to prevent wasted clicks.

I can feel another example coming on.

In the interior paints example above, we might see from the Search Query Report that 25 people typed in “Interior house painting contractors” resulting in 25 clicks – which will happen due to the “broad matched” key phrase. This means that if the search query contains the words “interior painting” anywhere in the string, the Mitre10 Interior Paint Google Ad will display. In my opinion, that’s 25 wasted clicks because Mitre10 don’t offer a painting contracting service.

What you should do is look for words that aren’t relevant and set up “negative matching” to stop your Google Ad being displayed for “contractors” or in your case, non-relevant key phrases or words.

Google AdWords can be a beast of a thing to get your head around, and there are literally dozens of little tricks you can use to continually refine your account But hopefully the two outlined above will go in some way to improving the overall performance of your account.

Chris Thomas heads Reseo, a search engine optimisation company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.

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