Google Best Practices for Adwords

By / / Google Adwords

Do you know your A, B, C’s in sales?

Always – Be – Closing.

Do you know your A, B, C’s in Google AdWords?

Acquisition –  Behavior – Conversions.

 

Google’s Best Practices are written to provide strategic advice on the most important search marketing tactics on the AdWords Advertising platform. This guide is intended for AdWords advertisers and marketing agencies using pay per click Search, Shopping and Display ad campaigns.

Best Practices are comprised from “Google’s internal data and vetted by the people that built AdWords.” This post helps form the foundation of your paid search marketing strategies.

Keywords

Keywords are the vehicle that connects you to potential customers. Keywords are basically human thoughts, expressed on a computer.  The words that your customer type into the Google search engine are not always the best way to find what a visitor is looking for. Google states “Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business.” To do this, you must A/b test keywords to determine which will convert and those that do not know. Many keywords bring traffic to your website from tire kickers and sales people. The key to success is proving the traffic on your site is from potential qualify customers.

The first time someone visits your website, they are not likely to convert.  Websites first time conversion rate can be high and low depending on the offer.  That is where RLSA’s come into the PPC strategy. It basically retargets your ads to potential customers that have already engaged with your brand.

Targeting

Targeting means the locations, the exclusions, search network scheduling and many other advanced features.  Most business and agencies have the incorrect targeting for the business strategy and cause tremendous amount of waste.

Ads

Ads will make or break the campaign. If you do not A/b split test your Ads to the keywords and the landing pages, you are going to fail.

  1. CTR Click thru rate is the most important metric to Google. Its because the higher the CTR, the more money they bring in.  Google has mastered how to make Google money and every day Google makes 100,000,000 from AdWords.
  2. Quality Score (QS) is one of the most important metrics to ensure your keywords, ads and landing pages are scoring well within the PPC algorithm.  Optimizing the QS is the most important factor to overall campaign health and long term performance.
  3. Conversions if setup correctly are the most important metric to the success and ROI of the AdWords traffic.  Conversions should only be setup as business valuable goals. 

With Ads, you need to A/b test constantly and have at minimum 2 ads per have adgroup. Test the Ad extensions and the targeting to gain the most performance.

Bidding

This is an auction and those that show up with a bank roll and ready to double down are going to win. There are strategies to lower the Cost per click (CPC) but the most important practice is to test the bid to the conversion rate and ROI.  This is difficult to do and your goal is to be able to track your earnings per click.  It is not always best to bid the top position, you need to check your Google Analytics report to identify the ad position that achieves the greatest ROI.

CPA bidding is not weighted in the businesses advantage and an effective strategy and management plan will always beat Cost Per Acquisition bidding.

A/b test your bids to find the perfect position and conversion rate to achieve profit!

Display

Display is awesome at generating brand awareness and increasing the top of the funnel visitor.  Ensure that you are excluding irrelevant placements and traffic networks from your display network campaigns or else you will waste a lot of your budget to click fraud and junk traffic.

  1. Retargeting as mentioned above under keywords and RLSA campaigns, retargeting gives you a second chance and many more to appeal to your customer and gain their trust. There is a rule in marketing, The Rule of 7.  The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a visitor needs to see the advertiser’s message at least 7 times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service.

Process & Productivity

Marketing is a process, not something that functions like a light switch. You need an ongoing optimization process and with it your business will find new customers and grow. Without it, you will have traffic to your site, but not gaining the value and opportunities like your competition is gaining.  Managing AdWords yourself without the training and optimization process is destined for poor performance.

Here is a few before and after results http://www.ppcrainmakers.com/ppc-management/managing-google-adwords-yourself-vs-hiring-a-ppc-expert-for-management/

Mobile

It is now a best practice to a have a mobile friendly website with responsive design. You also need to cross browser test your website for user experience and webpage load times. To ensure you are up to date on the best practices for mobile, read this article “Google Update Coming – Major SEO Algorithm change“

  1. Smart Phones
  2. Mobile Apps

It’s now estimated that 91% of Americans have cell phones and sixty something percent have smart phones. Your customers use their phones to find what they are looking for. Especially when they are bored, stuck on the public transport or the numerous other times when we check our phones. Have a strategy to maximize the potential mobile has the 21st century.

Shopping

The most impactful way to increase sales to your ecommerce business.  The key to PLA campaign success is optimizing the user experience by A/b testing your website and checkout funnel. Optimize the site and structured data based on the data in your AdWords search queries reports.

Reporting & Analytics

To get the best outcome, you need to review the data on a regular basis and make optimizations and setup new A/b tests.  AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google Tag Manager need to be setup correctly and synced to your website.

Pay for proper setup and configuration. Do not let you intern or webmaster setup analytics, they are not trained in the configuration and they now have MBA programs that specialize in the field.

After you have all of this down, you need to A/b test your: 1st Keywords, 2nd Ads, 3rd Pages, then its your People, Process & Product.  AdWords has the potential to bring you customers every single day.  It is your job to leverage the platform and build the perfect sales funnel for you business.