When it comes to advertising with Google Adwords, optimization through trial and error is going to play an important role. Very rarely will an internet marketer choose a keyword combination and a bid amount, and have their work turn into great success right off the bat. For most internet marketers, this process involves a great amount of Google AdWords optimization, where trial & error and split testing has to be employed in order to determine what keyword combinations drive results and which do not. Not every keyword combination, even the most popular, is going to drive consistent results for every advertisement. This means that it will be a process to determine which keywords are going to work for you.
Through split testing, multi-variable testing and the consistent optimization of your AdWords campaigns, you can improve upon the quality and the performance of your advertising without having to raise costs in the process. There are a number of different strategies that you can adopt in optimizing your advertising efforts, and each is going to bring you different results depending on the keywords that you are optimizing for, the bid amounts that you are selecting, and the ads that you are crafting to coincide with your keywords.
When we say “trial and error” we are not saying just do this blindly. What we are saying is that everything you do involving keywords, Adtext (your ads), Ad groups, landing pages need to be constantly monitored using Google Analytics and other available monitoring software. This is the only way you will know what is working and what is not working. You can even determine exactly why things are not working.
Google PPC Advertising, like all PPC Advertising, is completely focused on two key metrics:
- Click through Rate or CTR – this is the number of times your ad is actually clicked divided by the number of times your ad is displayed … displays are typically referred to as impressions. So an ad with a 10% CTR is getting 10 times the rate of clicks than an ad with a 1% CTR.
- Conversion Rate – this is the number of times landing page visitors actually perform the conversion act (purchase, sign-ups, registrations, lead forms, subscriptions, etc.) divided by the number of visitors coming from the ad itself.
You can’t achieve optimized ROI without optimizing your Google PPC campaign and you can’t optimize your Google PPC campaign without optimizing your click through rate and your conversion rate.
Accomplishing optimization in PPC is actually similar to SEO and all Internet Marketing. It comes back to relevance and targeting. Your CTR will only be maximized if your ads are very targeted on the keyword or set of keywords (Ad groups) they are associated with. So your Adtext is critical for optimized CTR.
Further, your landing page, the page clickers land on, must be highly relevant to the Adtext and must be designed with Conversion Optimization in mind. This involves great design with clear and engaging calls to action. Also, the results of these landing pages need constant monitoring with careful review of the stats; it is the stats that shed the light throughout the process of PPC optimization.
Another way to benefit from the optimization of your advertising is to structure your account well. There are two reasons for this, the first being that it improves management capabilities. The second benefit is that it will allow you to target your audience more effectively. You can organize your campaigns for PPC advertising in different ways, such as by topic, language, or location, or you can create ad groups that are highly specific based on who you are attempting to target. The more fine tuning that you do, the better able you will be to drive targeted results to your websites / landing pages.
Another important aspect of optimizing your PPC advertising campaigns is to choose keywords that are relevant as well as relevant placements. The more relevant that they are, the more easily you will be able to reach out to your potential customers. What this means is that you need to choose every one of your keywords carefully, and take advantage of options for keyword matching. Your campaigns should be placement targeted for the best results, which is something that is Google AdWords specific. When you can choose where your ad will appear, you need to make sure that you are optimizing this aspect of every campaign just as carefully as the keywords themselves.
How is your Google Adwords campaign doing? Need assistance? Just contact us, we can help!
December 22, 2009
