10 Quick Steps To Proper Adwords Campaign Management

Follow These Steps For PPC Profits And Avoid Losing Money With Adwords

Adwords Campaign Management can be tricky and not a lot of people, including some agencies, even know how to do this correctly. Today I’m going to drop a knowledge bomb on you and you’re going to get some ninja tactics. This is a run down of the first things we do once a company pays our fees to become a client. Below I’ve broken down a list of the most important things to consider when optimizing a Google Adwords campaign.

1. Google Search VS Google Display Network

Stop combing these two into one campaign, just stop. It’s a horrible idea to run a search and display campaign together. Display is best used for branding with banners and re-marketing (in my opinion), so combing them will eat your budget up literally within the day. I see this far to often.

2. Re-marketing

If you don’t know what this is you need to get hip to it…and fast. I recommend that EVERYONE implement a re-marketing campaign with every search campaign that they run. It helps you get a second, third, fourth, etc chance to capture a person who already visited your site. Read more about it here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454000?hl=en

3. Ad Schedule

I always recommend clients set-up an ad schedule. A very detailed schedule broken down into hours in the day. Why you ask? So once I have accrued enough data I can pop back in and sort my ad schedule data and see what hours of the day my campaign converts best. Then I can increase my bids on the high converting hours and lower my bid on the low converting hours. This Adwords Campaign Management 101!

4. Adgroup Targeting

Wayyyyyy to often we’ll scoop a new client and when we go into their existing Adwords account to asses the damage we see one Adgroup with 400 irrelevant keywords in there. Don’t do this! Adgroups need to be broken up and tightly themed. Relevance is the name of the game here guys. Read more about proper Adgroup structure here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2375404?hl=en

5. Keyword Match Types

This just hurts to see. When you look into a campaign that someone is not having success with and you look at their keywords and every single one of them is broad match. Ouch. While broad match is definitely kick ass to have, you gotta mix it up with phrase and exact and see what converts best for you. The name of the game is testing guys. Learn more about match types with this video.

6. Ad Extensions

Ahhhh the “mythical” ad extensions. Joking, there is nothing mythical about then and you 100% need them. Ad extensions like adding a phone number to the ad or having site links or call out text is great to have because it allows your ad to take up more real estate on Google’s front page which in turn leads to more eyeballs going to your ads over your competitors! Not mention you sneak some LSI keywords in there to achieve higher relevance and in return achieve a higher quality score. High quality score = Google love you long time.

7. Ad Optimization

With proper Adwords campaign management it is always best to have only 2 ads running per Adgroup. This will allow you to (once every few days) see which of the two ads has been under-performing so you can “drop” the losing ad and create a new ad to run against the winning ad. Doing this weekly will allow you to continually optimize the campaign. Remember to never delete ads though pause them and save the data.

8. Negative Keywords

Probably one of the MOST important aspects of a Google search campaign. Its in your best interest to add negative keywords into your campaigns on a regular basis. Negative keywords will help you optimize the campaign further and should be done every few days. Simply put, lets say you see a keyword that is driving a ton of clicks each day but it never converts into a lead or sale. After doing some quick analysis it might be in your best interest to negative out this keyword so your ads will never show for it again! Since it is just wasting money and not converting!

9. Conversion Tracking

This just absolutely kills me to see. Without Google Adwords and Google Analytics tracking codes in place there is no way to tell if your campaign is producing a positive ROI or even any leads, calls, sales, etc. Also, without these codes set-up you will not be able to optimize the campaign at the keyword level to see which keywords are winners and which keywords are losers.

10. Landing Pages

Sometimes sending direct traffic to a businesses homepage is not the best or most effective option. Especially if there is no lead magnet on the website or anything enticing the web visitor to become a lead. Landing pages solve this issue and also help you acquire a higher quality score from Google since you can make the landing pages relevant to each Adgroup in your campaign. Best practices is to have a nice high converting landing page to go along with your campaign.