Google Adwords audits are something that we do quite frequently. I run into tons of small businesses that setup their Google Adwords accounts on their own hoping to gain new business leads. The thing that I find most often, is that businesses that setup their own accounts usually make some common mistakes that can cost them big. Their budgets get eaten up and the leads that they receive are not very relevant. Something that I often hear is “Google Adwords doesn’t work!”

Well if you setup your account to target relevant traffic, Google Adwords can be a very cost effect way to increase your business leads and your ROAS (return on as spend). Here are some tips that will help you to improve your campaign.

 Tip #1 – Campaign Setup

When setting up your campaigns, it is a good idea to break the campaigns up by geographical region and by the network that you choose to market your ads on. This will help you in the future to allocate more budget to the campaigns that are performing at a higher level, converting, and bringing you more of a return on your ad spend.

Tip #2 – Ad Group Setup

When setting up your ad groups, it is a good practice to setup many ad groups that will incorporate unique targeted keywords. This will allow you to develop targeted keyword rich ad content to display to your audience that is relevant to the search query. Implementing this strategy will increase your chances of a higher click-through-rate which will in turn increase your quality score giving you a better cost-per-click and higher placement than your competitors based on a usability experience.

Tip #3 – Keywords – Broad or Match

When selecting keyword match types for a PPC campaign, it is important to take into consideration many factors; fist and for most, conversion rate, cost-per-click, conversion rate and quality score. Adding broad matches will get you more volume but will cost you more per click. The quality score on the broad match keyword should be lower than an exact match on and hence cost-per-clicks should be higher. You can run a low cost-per-click, high click-through-rate campaign on exacts but your ads will only reach a small audience.

Recommendations for setting up the pay-per-click campaign are to use broad match for longtail keywords and test broad and match types for higher traffic keywords. Since longtail keywords are already very targeted they will receive less traffic and convert at a higher level. However, the higher traffic keywords need to be tested to determine which convert better and have a higher return on ad spend. Once return-on-ad-spend has been determined, we will select the best method for specific keywords.

Tip #4 – Longtail Keyword Strategy

Within the pay-per-click channel, best practice strategies indicate that using more descriptive longer search phrases (longtail) convert at a much higher rate and cost a lot less than broader terms. Using geographical terms matched with broader terms is a great way to create longtail keywords. This is a strategy that we will implement.

Tip #5 – Hire A Professional

If all of this sounds foreign to you, hire a professional to setup your account for you. We setup accounts for clients all the time, and once your account is setup right from the beginning, it’s takes very little time to manage it. If you have already setup your Google Adwords account, we can audit it for you as well.