4 Tactics for the Success of Your AdWords Campaigns

• Monday, December 12th, 2016
• Blog
• one response

Good AdWords campaigns can completely transform your business. However, most people who use this advertising tool state that, after a certain while, they stop seeing results even though they end up paying more and more every day. If you’ve been there, too, then keep on reading and find out how to improve the results of your AdWords campaigns without spending a fortune.

Tactic #1: Revise Your Keywords

Yes, I know this is pretty basic, but you’d be surprised of how many people forget about the fundamentals and get right to the advanced settings. Before you do that, make sure that your keywords:

• Are in your customers’ voice: just think about how someone would look for your product or service. Let’s say you sell coconut oil. If your keyword is “coconut oil” people who simply want to see how it looks or what is it good for might end up on your page. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you are prepared to educate your potential customer with content on the benefits of coconut oil, but if you’re looking for someone who’s ready to make a purchase, try “buy coconut oil” instead.
• Go local: if your business is catering to a local community only, make sure to add the name of your city (or even that of your neighborhood) in your keywords: “buy coconut oil New Hampshire” is your safest bet to attract local crowds to your store.
• Use long-tail keywords: the competition is lower and, even better, people who look for long-tail keywords already what they want. “Organic raw coconut milk New Hampshire” clearly shows that the buyer is past the research and consideration phases and he’s ready to shop.

Tactic #2: Build a Better Landing Page for your AdWords Campaigns

If you’re not sure about the performance of your landing page, A/B testing should clear that up for you. However, you should always strive for excellent landing pages for two reasons:

• If you have a great landing page, your ads will cost less as Google will give you a higher quality score.
• A relevant landing page keeps readers engaged and, ultimately, convinces them to buy.

Briefly put, here are the minimal conditions for a high-converting landing page:

1. Have all the necessary keywords: make sure that all the keywords you select have been included in the copy
2. Make it easy to read: divide the text into blocks using headlines and subtitles. Also, choose contrasting colors (but nothing too glaring, as you don’t want to make it painful to read). Stick to the basics and get a clean layout.
3. Add CTAs: people who click on your ad should be able to make a purchase quickly, so make sure to add buy buttons and compelling CTAs in visible places.
4. Make it mobile-friendly: speed is a huge criteria for Google (both for organic results and for AdWords campaigns), so make sure your page loads quickly, especially on mobile devices. While we’re at this, you absolutely need a responsive website if you want your AdWords campaign to be a success; in fact, if you don’t have a mobile responsive landing page, Google won’t even show your ads to mobile users.
5. Advertise a single product: it might be tempting to upsell to a client, but leave it for another occasion. An AdWords campaign should be built for a single product (the one you describe in your keywords). Otherwise, your landing page will be confusing for anyone who clicks on it. Let’s say you run an ad for “buy coconut oil” and the person who clicks your ad is greeted by a page that has three other types of oils described. This is time-consuming, inefficient and very likely to drive customers away.

Tactic #3: Study the Results of Your AdWords Campaigns

You can learn a lot from your mistakes. Aside from daily monitoring of your campaign, try to do a comprehensive analysis when the campaign is over or monthly if you run AdWords campaigns continuously. Here are a few things to help you with your analysis:

• Add a conversion pixel to your website: this way, you’ll know exactly what your AdWords campaign is selling.
• Integrate Google Analytics with AdWords: this can help you see what visitors are doing after they leave your landing page: did anything else grab their attention? Are they trying to verify your credibility? Are they here just for browsing and information? Plus, it will be easier to find out which keywords drive more traffic and which keywords drive more sales.
• Check out the Results tab: OK, don’t just check it out; go a bit deeper. Find out where most of your visitors come from and where most of your buyers come from – it’s an important difference. Even more, you can see which time of day has a better result rate and you might consider increasing your bid for that timeframe. Play around with the tabs in the “Results” section; you never know what gem you might uncover.

Tactic #4: Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords help you filter those searches that aren’t relevant for your product. They can be of immense help in optimizing your costs. Drawing on the example above, let’s say someone is searching for “organic coconut oil”, but your product is not organic – why pay for this click since you will surely not make a sale. Similarly, “discount coconut oil” may not be a good idea if you’re selling a premium product – it’s obvious that whoever searched for this is looking for a lower price.

This saved me a ton of money when I was running AdWords campaigns for copywriting services. You’d be surprised of how many people were searching for job opportunities in this field and landing on my website. Naturally, they were never going to become clients, so when I added “job” as a negative keyword, I immediately saw an increase in my conversion rate.

What about you? Did you have an “aha” moment with your AdWords campaigns or are you still struggling with them? Let me know in the comment section below – I’d be happy to help you with suggestions.

Photo source: edge45.co.uk

Adriana Tica

Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the Owner and Founder of Idunn. In October 2019, she also launched Copywritech, a digital marketing agency that provides copywriting, SEO content writing, and strategy services to companies in the tech industry.