Managing Google AdWords Campaigns - Wrong v Right

by Kirt Christensen

Generally the mistakes people make in managing their AdWords campaigns are the same ones made by most advertisers. Improvements can be made with under an hours work. This can save you hundreds and probably thousands of dollars with less than 60 minutes work following the advice given in this article.

Want to know what the number-one mistake people make is in Google AdWords campaign management? Improperly organized campaigns. Badly organized ads and keywords cripple your Google campaigns and cost you a ton of money.

With campaigns put together in the proper way will have good results from the start. At that point optimizing them and making adjustments is a simple task. As time goes on this can make a big difference.

In a utopian world everytime someone typed in a keyword you would have the perfect ad for that keyword. With all those different keywords, you have a unique ad for each one. Say you have two thousand keywords, then you would need to write two thousand ads.

However we don’t live in an optimum world. We can get a good result by clustering keywords that are alike with an appropriate ad.

Ad groups are the smallest individual units that contain your keywords and your ads together. You can have multiple ad groups in a single campaign. A campaign is just a handy way to organize ad groups, usually according to broad topic.

In a single Google account, you can have as many campaigns as you want. Some of the campaigns in your account may be on a completely different topic, selling completely different services, and sending traffic to a completely different web site.

How you separate your campaigns is up to you. How you separate ad groups, however, is one of those areas where there’s a right way and a wrong way.

A novice creating their campaign might put it together in this manner:

Smith Telecommunications

Robust Answers for

All Your Voice Mail Needs

www.smithtelecom.com

This is what their ad looks like, with keywords such as these:

auto attendant

business telephone systems

call management systems

voice mail

voice mail equipment

voice mail service

voice mail systems

At that point the visitors are all sent to the same landing page with various links to pages called ‘Services’, ‘Equipment’, ‘FAQ’, ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, and so forth. So what is wrong with that way of managing AdWords?

There are too many different kinds of keywords in the same group. Every one of these keywords needs to be in its own group, along with a list of very similar words and phrases.

Secondly, the keywords and ads don’t match-up because of the problem listed above.

Using the name of the business, Smith Telecommunications, in the headline is a no-no in this case and for almost all businesses. Your click-through-rate is going to be lousy, which will drive up your bid price.

Is this ad selling Smith Telecommunications? Is that what the customer is looking for? Make your ad reflect the needs of the customer.

A person who searches for “voice mail service” needs to be taken to a page about voice mail service; a person who searches for equipment needs to be taken to a different web page about voice mail equipment. These are two entirely different topics. If a person has to figure out where to go after they land on your web page, you’re making them work too hard. You need to show them exactly what they were searching for.

By creating a specific layout of your keywords and adgroups initially, you will be able to make these adjustments more easily. Using www.wordtracker.info or http://inventory.overture.com, categorize your keywords into neat and closely related adgroups. Something like this:

Voice Mail Services (adgroup)

voice mail provider

voice mail service

voice mail service provider

voice mail services

Voice Mail System (adgroup)

voice mail systems

voice mail systems for realtors

telemarketing and voice mail systems

phone systems voice mail

home office voice mail systems

home office telephone voice mail systems

Auto Attendant (adgroup)

answering attendant auto system

auto attendant voice mail services

auto attendant

auto attendant phone system

auto attendant software

auto attendant system

auto attendant voice mail

phone auto attendant

One more thing needs your attention prior to putting together your campaign; Look at your negative keywords. This list of phrases came from ‘voice mail software’.

voice mail software

voice mail business software

voice mail software for panasonic

voice mail broadcasting software

voice mail business software

multiple voice mail software

mac voice mail software

multi-line voice mail system software vru

norstar voice mail software

software to record voice mail

free voice mail software

You really aren’t wanting to have visitors looking for free stuff. You also don’t have anything to do with voice broadcasting or even Macintosh computers. This is a good start on your negative keyword list. You do this by putting a minus sign in front of each of the words on your negative keyword list. This is how your list will now look:

voice mail software

voice mail business software

voice mail software for panasonic

voice mail business software

multiple voice mail software

multi-line voice mail system software vru

norstar voice mail software

software to record voice mail

Negative Keywords:

free

mac

macintosh

broadcast

broadcasting

When your ad campaign is all set up every one of your mini keyword lists will be in ito own adgroup with it’s own set of ads.

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