AdWords checklist

AdWords was originally built for everyday users with no specialist skills, these days AdWords is a very complicated product and its ever-increasing array of features can be daunting to new online marketers.

At Sky Rocket Inc., when we’re working with existing accounts, or starting afresh, we follow a checklist. The AdWords Checklist below focuses on the important areas of PPC advertising without getting lost in the minutiae of the AdWords interface.

The AdWords checklist

• Campaign planning

  1. Geographic targeting

     Only show your ads in regions where people can act on them; if your product isn’t available in a certain area, don’t show your ad there.

  2. Demographic targeting

     Start thinking about the type of person you’re looking to attract with your campaign, this will inform your keyword choices later.

  3. Search & content settings

     Google search and content networks provide VERY different types of traffic and the general rule is that content converts lower than search. So, enable both, but also make sure that separate bidding is enabled.

  4. Day parting

     Day parting is a very powerful way to present your ad to people at times (day or week) when they are most likely to act. However, to be certain what those times and days are, you first need to collect more information from your analytics software. We will cover this in more detail in our posts on analytics.

• Ad Group structure

  1. Ad Group naming (core term Ad Groups)

     Ad Group naming is an art and it’s here that we really start thinking about the keywords the Ad Group will contain and how relevant that is to the landing page. We find it useful to create and name Ad Groups based on core terms. Core term Ad Groups contain keywords that are directly related to the core term or name of the Ad Group. For example: if you have an Ad Group called Red Apples the keywords contained should all have a strong relationship to that core term. Red apple, red apples, juicy red apples, ripe red apples, best red apples, red apples online, red apples for sale would be good examples of keywords. You should not include ‘green apple’ keywords; for these, you should build a separate Ad Group called Green Apples, or if there were no green apples available on the site, you needn’t bother and use a keyword negative -green in the Red Apples group. The core term concept of Ad Group building is about creating silos of related keywords that describe something on your website.

  2. Landing page relevance

     Generally with core term Ad Groups you will have 1 single, or a few related, landing pages for each Ad Group. This is easier to manage than mixed term Ad Groups with all sorts of different landing pages. Ad Groups should be tightly focused on the contents of the landing page. You will improve performance of the Red Apples Ad Group if the landing page contains text and images related to red apples.

  3. Ad Group level bids

     Using core term Ad Groups you will find the Ad Group level search and content bids give you greater control of ad spend. This means you can forget about keyword-level bids for the time-being and leave that for another day.

• Keywords

  1. Research

     AdWords comes with a very advanced Keyword tool that you can use to research keywords and there are many other good options available from 3rd parties: Wordtracker, Compete, SpyFu, KeywordSpy, etc. However, the best research tool is your own mind, experience and cunning. The problem with the AdWords Keyword tool and the 3rd party options is that everyone uses them which means you will be bidding on keywords that already have a lot of competition.

  2. Expansion

     You can expand keywords by combining core terms with other related terms to create whole new keywords (here’s how in Excel).

  3. Mining

     Keyword mining is one of the best places to get keywords, but first you need access to your websites log files. Hidden in these log files is valuable information about which sites your users came from, and more importantly, what search queries they typed into search engines like Google. Mining keywords allows you to see exactly what people type and you can use these queries as your own keywords to enrich and improve the performance of your Ad Groups.

  4. Negatives

     Make an effort to really understand how negatives can reduce unwanted impressions and improve CTR. Always be thinking about good negatives to add to your Ad Groups, every Ad Group should at least contain a few.

  5. Miss-spellings

     We all make spelling mistakes, so your Ad Groups should always contain common miss-spelled keywords.

  6. Pluralisation

     Be sure to include plurals and singulars if relevant. The AdWords system is supposed to handle this for you, but it’s far from perfect. You will get extra clicks if bid on plural and singulars.

• Ad Text copywriting

  1. Dynamic keyword insertion

     Always use keyword insertion in at least 1 line of ad text if not all 3, because Ads with inserted keywords always enjoy a higher CTR. Don’t worry too much if it spoils the grammar of your copy, research suggests that no-one is reading anyway, instead users just scan through search results and ads looking for keywords.

  2. Variations

     Copywriting is an emotive, artful practice and often it’s not entirely clear what copy will work best. So write variations and test the performance.

  3. Landing page relevance

     Again, it’s important that your ad directly relates to the content of your ladning page.

• Content network

  1. Ad Group level bids

     Always use Ad Group level content bids, there is huge volumes of traffic on content, but because the quality is not as high as search you want to pay less for it.

  2. Negative Sites

     The big problem with the content network are popular, low-quality sites (like MySpace) sending thousands of clicks you don’t want. Use your analytics software to identify these sites and negativise them. Be aggressive and shut down any source of traffic that is not working for you.

If you focus on understanding and improving these areas you will go a long way to improving your campaigns.

Related posts:

1. Prepare AdWords campaigns in Excel for upload into AdWords Editor
2. PPC competitive research…
3. How Does AdWords Determine a Keyword’s Quality Score Before It’s Even Activated? Find Out! | The Adventures of PPC Hero
4. How much effort to recover a low quality adwords account?
5. AdWords Tuneup!

Tagged as: adwords, ppc

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