New users to AdWords often find the system very challenging, or the return on investment simply does not add up because they make a number of common mistakes.
The problem that most new starters get into when setting up their AdWords campaign is that they don’t approach the subject with an analytical mind. Once people get a basic understanding how PPC advertising works, and sign up for an AdWords account, they hastily throw together a campaign with ill defined goals and no actual strategy behind it.
A lot of people have been burnt by PPC advertising because they have failed to take the time to set up an easy to manage and optimise campaign. Failure to manage a campaign through a number of critical stages, and poor initial campaign design leads to a drop in quality score for your campaigns over time. When this happens, the cost per click for all of your keywords goes through the roof, and it leads to a lot people becoming disgruntled with AdWords in general, and feeling like Google is greedy and grabbing at cash.
This is the furhest thing from the truth in my opinion. A well thought out AdWords campaign is one of the best ways to draw traffic to your product or service.
If you currently are running AdWords, a simple way you can get some control over the direction of your PPC marketing is to review the way your campaigns are organised.
Don’t think about campaigns and AdGroups as just simply a place to put keywords that have similar themes. The structure of campaign and AdGroups should be thought of as individual experiment. This is the place where combinations of keywords and advertising copy are being tested against each other. It is very easy to make comparisons of results between individual AdGroups, or advertisements and keywords within AdGroups. You can find clear trends and winners by testing like keywords and ads with only small variations. This makes it easy to see which factor is in play and has increased CTR, conversions or Quality Score.
This separation of data is important to think about when setting up AdGroups. Try as hard as possible to keep your data ‘clean’, and not muddy the results by having unrelated areas and types of keywords in the same AdGroup, or even the same campaign. For instance, i always have brand related keywords in a separate campaign, as these then to have a higher CTR and skew the results of the other campaigns.
This should be taken into consideration for the life of the campaign. If a keyword is dominating a campaign or AdGroup, you should consider isolating it and creating an expanded AdGroup for it.
This makes it easier to test variations on this proven winner and further increase its performance. There is a fine line to walk here, as Google likes to see a high CTR for campaigns, and if you drastically reduce the CTR by removing all of the high performing keywords, the quality score will lower and the average CPC for the campaign will increase.
As for everything, testing and measuring is the key to success.
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