7 fundamental approaches to get more from your Adwords campaign

Practical tips to review and improve an Adwords Campaign

When reviewing an account that hasn't been optimised, it's important for the paid search marketer to review that the basics are right. Bells and whistles are all well and good for later on, but if you fail to grasp the foundation principles of a paid search campaign, you’ll struggle to grow successfully. There are always new, exciting and innovative developments in paid search, all of which can distract you from the crux of your campaign.

A strong account structure forms a strong foundation for every successful Adwords account. If a PPC account does not adhere to best practice, the keyword quality score can be restricted, and effective management of the accounts can become a huge, uphill challenge. In this post I give 7 tips that are a core part of my approach to getting more from Adwords campaigns.

TIP 1. Micro manage high converting keywords

Conversions in PPC accounts typically follow the 80/20 rule: 80% of all conversions are driven by just 20% of the keywords. Pulling these keywords out into their own dedicated campaign will help you to micro manage these priority keywords effectively. A separate campaign will let you closely monitor and control spend and performance.

TIP 2. Give your Long Tail terms room to work

Splitting high converting keywords into their own campaign has an additional benefit: ensuring the visibility of your long tail keywords is not limited. If you are losing impression share in a certain campaign, quite often the high spending keywords will use up all of the budget before the long tail keywords are given chance to appear.

TIP 3. Budget allocation

When planning your account structure, always consider your daily budget and how this would split across your campaigns. For example, if you have a daily budget of £10 and spread this across 20 campaigns your visibility will be limited. In this case, each campaign would only have a daily budget of £0.50. If your CPCs (cost per click) are around the £1.00 mark, your keywords will never show because the CPC exceeds your daily budget.

TIP 4. AdGroup granularity

One of the most important elements of AdWords Quality Score is clickthrough rate (CTR). This can be improved by ensuring that your Text Ads are highly relevant to your keywords.  If your AdGroups are granular, this will lend itself to tailoring ads more specifically.

TIP 5. Search and Display targeting

It is extremely important to target standard search and Google display in separate campaigns. Search and Display perform very differently, and as a result they need to be optimised and analysed separately. This is a common error in PPC accounts as the automatic setting within AdWords is to opt into both search and display for a new campaign.

TIP 6. Quality checks

Due to the size of PPC accounts, it can be easy to make mistakes - such as adding keywords into the wrong AdGroup or selecting the wrong settings for your campaign. Always carry out a full quality check of your account before posting any changes, as any error can be costly and detrimental to the effectiveness of your PPC account.

TIP 7 On-going health checks

It’s important to review PPC account structure in line with best practice every six to 12 months. Over time, your account will grow through keyword expansion, and these keywords may be added into existing AdGroups that are not specifically relevant enough to your Text Ads. One other area to check regularly is whether any of your new keywords should be pulled out into dedicated, high converting campaign groups.

My top tips summary

• Split out your top converting keywords to help monitor and maximise performance. This will also help increase visibility for your long tail terms.
• Consider your daily budget when deciding on the number of campaigns within your structure.
• Always split out Display and Search campaigns due to the different behaviours of users being exposed to each channel.
• Carry out quality checks before uploading any changes to your account as mistakes can be costly.
• Plan in time to revisit your account at least once a year to ensure it is in line with best practice.

There are many simple, avoidable mistakes which can prove very costly in the world of paid search. They cause some companies to give up on Adwords completely which is a missed opportunity.  By considering these tips when reviewing your account structure, you will be able to run your PPC account more efficiently - in terms of both time and money.

Always be sure to plan ahead to analyse the impact of any changes you make to your account, as this will help direct any future account changes, as well as improving your overall PPC knowledge.

Thanks to Amy Bott for sharing her advice and opinions in this post.  Amy is Director of Paid Search & Affiliate at ClickThrough Marketing with her key focuses being data analysis, strategic planning and team development of Clickthrough Marketing.  You can follow her on Twitter or connect on LinkedIn.