* Note: this is a recap from Google Adwords seminar by me for BraveBits last week.
About my background: before getting to work at BraveBits, I have 3 months doing Google Adwords for eCommerce for Vatgia.com. Then at BraveBits, I ran Google Adwords for our WooCommerce theme – Nitro.
First of all, I’m not a Google Adwords expert. I’m just using Google Adwords to reach the business goal of my team – to earn sales. The goal of this article, therefore, is simply to share my experience while running Adwords (search ads) at BB.
Put it broad. Then narrow it down
My flow when running any Adwords campaign is broad to close.
1/Adwords is about machine learning, and machine learning can only be effective when the data is big enough.
2/Narrow down a newly-created can lead to a loss of conversion from a segmentation that you may not expect. For example, your target country is “Singapore” only, but there can be customers from Malaysia or US. They also can purchase your product, but you don’t let them see your product on Google search.
Instead of limited segments, using some basic segments at first is a good start. After a time period (several weeks or a month, depend on your product and business goal), review your performance, and separate your current campaign into smaller ones to optimize ad bidding.
There are some exceptions that you have to use adjacent segments.
E.g: an Adwords campaign for a restaurant in Hanoi only. In this case, you can’t set location segmentation to “Vietnam”, since there could be customers from other cities and they couldn’t be converted into sales.
(No more than) one change at a time
Doing than one change at a time also means that many variables modified, which may lead to much noise in ad performance. Thus you will never know which change brings higher performance. So try to edit ONE element in your campaign, and be patient enough to wait for the result.
Stop targeting keywords. Use keyword themes instead.
There are a lot of articles from experts out there said that we have to use target keywords to trigger our ads. But as a regular Google search user, do we always search these keywords?
In most cases, NO!
If you look into search terms in your active Adwords campaigns, you’ll realize that people search for various terms. Some have a meaning, while some are meaningless.
To capture as many leads as possible, use keyword themes instead of keywords. When your ads are triggered based on a specific theme, your ads will have a higher position, lower CPC, higher relevance, and the quality score is higher accordingly. For using keyword theme, use +broaden +keyword +match (with the plus “+” before each word that you want to set the theme). Only a keyword theme per ad group.
Here is an example of a keyword theme: you want to set ads for a fashion shop for women. Some keyword themes for this campaign can be
- +fashion +women
- +where +fashion +women
- +clothing +women
- …
For each theme, create an ad group and write ad content based on this theme. For the best performance, the ad content, URL, and landing page’s content should be exact or closely related to the keyword theme.
For example, with the theme +fashion +women, I can create ads like:
keep track of search terms, and continue modifying and adding +modified +broad +matched keywords (in suitable ad group) to enhance the performance for your campaign.
Negative keywords are your BFFs
Negative keywords are keywords that can burn out your budget, but don’t bring much value for your campaigns. When coming up with a new Adwords campaign, don’t forget to make a list of negative keywords.
There are 2 level for setting negative keywords: campaign level and ad group level
For campaign level
Negative keywords include the ones that are not relevant to your product/service. For example, if your product is fashion products for kids, there must be negative keywords about fashion for women, fashion for men, etc.
For ad group
Use negative keywords section to avoid ads cannibalization. When a search query is triggered, there is only 1 ad from a single domain can be displayed.
For example: a Google Adwords campaign for a productivity application
Ad group 1: with keywords like:
productivity app
best productivity app review
productivity which is best
Ad group 2: with keywords like:
[productivity app]
+productivity +app 2016
Since keywords [productivity app] in ad group 2 is more relevant than the keywords productivity app and +productivity +app 2016, the ads triggered from that keyword in ad group 2 will fight with keywords in group 1 each time your ad is triggered. Instead of bidding ad with other competitors, your ads have to compete with their bros, which is a waste of time and budget.
As your campaign is running, don’t forget to track search terms, and add more negative keywords to make the most of your Adwords budget.
I’m lying
The ugly truth of Google Adwords is that there is no formula to high conversion rate. Even the campaign that’s bringing high ROI for you today can turn to low performance or high bidding price someday. Even Adwords tips and tricks from Adwords experts, or anything you have found about “how to run an effective Adwords campaign” (even this article!) don’t ensure a victorious campaign for you.
So the best way to control your campaigns for best result is to learn lessons along the way. Note down the search behavior of your target audiences, and optimize your ads to make them best matched with your audience’s needs.
Jeanne's 