Google AdWords and any other type of Pay Per Click engine is all about ROI, your return on investment is pivotal in a good or bad campaign and there are many keys to the success of such campaigns. I will focus on Google AdWords as it is the most widely used platform but feel free to ask about any other platform.

1. Experiment – PPC is all about understanding your market and the potential client base available from this channel, how will you ever know how many clicks and customers are available unless you play around with budgets, times of the day and location unless you try? In the early days of the campaign test as much as possible, refine and create a robust campaign that works for you.

2. Learn – If something isn’t working, change and learn how to recognise what will and wont work in AdWords before you action it. For example targeting certain markets on mobile platforms or on content networks may or may not work but learning and experimenting from yourself and others is the best way to succeed saving you time and money.

3. Focus on conversions –Possibly the most common mistake I see when looking at a new account is people focusing on clicks and not conversions or even worse than that not having a conversion tracker installed on the account. I have seen accounts of people who have been running Ad Words for years and spent hundreds of thousands on it without knowing how many conversions it gets them, for me that’s the most important thing about internet marketing as a whole, being able to analyse in real time.

• Install a conversion tracker on a ‘thankyou’ page or equivalent yardstick that is your target for the campaign.
• Pause and delete those keywords, ad groups and campaigns that do not convert!
• Don’t be drawn into judging the success of the campaign on clicks or any other metric that isn’t telling you how many customers you’re getting, your there for customers
• If a keyword is costing a % of your daily budget but isn’t converting over a decent period of time (judge that for yourself) then drop it, no matter if it’s your main service or product. You need to get customers; once you have a firm bed of keywords that are converting regularly you can add in the ‘prize’ and ‘luxury’ keywords.  Remember that wasted £ on keywords that don’t convert is sapping budget away from keywords that do convert.

4. Be pro-active – Don’t just sit on your laurels, there are always more keywords, placements and experiments you can run. Small tweaks to keywords can have a massive difference to a whole campaign so keep playing around in silos and continue to get better return on investment out of your campaign.

5. Use all that is available to you – There is probably a way to summarise this better but essentially I mean utilise all the services, tricks and ways you can improve your campaign that are available to you. Things like:

• Utilise the display URL to include a keyword or two
• Build separate landing pages for all ad groups
• Use the ‘experiment’ function on Google PPC to mine data
• Create multiple ads with a different approach
• Start with as many keywords as your budget allows, trim, refine and focus on conversions not clicks.

Tags: adwords, pay per click, ppc

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 14th, 2011 at 9:27 am and is filed under SEO Tips & Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.