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The 5 Keys To Google AdWords Optimization

April 9, 2017 Dayton Barmore

You spent a whole year building up a 1200 horsepower engine and it's finally ready to go! Keys in the ignition. Heart racing with excitement. You turn the key and BOOM! Smoke is seeping out from underneath the hood and the dream has officially been crushed. You are left with three options:

1. You throw a temper tantrum and permanently convert to riding bicycles for the rest of your life.

2. You decide to start from scratch, circle the date on next year’s calendar, and mark the last year off as a failure.

3. You figure out what went wrong, and you fix it.

Yay, you chose the smart option! (Warning: If you thought number 1 or number 2 was the right decision then you’re a lost cause and this article will not help you one bit). Looking around your garage you spot your 5-year-old son chewing on a valve. Hmm, I think your problem-solving skills just saved you a lot of time, money, and leg cramps from your old bicycle. You might have even prevented some infectious diseases for your 5-year-old son (depending on how long it took you!) You fixed the problem and now you’re driving the car of your dreams.  

Now translate that to your Google AdWords Campaign. Yes, you know which one I’m talking about, the one swirling into oblivion as we speak. The one you're about to give up on. Remembering back to when I first started using Google AdWords, I would start a campaign and it would immediately put up some really bad numbers. Thus, my fear and anger would force me into calling it quits so I could allocate the funds towards something easier and less stressful. After my heart rate lowered to a safe level I would try again. Then I would fail. Then I would quit. Repeat. I desperately wish that I could go back in time and teach myself that the right formula isn’t Fail. Quit. Repeat, but instead, Fail. Optimize. Repeat. So how do you “optimize” a campaign? 1. Set Your Targets (Not Goals) I am hoping and assuming that you set goals for your campaign. Good, you have your goals clearly defined, but how many people define their targets? Two completely different things. Is a CTR of 3% good or bad? What about a CPC of $2.50? What’s a good average cost per conversion? I can’t answer any of those questions for you. I work for a radon mitigation company where each job has a net profit of over $500, so I can deal with a higher CPC. If my average cost per conversion is under $150, then I’m doing fantastic. I shoot for a CTR of 5% as my bare minimum (the average is only 2%). because people searching for radon mitigation services know specifically what they’re looking for because “Radon Mitigation” isn’t searched for nearly as much as something like “cheap razors” for example. Rule of thumb: you can't throw a temper-tantrum about a specific metric until you know what it means to you. After that, you can break all the stuff you want. 2. Find The Failing Component In The Campaign Before Calling The Campaign A Failure This ties in directly with the car analogy. There is a very good chance that something specific within your campaign is causing it to fail. This is where a large number of reports that google makes available to you come in handy. Say you apply the "Device" Segment and find out that 70% of your clicks are coming from “Mobile Devices With Full Browsers” but their conversion value is twice as much as the traffic coming from “Desktops”. Before you can pull the trigger and just exclude your ads from showing on mobile devices, you need to dig deeper. Is your site optimized for mobile? Yes. Then go to the Placements report and find out if a lot of the mobile clicks are coming from within apps. And if you didn’t know that apps are evil money draining snakes on PPC campaigns, you do now. Next, you exclude that placement and fill a huge hole in your campaign.   3. Fix Your Budget Ok, this one seems like a no-brainer. I’m not trying to tell you that you should consider raising your budget because you have some unrealistic goal to achieve a total conversion value of $30,000 in four days when your daily budget is $1.50. If you’re doing that, then I suggest that you stop marketing all together and see how Human Resources or Customer Service fits you. I’m referring to missing half of your potential impressions because your budget is off by a little bit. The first place to look is under the Search Lost IS (budget) column at the campaign level. It will show you the percentage of potential impressions that you lost due to an insufficient budget.

4. Improve The Quality Score Of Your Keywords There is one metric that far outweighs the others when looking at your keywords, and that would be the Quality Score. The Quality Score is Google’s estimate of how well a keyword has performed overall in past ad auctions. Based on this data, each of your keywords gets a Quality Score on a scale from 1 to 10, where 1 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest. You really want to aim for a Quality Score at 7 or above. The higher Quality Score the less you’ll pay for clicks on that keyword, and it will appear at a higher average position. Three things determine the Quality Score: 1. The expected CTR. Unlike the "CTR" column, the expected CTR of a keyword considers how the keyword performs both within your account and across all other advertisers' accounts. 2. The ad relevance, which measures how closely related your keyword is to the text in your ads. 3. Your landing page. Landing pages with higher ratings are usually well organized and have text that relates to a person's search terms.

5. The Number Of Keywords, Ads, And Ad Groups Each theme needs its own ad group, otherwise, prepare for an awful CTR. Within the ad groups, you should have at least 2 ads. 3 is an ideal number. Just make sure you have more than one! A key to optimization is trial and error, multiple ads really allow you to see how one ad performs better than another. And keep your keywords below 20 per ad group at all times. Anything over 20 makes your keyword collection too broad Match your keywords to your ad group themes.

Let me get something off my chest. In all honesty, I hate you Google AdWords. From the bottom of my heart, I absolutely hate you. That’s coming from someone who lives and breathes digital marketing. Google AdWords is potentially the most frustrating advertising platform in the world. Sure, it gets easier as you really start to learn the platform. But do not think that there isn’t one day spent working with Google AdWords that I do not want to dip my computer in gasoline, light it on fire, and move to North Korea just so I would be restricted from going anywhere near Google ever again. Those are some frustrations from someone who has a lot of success with pay-per-click campaigns. So just be patient, micro-manage, figure out why things are or aren’t happening, and use as much data, metrics, columns, dimensions, filters, and anything else that will provide you with further insight into your campaign.