How To Maximize Your Adwords Performance

Making your Adwords advertisements highly relevant is one of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful campaign. High relevance leads to high clickthroughs and as we all know, high clickthroughs lead to better positioning and a lower cost per click.

Google deliberately keeps vague about the algorithms they use to rate the relevance of your Adwords ad and how that then translates into the price you pay, but ultimately all you need to know is that relevance is vitally important. So how do you achieve it?

Here are three vital steps to help you get the best from your Adwords budget.

1. Segmented keyword lists. Too many novice advertisers invest a huge amount of time in building their keyword list, but then don’t use them correctly. They use all the latest tools and research to create massive lists of words, phrases and every possible variation under the sun, but then they put all those keywords into one single ad group.

   The problem with this is that it is impossible for one single ad group to be relevant to all those words. If you are selling organic food, your keyword list might include such variations as organic vegetables, home-grown onions, non-GM (genetically modified) produce and so on. There is no way, in the limited space available to you in an Adwords ad that you can have all those words appear.

   It is many times more effective to break that huge list down into multiple small lists, each focused around one keyword. In our organic food example, that would mean creating a list based purely around onions, such as organic onions, home-grown onions, non-GM onions and all the variations you can think of. However, now you will have maybe 40 subsets of 30 or 40 words and phrases on each single theme, instead of 800 on multiple themes.

2. Multiple ad groups. Next, you will take each of your tightly focused sub lists and create an Ad Group, specifically for that list. Your aim should be to have an advert which can incorporate almost all of the most essential words from that list in its headline and copy. For example, you could write an ad with the headline, ‘Want Organic Onions?’ and body copy that says, ‘Home-grown, non-GM onions, fresh from the organic farm.’

   Why is this important? Because when a searcher types ‘organic onions’ into the search box, your ad will appear with the words organic and onions bolded, at the right side, high up the page. It will stand out because it contains the exact words our prospect entered. It is a direct connect to his query and the bold text will draw his eye.

   The headline ‘Want Organic Onions?’ rephrases the exact question he had in his mind and is a powerful psychological incentive to click on your ad and not another that says, ‘Fresh produce, grown organically.’

   Unlike your competition, you will have created another keyword list that uses the phrase 'grown organically' and another that focuses on ‘tomatoes.’ One for cabbage and one for carrots. One for non-GM and so on.

3. Create ad variations to test and cover all bases. Finally, within each Ad Group you must take full advantage of Google’s powerful testing tool; the ability to create ad variations.

   Take your first ad in each group and create three variations by changing one simple thing, such as the headline. Our original headline ‘Want Organic Onions?’ can be varied to make ‘Find Organic Onions’ or ‘Organic Onions Online.’

   The trick is to make small changes and then test them for responses. As soon as one of the three becomes a clear leader, drop the other two and start making small changes to the body copy. If something causes a drop in clickthrough rates, go back to the previous version and try again. It is perfectly possible to increase your ad performance by two or three times, with careful testing.

To recap; the key to high relevance, good page positions and a low cost per click is to create tightly focused keyword lists; build custom ads for each one and finally test, test, test.

If this sounds like a lot of hard work, you’re right, but if you want to make Adwords work for you as an effective tool, instead of being a poor performing cash drain, then this is work that you really need to put in.