Optimising Ad Words Campaigns

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduction: Most of the time, people think "good" is good enough. But the truth is, we are always out there to get something more because we want things bigger, faster, stronger.
• #3: If you google the word optimization, Wikipedia will define it as relating to improving performance. We want to improve what we have and make it better - like having a house with a better view (show slide), driving a better car (show slide) or having a makeover and improving the way we look (show slide). The next question you need to be asking yourself is, what do I want to achieve by optimizing and improving my AdWords account?
• #4: What do you want your AdWords campaign to achieve? You may want to have (clicking through slide): - more orders - increased percentage of sales or - increase visits
• #6: Just like you, our good friend Sergey is running a small side business called the Google Store where he sells various Google items online such as Google t-shirts, laptop bags, tumblers, towels and anything else he can put the Google logo on. Sergey has an AdWords account and he’s tracking his site performance through Analytics. Sergey’s goal is to increase his sales by 30% so he can work on other cool Google products like the Google phone.
• #7: Now Sergey is a smart cookie and made sure that his AdWords account was linked to his Analytics account. By linking his AdWords to his Analytics account, Sergey can easily access his Analytics data from the Reporting tab of his AdWords account. Aside from that, all his AdWords data like clicks and keyword bids will be incorporated to his Analytics reports which makes it very easy for him to optimize his account. He also made sure he has e-commerce installed because he wants to measure the value of his online transactions and analyze his revenue. He also enabled site search because he has the Google custom search engine installed in his website. By enabling Site Search, he can see what search query terms his customers used to find products on his site.
• #8: The first thing Sergey wants to know is where his visits are coming from, and if it's worth creating a global campaign, or if he should be focusing on specific markets. He’s relying on his Analytics data to lead him into making more informed marketing decisions.
• #9: Sergey decided to use the Map Overlay report under the Visitors tab to know which country or city is most interested in his products.
• #11: He now examines his e-commerce report and found out that Thailand brought him a lot of revenue, more revenue than Singapore.
• #12: This led him to the conclusion that Thailand is a profitable target city and if he can drive more traffic from Thailand, he can increase the total visit value to $638.22.
• #13: So what is Sergey going to do?
• #14: His first step is to find profitable locations and add them to his AdWords location targeting. He will also create a new campaign in Thai to increase his visits. He also thought that it would be a good sales strategy to offer shipping discounts to profitable countries.
• #15: Sergey’s next goal is to find more keywords. He wants to know which keywords his customers are using, if his keywords are profitable and how he can find more keyword cash cows.
• #16: Sergey first looks at the Keyword Report under Traffic Sources. Sergey will look at the non-paid keywords tab to find new keyword cash cows.
• #17: In this example, he found out the keyword “google store” to be very profitable, with a per visit goal value of $0.65 and revenue of $12,206.93. He can add this keyword to his keyword list and look up variations.
• #18: The second report he looks at is the Site Search Report where he can find Search Terms that users used to find products on his website.
• #19: He looked at the unique searches and found out users are searching for blogger, baseball products and are particularly interested in bumper stickers (for whatever reason).
• #20: Sergey also looked at the e-commerce tab, and found that the search term that had the most revenue was the term “1013101”. It doesn’t make sense to put these bunch of numbers as keywords. What he can do is search for the product and add this to his keyword list. And in this case, the product refer to Android shirts.
• #21: One thing Sergey loves about Analytics is the ability to export these keywords as CSV so he can easily find existing keywords using Vlookup in Excel.
• #22: So what is Sergey going to do next?
• #23: Sergey is going to find profitable non-paid keywords in the Keyword Report and add these to his keyword list. He’s also going to find search terms his users are interested in in the Site Search report.
• #24: When a visitor comes to your site, chances are they came from somewhere else – either from a search engine, a blog article, or Facebook. The site that they come from is called the "referring site". Sergey is trying to figure out who his referrer best friends are.
• #25: Sergey is now looking at his referring sites report to see which websites are giving him valuable traffic and which websites are not bringing him valuable traffic. Facebook for example is not bringing his store that many visits, but is bringing in some revenue with a per visit goal value of $0.15.
• #26: By looking at this report, he also discovered that this particular blog is laying a lot of fat zeros. He didn’t want them in his circle of web friends so he decided to exclude them using the Site Exclusion tool in his AdWords campaign.
• #27: To exclude placements in your AdWords account, you can go to the Networks tab, scroll to the very bottom and click on Exclusions, Exlude Placements, and you can start listing down sites which do not bring you valuable traffic.
• #28: On the other hand, he found that seopedia.org brings him high value visits and a lot of sales. He decided he can use Google Trends to find out what other types of websites SEO pedia users are visiting.
• #31: Sergey figured that in order for him to increase sales, he’s going to need more profitable keywords.
• #32: Your landing page is where you send the traffic to. If this page does not appeal to your visitor, it’s going to be “hello, this sucks, goodbye,” and this will be considered a "bounce". When you are receiving a high degree of bounces, this translates to "paying AdWords for nothing".
• #33: The right keyword-ad-landing page is the recipe for campaign success.
• #34: The first metric you can look at is keyword bounce rates. In this case, why is google for kids resulting to high bounce rates? It could mean that either users don’t find the relevance between your keywords and landing page.
• #35: Apart from keywords, you also need to find out if your ads are performing. Here you can ask yourself: Do you have good keywords but weak ad texts? What is your best performing ad? Does the ad lead to a landing page that has high bounce rates?
• #36: When determining which landing pages are performing poorly and have bounce rates higher than his site’s average, these are the things you need check. Before you start going crazy and scream at your web designer, the first thing you need to ask is are users leaving because the landing page did not match the keyword and ad text? If it’s not the keyword, if it’s not the ad text, then you can yell at the designer to fix your site.