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A Google AdWords campaign can be optimized in a similar fashion to websites
to lower "Cost Per Click" (CPC) and increase the "Click Through Rate" (CTR).
Google AdWords give you, the advertiser credit for submitting relevant
advertisements. If you have an effectively designed advertisement on AdWords,
Google will show your advertisement higher up in the sponsored links list,
giving you more exposure with lower CPC. This will in turn increase the CTR
for that ad group, which allows Google to determine that your advertisement
is indeed related to the keyword searched. As CTR is also a factor in determining
the relevancy of your ads, an increase in CTR results in higher rankings in
the sponsored links section.
So how can you design your advertisement so that is it most effective and
achieves high CTR?
Let's look at an example to help me explain things.
Say I run a baby keepsake website (which I actually do) that provides
information on baby keepsake footprints. Some keywords I might consider
using are listed below:
- Baby keepsakes
- What are baby keepsakes?
- Buying a baby keepsake
- etc...
Now, what I could do is to set-up an AdWords adverts like this:
Now that I have created an advertisement what many people would be tempted
to do is to assign all the keywords I can think of to this one advert.
This is not the approach to take!
One of the most important things you must realise is the fact that you
need to target specific keywords in each individual ad. There seems to be
a tendency for advertisers to create one advertisement for multiple keywords.
This is probably due to the way in which the AdWords site is layed out.
Advertisers are asked to create the advertisement before assigning keywords
to it.
What you should do when designing a AdWords campaign is to think, "what
are the keywords I'm trying to target?" and then create individual advertisements
for each keyword by making use of ad groups. So using the keywords above I
would create an ad group for "Baby keepsakes", another one for "what are
baby keepsakes?" and so on.
There are also other things you can do to improve the effectiveness of
your advertisements. Let's take a closer look at the advert I mentioned
before:
Now when Google show these advertisements, they emphasise the search terms
within the ad by making it bold. Let's say someone searched the keyphrase
"buying a baby keepsake" and that (for the sake of this example) I still
had all my keywords assigned to that ad - the following would appear:
Note the fact that AdWords don't enbold "keepsakes" even though it is
just the plural of "keepsake". Basically it needs to be an exact match
unless it's in the URL. If our site was called "www.keepsakes.com",
the search for "keepsake" would still return "www.keepsakes.com".
These points put aside you will notice that this advertisement can
be optimized much further. When creating an ad for individual keywords
you should take the following points into account:
- The Title - Let's say we're creating an ad for the keyphrase
"buying a baby keepsake". The title should include these words, or as
many of these words as possible as this will increase the visibility
of your advertisement.
Another thing you could consider is to try and engage your visior by
asking a question in your title. For example "Are you buying a baby
keepsake?" would be a good title as it includes the keywords and also
manages to engage the viewer (although it's too long to fit).
- Description - This needs to be as informative as possible
and provide an incentive for your visitor to click on the ad and visit
your site. The inclusion of keywords will increase the visibility once
again and increase the relevancy of your ad to their search. An example
being "A list of keepsake sellers for people buying a baby keepsake."
- URL - The url is another place where the visitor and Google
will check to see if your site is relevant to the search term. Try and
include keywords in the url if possible by creating pages such as
"keyword.htm" etc...
- Capitalization - According to some experts capitalization
can have an impact on the effectiveness of your advertisement. By
capitalization I don't mean use capitals through out the ad - Google
wouldn't allow it anyway. What you should do is capitalize the first
word of every letter except words such as "of" etc...
- Geo-Targeting - Google allow you to show your ads to people
in specific areas. If you're a window cleaning company based in the
UK there's no point showing your advertisement to people anywhere
else in the world so make sure you specify that when creating your
ad campaign.
- Trial and Error - You should always be monitoring and then
optimizing your ads. If one of your ads isn't going as well as you'd
like it to you should make changes to the ad to try and improve it's
performance. That said you shouldn't just make changes to the original
ad. Try creating a new advertisement for the same keyword and run both
at the same time. That way you can compare the new ad with the old ad
and keep the one that performs best.
You should be doing this in the long run - creating new ads all the
time and filtering the ones that perform best.
Now that we have discussed the different aspects involved in creating
an advert, lets consider the optimized ad compared to the old ad mentioned
above for the search "buying a baby keepsake" (as it would be shown on
SERPs):
The Old Ad:
The New Ad
Which would you say is more visible and relevant to the search phrase
"buying a baby keepsake"?
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