5 Tips to Building an Effective Google Adwords Campaign

A recent whitepaper from the search engine optimization and marketing firm MoreVisibility, 10 Critical Elements to a Successful Google Adwords Campaign, provides tips for multichannel merchants to help them realize the full potential, and profitability, of a properly managed Google Adwords account. Here are five pointers to take away from the report.

1. Keep your campaigns and ad groups tightly themed. Keep your campaigns and ad groups as relevant to your business as possible. Without tightly themed ad groups, you run the risk of Google not being able to determine the context of your groups, the whitepaper cautions. This results in Google misinterpreting what you represent or want to represent within your key phrases. Tightly themed ad groups also benefit ad copy, helping to focus it on one message that can be effectively conveyed to each phrase or subject matter within that group.

2. Take advantage of free analytics and conversion tracking from Google. To identify the performance of each keyword and its cost per conversion within the Adwords interface, set up conversion tracking. This capability is helpful to optimize poorly performing words or make bidding decisions. This is only a start, however. Google doesn’t provide enough information to make informed decisions regarding keeping or removing terms. A full suite analytics program is needed to do this accurately, as well as understand what your Web visitors are doing on the site, the whitepaper advises. Google analytics supports all marketing efforts, including other channels and search engines.

3. Monitor and improve your quality score. The quality score metric can greatly impact your visibility and ad costs on Google. Every keyword is assigned a quality score, which relates back to the relevancy of your ad copy and landing page for this term. The quality score is comprised of several factors, including clickthrough rate, relevance of the keyword to its ad group, landing page quality, history of the account’s performance, and other relevance factors. This score directly affects your status on that word (active or paused), as well as minimum bid price and position (on a per keyword basis). Landing page load time is a recently added metric to this score, so if you use redirects or have a flash or image-heavy page, it could negatively impact your score, the whitepaper says. There’s a separate column in the Adwords interface for each term; rating are displayed as good, OK, poor, etc.