Bury Your Competitors by Making Your AdWords Campaigns More Successful: Four Vital Tips

		Would you like to be on the cutting edge of Online Marketing? Every month you can receive articles, white papers and guides that deal with the challenges you are faced with. Sign up for the Bloofusion Newsletter now!

The challenge, however, is in the detail. If you are wondering how to optimize your budget to end up spending less than your competitors while outranking them, take a look at the following four tips.

Tip #1: Select negative key words

By choosing your list of key words you decide which queries will launch your ads. But not every visitor may represent a good target for you. In order to directly exclude certain client groups, you need to specifically disallow particular search terms.

In this example the ad will always appear when "music downloads" is queried. However, if the query contained "free" or "cheap", the keywords preceded by dashes will ensure that the ad does not appear for those combinations.

Tip #2: Separate the content network

In your campaign settings you will find two options the indicate where your ads will actually appear: If you select the "search network" option your ads will appear on Google and its search partners. By checking "content network" your ads will come up on various other partner web sites as well.

In theory, there is no difference where your ads appear, but in practice, the conversion rates for search pages end up much higher than those for content pages. A popular strategy that lets you take advantage of the content network is to create two separate campaigns: One will only appear only within the search network, the other only within the content network, usually with lower bids. That way you can manage the difference between the two networks, while still taking advantage of both them.

Tip #3: Monitor conversion rates

Another helpful feature offered by Google AdWords as well as Overture is the so-called conversion tracking. A conversion can mean several things, i.e. a successful purchase or a newsletter subscription. It all depends on what the primary goal of your web site is.

Google AdWords provides a small piece of HTML tracking code. And by adding this code to the appropriate page(s) of your site, AdWords will be able to verify how many clicks are needed for one conversion to take place and how much you are paying for each conversion. In the example above, the ad group "Online Marketing" has a conversion rate of 8.33% (meaning that 100 clicks will give you an average of 8.33 conversions) and the average cost per conversion has been $7.11.

If want to optimize your budget, you may now use these data to turn off the "Search Engine Marketing" ad group or at least decrease the bids. Another reason that there is a low conversion rate here may be the quality of the page that is linked to the ad.

Tip #4: Don't just link to the home page

Since you are paying good money for your clicks, you should make sure that your visitors are finding exactly what they are looking for. Usually that means: don't link your ads directly to your home page. The target URL ought to be defined by your key word that brought the visitor there: If somebody is searching for "backup software" they should end up in a shopping area of your site, somebody else searching for "backup solutions" should end up on a page featuring more specific information, such as current product offers or deals.

To achieve this, you can either set up various ad groups with different URLs or simply link the distinct URL directly to the key word.

Printer-Friendly Version of this Page

	Our white papers cover the online marketing sector in much greater detail: Search Engine Optimization for E-commerce Sites     Search Engine Optimization and Web 2.0     Web Design and Search Engine Optimization: Two Separate Worlds More White Papers...