Wrong Google AdWords Campaign Management
Published May 31st, 2008Generally the mistakes people make in managing their AdWords campaigns are the same ones made by most advertisers. Improvements can be made with under an hours work. This can save you hundreds and probably thousands of dollars with less than 60 minutes work following the advice given in this article.
And what is the top ranking mistake made by folks in Google campaign management? The big culprit is improper organization of their campaign. If ads and keywords are poorly organized you will have inefficient campaigns and higher advertising costs.
When your campaign is organized right you will get the effect you are looking for right off and adjustments and optimization are a snap. This will make all the difference over the long haul.
In a perfect world, you’d serve up a perfect ad for every single keyword someone types in. Since each keyword is different, each ad would be different, too. If you had 2,000 keywords, then you’d have to write 2,000 ads, too.
But for the world that we live in that is not practical. The answer is clustering similar keywords with one ad.
An ad campaign is the file cabinet that holds all your ad groups, it’s topic is general. An ad group is the smallest unit that has keywords and ads in it. Your ad campaign should always have more than one adgroup.
In Google your account can contain as many campaigns as you need. You can have campaigns in your account with totally different topics. The products you sell may be absolutely unrelated and the websites you send traffic to may be different.
The way you divide up your campaigns is your choice, but the in which you divide up your ad groups is not. There is the right way and the wrong way to do it.
Someone starting out might put their campaign together this way:
Smith Telecommunication
Vital Solutions for
Your Every Voice Mail Need
www.smithtelecom.com
This is what their ad looks like, with keywords such as these:
auto attendant
business telephone systems
call management systems
voice mail
voice mail equipment
voice mail service
voice mail systems
Then they send all the visitors to the home page, which has a bunch of different links to “Services,” “Equipment,” “Q&A,” “About Us,” “Contact Us,” etc. What’s wrong with this kind of Google AdWords campaign management?
Number one is the variety in the keyword list is too wide. Each of those words should be put into its own adgroup adding in a shortlist of similar keywords/phrases.
The ad doesn’t match the keywords, and it can’t, because there are too many different kinds of keywords in the group.
“Smith Telecommunications,” or the name of almost any business, is a lousy headline. The clickthrough rate (CTR) is going to be very low, and therefore the bid prices will be higher.
The ad is about Smith Telecommunications, not what the customer really wants. Your ads need to be about your customer, not about yourself!
When searching for ‘voice mail service’ a person wants to go to a page whose topic is voice mail service. Likewise someone looking for equipment will want one on voice mail equipment not voice mail services. By making someone scour your page for the information they want you are making them work too hard and they may leave before they find what they are looking for.
By creating a specific layout of your keywords and adgroups initially, you will be able to make these adjustments more easily. Using www.wordtracker.info or http://inventory.overture.com, categorize your keywords into neat and closely related adgroups. Something like this:
Voice Mail Services (adgroup)
voice mail provider
voice mail service
voice mail service provider
voice mail services
Voice Mail System (adgroup)
voice mail systems
voice mail systems for realtors
telemarketing and voice mail systems
phone systems voice mail
home office voice mail systems
home office telephone voice mail systems
Auto Attendant (adgroup)
answering attendant auto system
auto attendant voice mail services
auto attendant
auto attendant phone system
auto attendant software
auto attendant system
auto attendant voice mail
phone auto attendant
There’s another step we need to take before pasting this into a campaign: Consider negative keywords. Here’s a list of keywords that come from “Voice Mail Software.”
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail broadcasting software
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
mac voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
free voice mail software
You really aren’t wanting to have visitors looking for free stuff. You also don’t have anything to do with voice broadcasting or even Macintosh computers. This is a good start on your negative keyword list. You do this by putting a minus sign in front of each of the words on your negative keyword list. This is how your list will now look:
voice mail software
voice mail business software
voice mail software for panasonic
voice mail business software
multiple voice mail software
multi-line voice mail system software vru
norstar voice mail software
software to record voice mail
Negative Keywords:
free
mac
macintosh
broadcast
broadcasting
When you are all done tweaking your big keyword list you will have a lot of mini keyword lists grouped into their own ad groups and given their own ads.
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