Tips for successful Google AdWords campaigns

Google AdWords can be the most profitable advertising you’ll ever do, provided you do it correctly. This article reviews three common mistakes businesses make when running their own Google AdWords campaigns.

1. Your advert does not have an enticing offer

Google Adwords campaigns are first and foremost “advertising” and basic advertising principles still apply. Yet too many people are obsessed with the technology behind Adwords and fail to create an enticing advert to stand out from the crowd to make someone click.

An enticing offer could be a free whitepaper, free download, limited time special offer and so on. Try typing one of your keywords into Google and review your competitors’ ads. This is what you’re up against.

Include specific benefits or unique aspects of your offer. For example, after some discussions with a client who was a tradesman, it was evident his clients considered punctuality a major worry when booking his services. So we included an offer whereby he would pay his customer $50 if he was more than 15 minutes late. It stood out from his competitors’ ads, and it worked very well.

You should also include the keyword you are bidding on in the actual text of the ad. Remember your customer is looking for a problem to be solved and typed specific keywords into Google. If she sees those same keywords that she had in mind in your ad, she will be far more likely to click on it.

Taking this one step further and by the same logic, you should also include these keywords on the web page they land on after clicking the advert.

2. Not understanding the value of each customer

Before doing any advertising it is critical to understand how much each customer is worth to you. If you don’t, how will you ever know if your advertising was profitable or not, or whether you should keep doing it?

Let’s assume you’re a graphic designer and each customer is worth approximately $500. And for every five email or phone enquiries you receive, you make one sale. That means if you could pay less than $100 per enquiry you’ll make a positive return: $100 x 5 enquiries = $500.

Google AdWords campaigns will generate clicks to your website and those clicks will generate enquiries or sales from your website. By looking at your Adwords costs for a week and comparing them to the number of sales enquiries, you can quickly work out the average cost of each enquiry.

The ultimate goal is to get to a position where you know that, for example, for every $100 you spend on AdWords, you are making $300. Then advertising is no longer a cost where you have no idea what’s working, but a specific profit generating activity. What a lovely place to be!

The next step is to make smart changes to your campaign to further improve your profitability.

3. No conversion tracking in place

If you really want to improve the effectiveness of your Google AdWords campaigns, you should install Google’s conversion tracking code. This enables you to see which individual keyword was responsible for your prospective customer’s web enquiry form or purchase from your website.

Imagine you have a campaign with 200 keywords costing you $500 per month. You may find that only 30 of these keywords are actually generating enquiries or shopping cart sales if you’re selling from your website.

With conversion tracking you can quickly hone in on these ‘converting’ keywords and spend more on them, or pause the other keywords that are just costing you money. Perhaps $300 of your $500 spend was wasted as they were not generating any enquiries. You can now get similar number of sales enquiries with spending $200 per month rather than $500. Your return on spend will go through the roof!

The golden rule with AdWords is “test and measure”. Whenever you make changes, always measure the outcome. Regular focus on your campaign will practically guarantee great results.

There are many strategies to running a successful Google Adwords campaign. What are your best tips?

Philip Shaw a director and founder of CleverClicks, an online marketing company passionate about helping small businesses use the phenomenal power of the internet to boost their sales.

16 comments | Add your own 1 2 3 | Next» View all»

Thanks Phillip - great article (especially the conversion tracking mention). Do you (or anyone else) have any statistics on whether being listed first versus second or third for AdWords makes much of a difference? Rich from Sydney
Getting to know Analytics has helped me greatly in refining keywords & making our site more relevant to visitors.
Analytics shows heaps of data on how visitors actually use your site :
- how they found you
- what they viewed
- how long they stayed
- and much more...
Using Analytics data to refine our campaign has brought the cost per new customer down by almost 30%. Rod Tanks from Sydney
I find the problem with adwords is that the ad is so short. You're allowed 1024 characters for the destination url, and yet only 35 characters each for the two lines in the ad. Barely enough! It's so hard to get across what you do in 70 characters, without enticing punters with an offer as well.
In the second part of your article Philip, I presume you mean that you need to make $500 clear profit after tax, from the client, not just $500 per sale. Ben from Sydney
An interesting little read, thanks! As a participant in the Centrelink NEIS program (New Enterprise Initiative Scheme) I'm pretty keen to try to not duplicate the little things that make life harder than it may be - when I get to the point of using ad words (website imminent) I'll think of you! Cheers. Trish from Brisbane
I have had some good results but overall it can be very expensive if you don't keep a very tight rein on it. Grant Hyman from Sydney | Read my articles
Rich, generally the higher the position the more you pay per click, and the more traffic you get. However, the higher positions do not necessarily mean an equivalent increase in the number of conversions. Often people will click top ranking ads while doing research, and not necessarily buying. And the higher costs may also mean you are paying a higher cost per conversion in the higher positions. We have experienced excellent campaign returns in position 3 and 4, and I have seen research to back this up. However, every market is different! I suggest you start in the lower positions, measure your returns, and then bid higher. Always test & measure.
Regards, Philip Shaw from Sydney | Read my articles

16 comments | Add your own 1 2 3 | Next» View all»

Add Your comments

Preview comment

Name

Website *

Town / city and country

Email (never sold, displayed or given away)

* This will link your name to your site. So please avoid self promotion elsewhere! We delete spam, disrespectful or off-topic comments.