Dont Waste Your Adwords Budget!
If your new to Google Adwords you could be pouring your money down the drain, If you don’t know how to set up your campaign properly.
I know personally from experience of running my first ever small business (not this one) that there are some really easy mistakes to be made. In my first year of running a PPC campaign my total adwords spend was just over £10,000 which is not a massive amount but for a small business it was still a huge dent in my profits.
Leaning The Art Of PPC
The following year I decided that I needed to get my act together and learn the art of PPC management. I could see that adwords together with organic SEO really was working well for my business. But could be even better if I could lower my monthly adwords bill.
By the end of the following year after months of tweaking and testing. I had managed to reduce my adwords bill to just under £2,000 and believe it or not that 2k yielded much better results which meant even more profit than the year before. And all because the campaign had been tweaked to get the maximum amount of clicks for lowest cost per click and was targeted specifically at my potential customers.
How I optimised my Campaigns
I started by creating sub campaigns for each of my local towns and used the location targeting setting to include people searching in and about my targeted location. I rewrote all of my old ad listings making sure that they all included great ad copy and my targeted keywords. I also set each advert so that the link clicks through to specific location and keyword targeted landing pages to help improve my ad quality score.
Improved Ad Position
My average ad position had shot up to to a steady 1.0 and 1.1 for my whole campaign and that meant that my website was at the top of google for each of my targeted keywords and each click was costing me a fraction of the cost of the previous year.
Keyword Modifiers
I had implemented the use of the broad match modifier and exact match modifier. For my key phrases both of these changes helped me achieve a lower cost per click for my exact match keyword but also meant that I was targeting different synonyms and variants of my chosen key phrases.
Which is great as it gives your campaign a better chance of reaching more customers than just exact match phrases. Along with the use of a negative keywords list this can be a really effective way of getting those extra clicks and also from my experience helps prevent those fraudulent clicks that a lot of exact match only campaigns suffer from.
Ad Scheduling
I also made sure that my ads were running to a specific time and day schedule. After all most small businesses don’t really need there campaign running while there customers are sleeping.
Through testing I found out that for my business each day had different calling patterns for instance on a Monday I would receive most of my phone calls between 8am and 7pm. On Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I received most of my calls between 9am and and 4pm. Friday 9am-6pm and saturday and sunday it was 10am-1pm.
Just making this change alone massively improved my click through rate. Leading to a much better quality score which maintained my ad position and lowered the cost of each click.
Ad Extensions
I also setup call extensions which are not only great because mobile users can click to call straight from there search results. It also gives you an extra insight into if your ads are actually generating calls.
Another great extension is the site-link extension which adds even more content to your ad copy. Site-links are extra links to chosen pages that display underneath your ad text which is great for extra exposure of ads in search results.
I added the anchor text as £10 off carpet cleaning for one link and £10 off upholstery cleaning for another which worked really well for me and improved my click through rate.
Try It Out For Yourself
Getting the most of your adwords budget really is trial and error. However if you follow these tips I can almost guarantee you will reduce your adwords budget and even improve your click through rate for your campaigns.
