Best Tips for Google Adwords PPC Optimization

Google Adwords campaign Optimization is a full time job for PPC professionals as Google regularly improves Adwords PPC ad auction system with new features and Quality Scores updates.
Google offers official Adwords guides for beginners:

• Adwords Beginner’s Guide
• Optimization Center

Before optimizing your Google Adwords campaigns, go through the check list below:

• Quality Score
• Account Structure
• Ad Copy Optimization
• Keyword Research
• Keyword Bidding
• Location and Language Targeting
• Reports
• Conversion Tracking
• Landing Page Optimization

Quality Score

Google Adwords Quality Score is one of the most important ranking factors for Adwords campaign optimization. Optimize your Adwords campaigns by improving the Quality Score of your accounts, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and landing pages.

The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC).

Google’s Quality Score is a “live” ranking algorithm which is re-calculated at the time of each search query. Quality Score also differs for search network campaigns and content network campaigns.

Account Structure

A Google Adwords account consists of campaigns and ad groups. Campaign level settings allow you to select locations (e.g. countries, cities), languages, networks, budgets, bidding methods, ad scheduling and ad delivery methods. A Google Adwords account typically has the following structure:

Ad groups serve as “keyword holders”. All the keywords in an adgroup are associated with only ads in that ad group. Create closely related keywords within a single ad group allows your keywords to be categorized in a single “theme”.
Google’s traffic partners within Adwords content network are different to those in Adwords search network, so one of the best practices is to always separate your search campaigns from content campaigns. Adwords content targeting optimization differs from search targeting optimization.
Ad Copy Optimization
High click through rate (CTR) is the most important factor for achieving high Google Adwords Quality Score. Professional PPC ad copy writing will ensure the CTR of your ads is optimized.
Keep the size of your ad groups small so that each ad group contains only closely related keywords. It is easier to write targeted ads for an ad group of 10 keywords than for an ad group of 100 keywords.
Test two ads per ad group. Rotate the ads evenly and allow each ad to display for a minimum of 100 impressions. After each A/B ad test, keep the ad that produces higher conversion rate and replace the ad that results in lower conversion rate. Repeat the A/B ad test until you are satisfied with your ad groups’ conversion rates.
Inside Adwords Blog also offers some ad text optimization tips.
When targeting some countries such as the US, you can include whatever trademark within your ad text.
Keyword Research
Create your core keyword list using the SEM keyword research tools. When building your keyword list, you should always include:

• Singular and plural keywords – phone vs. phones
• Synonyms – mobile phones vs. cell phones
• Common misspelled keywords – entrepreneur vs. entreprenuer
• Geographically related keywords – Illinois search marketing workshop
• Your brand or trademark keywords – Amazon

Adwords offers 3 major keyword match types (i.e. broad, phrase, and exact). Adwords broad match keywords are great for the discovery of new keyword variations that may or may not be related to your website. Search Query Performance Report allows you to pick out two lists of keywords: the irrelevant keywords and the relevant keywords.

• Add the irrelevant keywords as negative keywords to your existing campaigns or ad groups (where appropriate) to filter out clicks that would have cost you but would not have converted
• Add the relevant keywords as exact match keywords to new ad groups to capture additional clicks that you would not have previously captured with targeted ad text

However, mis-use of broad match keywords can also cost you to spend large amount of unnecessary marketing budget.

Keyword Bidding

Keyword bidding on Google Adwords is an ongoing process, as you do have to adjust your keywords’ bids according to your bottom line (aka PPC business model). When using multiple keyword match types within your Adwords account, set your keywords’ cost-per-click (CPC) as below:

• Exact keyword: Highest CPC
• Phrase keyword: Medium CPC
• Broad keyword: Lowest CPC

Before setting your keywords’ bids manually, use Google Adwords Bid Simulator to find out your keywords’ estimated clicks, impressions and cost.
If you aren’t able to keep up with manual bidding, Google offers Adwords Conversion Optimizer to automatically optimize your campaigns based on your campaigns’ past conversion data.

Location and Language Targeting

Google Adwords offers geo location targeting on the campaign level. For example, show your ads to only China’s users if your products are only available for sales in China.

Language targeting is also available on Adwords campaign level. For example, set your campaign language to English and Spanish, if your products’ users are only (or mostly) English or Spanish speaking people in the United States.

Ad scheduling allows you to display ads only during your selected period of time.

Google Adwords Reports

Adwords offers many built-in reports which offer you insights to your Google Adwords account.

• Place / Keyword Performance Report gives you keyword or placement data depending on the type of your campaign’s network
• Ad Performance Report shows you the performance data of your ads
• Account Performance Report is the top level report for your Google Adwords account
• Search Query Performance Report is a great source for discovering new keywords and negative keywords
• Geographic Performance Report breaks down the geographical locations of your traffic sources
• Placement Performance Report tells you where your ads have been shown within Google’s content network sites

Adwords reports can be scheduled to run automatically and saved as templates for future use.

Conversion Tracking

Set up Adwords Conversion Tracking in your Google Adwords account. Adwords Conversion Tracking allows you to track key metrics including cost per sales, cost per leads, and cost per sign-up on the keyword level. Once Adwords Conversion Tracking is installed, the conversion data will be shown under the conversion columns within all your Adwords built-in reports.

Install Google Analytics and view your website’s traffic by traffic sources, visitors and pages viewed. To complement your Adwords account’s data, link your Google Analytics account to your Adwords account and import your site’s Google Analytics goals into your Adwords account.

Landing Page Optimization

The conversion rate of your website is highly related to your site’s landing pages.
Each keyword or set of keywords should be targeting a product which should have a unique landing page. The keyword of your product should be displayed at a prominent position (or within one of the most important tags, e.g. H1) on your landing page.

• For specific keywords such as “Nokia phone ABC3801″, the content of the landing page should only be about the product “Nokia phone ABC3801″.
• For generic keywords such as “mobile phones”, your landing page can be a list of all the mobile phones available on your site.

The next step is to test different versions of your landing pages with Google Website Optimizer or other web page A/B testing tools.