Small businesses especially find it difficult to get the most out of their AdWords campaigns as they do not have time for day to day management or the expertise to get the most out of AdWords. Therefore, we have created a short and precise PPC checklist to optimise the campaign from the first month which can be downloaded here.

Before Starting..

Before starting the campaign, it is important to answer the following questions in order to get the most out of the campaign.

1. Who is your target market?

This is the most important step for any business. If you do not know who your target market is, you will not be able to get the right search terms used by the market and hence the campaign will not be successful. In order to get a better understanding of the target market, create a buyer persona using this simple guide by Shopify to help you get in the mindset of your target market.

2. What is your budget?

It is important to have a set budget in mind before starting a Google AdWords campaign. This is important because without a specific budget in mind, it is very easy for the monthly spend to go over the estimated amount. When deciding on a budget, it is important to keep the goals of the campaign in mind in order to set the right budget and not start too small.

3. What are your KPIs?

In order to optimise your AdWords campaigns, it is important to know what the KPI for the campaign is before starting. The most common KPIs for any campaign are – Conversions, cost per conversion, number of clicks, click-through-rate etc. Once the KPI for the campaign is set, you can find various new avenues to achieve that KPI.

24 hour Review

Once the campaign has been made live, it is important to review your campaign after the first day as there will be some ads and keywords that are underperforming. Pausing these keywords and ads at this early stage will be beneficial in the long run.

1. Review Budget Spend

If your budget has been reached before the first day is over, you need to review the bid amounts on the keywords. There are two options to reduce the bids, either you can reduce the bid amounts for all the keywords or only reduce the biggest spenders. Alternatively, if the daily budget was not met, you should review the bid amounts on the keywords and increase the bids till the budget is reached.

2. Keyword and Ad Status

Google may sometimes disapprove your ads if they are against the Ad Policies of AdWords. Double punctuations, trademarks etc. are a reason for ads to be disapproved by Google. Some keywords also get disapproved if they direct to a different landing page. Therefore, it is important to review the status of all the keywords and ads after day one so that any disapproved keywords or ads can be rectified at once.

Day 7 Optimisation

This is the first time you can start optimising your AdWords campaigns. By waiting for seven days, you can get a fairly good idea about the performance trends on the campaigns and the best time to start optimising the campaigns.

1. Check Ad Positions

It is best to be in the first three ad positions of the campaign. If your ads are in this position, the bidding strategy you are using is working well and you should continue to use the same strategy. However, if your position is below the 6th position, you should increase your bidding slightly if your budget is still not meeting its daily mark.

2. Check Your Budget

It is important to look at the “big picture” when looking at your budget at this stage. Set the time period to ‘last 7 days’ and check the graph. If the daily budget is met, reduce the number of active keywords. Also, change the match types of the keywords form broad to either phrase match or exact match. This will help free some of the budget from broad match keywords.

3. Low Search Volume Keywords

Some keywords will be labeled as ‘low search volumes’ if you check your keywords tab on AdWords. These are keywords that are not getting many searches on Google. These keywords should be paused immediately as these generally do not get many conversions.

4. Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are those keywords that are not relevant to your business. After 7 days, you can get a decent search term report from analytics. You can use this report to find out what keywords are triggering your ads that are not already in your keyword list. From this list, the keywords that you deem not fit for your objective can be excluded by adding it as a negative keyword to your campaign.

Day 14 Optimisation

The goal for the optimisations from this point is to increase the quality score of your campaigns while still being profitable.

1. Low Click-Through-Rate

It is important to pause all poor performing ads and keywords. This means that all ads and keywords that have low click-through-rate (below 0.50%) should be paused as these are not converting impressions into clicks even if they are positioned well. This will help improve the quality score of the campaign which is beneficial for the long run even though the short term potential of the campaign is not maximized.

2. Optimise Ads

After two weeks, it is time to shift the focus of the campaign onto the ads. Review the overall goal of the campaign and make sure that the goals for the ads are aligned with the overall goal. All under-performing ads should be paused at this point. If none of the ads in the Ad Group are meeting your objective, pause all the ads and start afresh. For the ads that are successful, make minor changes to them such as changing ‘buy’ to ‘order’ to help with A/B split testing. Do not ignore small improvements as they will make big contributions in the long run.

3. Review Bids

Even though it was done after the first 7 days, it is still important to review if your budget is being exceeded. Making these slight changes to the bidding model of your campaign will be beneficial in the long term success of the campaign.

4. Review Keywords

All keywords that are not performing well should be paused at this stage. It is important to focus on keywords that are profitable for the business rather than those are never going to perform well. Review the search term report for negative keywords and new keywords that can be added.

5. Reasons For Low Quality Score

Some of your keywords will have a low quality score. There are several reasons for a low quality score but the most efficient way to improve this score is to work on the relevance of the Ad to the landing page. Ensuring that the relevance of the search term, keyword, and ad and landing page is high is one of the best practices for having a high quality score.

Day 21 & Beyond

After three weeks, you are more than likely to be close to a successful campaign in terms of stability. Depending on your traffic levels, it is either time to redo the optimisation from week 2 or just make minor adjustments to the ads that are successful. Going forward, it is important to schedule your optimisations as there is a constant need to make minor adjustments to the ad copy or bidding module to help increase your return on ad spends.

If you want to see what Evolution Digital can do for your PPC campaigns, email us at info@evolutiondigital.ie or call 01 288 5118.