How to Get the Most Out of Your Adwords Dollar
Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Adwords Dollar?
The number one concern for any beginner Adwords advertiser is the BILL from Google and how to keep it from running up without results. A very valid concern for ANY marketing activity is how to make sure you’re getting the most value for your dollar/time/etc.
So how do you make sure you’re getting the most out of your Adwords dollar?
First – Set Yourself Up to Measure
The pre-step here is to have Google Analytics installed on your site. The easiest way to link your Adwords & Analytics account is to make sure you use the email address associated with your Analytics account to set up your Adwords account.
To link the accounts, head to Tools & Analysis-Google Analytics once logged in to your Adwords account. From there, it’s a pretty simple walk-through but here are Google’s detailed instructions just in case.
If you can’t measure your Adwords properly, you can’t effectively evaluate its value. Sure, Adwords will tell you how many clicks and impressions you’ve gotten, but your REAL value for your biz is what this traffic is doing on your website. With Google Analytics integrated, we know if this traffic is jumping ship right away or if they’re sticking around and converting.
Second – Set Up Goals
You can’t very well get much out of Adwords if you don’t know what you WANT to get out of Adwords, right? Spend some time thinking about your goals for your campaign – number of clicks, conversions, perhaps something a little more advanced?
Once you have your website goals figured out, make sure you have them configured in Google Analytics.
Third – Think Local
Are you a local biz? Make sure you’re limiting your ads to just your territory. If you’re a local hairdresser in Boston, ads showing up in Poland aren’t going to do you much good and will just run up your Cost-Per-Click bill.
Maybe you’re not a local biz, but you still don’t have to show your ads to the whole world. Think carefully about which countries in particular but after that, consider targeting 1-3 major metropolitan areas to start – where is your ideal customer mostly located?
Testing your ads in a few local spots before going national with your campaign can be a HUGE cost saver. Learn what works before spending the big bucks.
Fourth – Choose Keyword Carefully
Choosing keywords is a big part of any element of the online marketing game. Here’s how to choose keywords for your website (or, in this case, for your Adwords campaign).
The second part of this is to make sure you’re choosing keywords that are a great match for your landing page. Quality Score is a HUGE factor in how Google decides to the auction system for Adwords.
Wordstream does a great job illustrating this with their infographic. The below image is a snippet of their larger graphic explaining Google Adwords.
The higher your quality score, the less you’ll have to pay. Even better, the higher your quality score, the more likely your page is a great fit to the searcher’s intended request and the higher your conversion rate will be.
Fifth – Set Limits
Adwords lets you set budget limits on daily basis. If you have a monthly budget, just take your monthly number and divide it by 30.4 (the average number of days in a month).
Budget limits are set at a campaign-level so if you have more than one campaign, you’ll need to set this for each. Once in the Campaigns Tab, you can adjust this limits under Campaign Settings – Bidding and Budget. You can adjust these at any time.
When thinking about your campaign budget, think about what you’re willing to spend on a monthly basis and drill down from there. Setting up these limits helps prevent those oh **** break-the-bank moments.
Don’t be alarmed if your daily cost on a specific day is slightly higher – Adwords will average your daily limit across a whole month. From Google:
AdWords helps you maximize your return on investment (ROI) by looking out for days when search traffic is higher, and then showing your ads more often on those days. When this happens, your total daily cost could be up to 20% more than your usual daily budget – but AdWords prevents your campaign from overspending for the month as a whole based on a monthly charging limit.
You can read more about how that works here.
Lastly – ADJUST ADJUST ADJUST
The worst thing you can do for your Adwords campaign is set it up and let it run ‘on auto’. Even the best campaigns are set up with only the best educated guesses when it comes to ads, keywords, timing.
Set up more than one ad and set them to display evenly so you can see which copy performs better (Campaign Settings – Ad Rotation). Don’t adjust the timing of your ads at first unless you already have data on when your target customer is searching online.
Find out which keywords are converting best and then trim down all the fat from your campaign. Remove poor performing keywords, ads, geographic targets and ad more as you discover them.
The best thing you can do for any online marketing activity (including Google Adwords) is test, test, test.
Bonus – Start with Free Dollars
You can get more out of your Adwords dollar if you’re new to Adwords by starting with some free credits. If you’re a DIYer, just Google “$75 adwords credit” and should you come across a few ads or codes to get you started. Otherwise you can contact an agency or Adwords consultant like me for a $100 voucher to get you started.
Have you ever run an Adwords campaign? Any tips for getting more out of your Adwords dollar? Find this post helpful? Let me know in the comments!
