Toronto SEO Blog

Search engine marketing, or SEM, Adwords can be a great source for finding new customers for your products and services.

While it’s fairly straight forward to setup an Adwords account, it’s not so straight forward to get your Adwords account to perform at it’s maximum potential. There are some fundamental account settings that’ll help, but it’s a process that takes several months or more to achieve, as opposed to one single thing that you change and magically transform your Adwords account into a money making machine.

Here are some of the areas you’ll need to optimize and tools you’ll need to know in order to run a successful Adwords campaign that provides a positive ROI.

Adwords Campaign Tracking

This is arguably the most important area to make sure you have setup, and understand – if you’re not involved in the setup, you should still be able to run reports and see what’s performing and what isn’t with your Adwords campaigns.  It always amazes me to see businesses running paid campaigns without tracking in place.  Without tracking you’re flying blind, and don’t have hard data on performance.

Analytics provides two types of tracking – Goals & Events.

Goals are for tracking basic stuff – forms, etc… whereas Event tracking is very robust and configurable, suitable for more complex tracking requirements.

In addition, Analytics provides a way to tie in your eCommerce ordering system so you can track sales by source, including sales volumes, number of transactions and much more.

So make sure you’re tracking all your paid campaigns – from SEM, to SEO, if it’s costing you money every month, you should be tracking it.

Adwords Account Organization

Start here with building your campaign.  Remember that some of the settings that control your campaigns can only be set at the campaign level, not the adgroup level, so take some time in the beginning to think about the best way to organize your campaigns.  This will give you more flexibility and control over how and when your ads run.

Adwords Campaign Settings

Some of the most important settings to help you get the most out of your campaign performance include:

• Language and Locations
• Networks and Devices
• Google Search, Search Partners & Display Networks
• Budgets
• Bidding Options
• Delivery Methods
• Ad Delivery
• Standard or Accelerated
• Account Organization
• Adgroups & Campaigns
• Keywords
• Ad Copy
• Landing PagesA/B, Multi-variate Testing
• Adwords Editor
• Analytics Tracking
• Goals and Events

Location – if your product or service is only available locally, then make sure you’ve setup the location settings.  You can select where your ads show by Provence, City, even postal code as well as set a radius around your selection.  This ensures you’re not wasting your spend showing your ads to people who can’t even buy from you.

Time Settings – controlling the time of day your ads run improves the efficiency of your ad spend. Allows you to set the times you want to run your ads, so they aren’t running in the middle of the night when normal buying customers are sleeping.

Networks – control where your ads run.  Choose from Google search, Partner search, and Display network.  We always suggest starting with only the Google search network and adding others if you’re having difficulty achieving an adequate click volume.

Devices – control what type of devices your ads appear on.  From desktop and laptops, to tablets and mobile phones.  If you don’t have a mobile site, or a site that works perfectly on mobile devices, don’t pay for traffic that’ll never convert.

There are more settings, but these are a few of the most important ones you’ll want to pay attention to.

Keywords

Once you have a grasp on how you’ll be organizing your campaigns, you can start building your keyword lists for each adgroup.  If you’re also running an SEO Toronto campaign, you can use the same keyword list used for this, although you’ll need to expand on it for Adwords.

Some common tools for building keyword lists include:

• Google Keyword Tool
• Analytics
• Site Search Data
• Product Model Numbers
• Product Names
• Brand Related Names

Start with as many related terms as possible, then with the help of the tracking you’ve cleverly implemented, you can weed out the terms that aren’t converting, and increase spending and expand on terms that are converting.

If you’re doing fairly well organically for a given term, we don’t recommend bidding on the term.   Some people feel it’s important to be in the paid results, as well as organic, and there’s data to argue both sides of the fence.  Personally I think this is a waste of budget, unless you have a large enough Adwords budget to effectively do both of course.  Otherwise it’s more efficient to focus your spend on terms where you’re weak organically. There should be plenty of terms to work with using this method, and it helps you stretch your SEM budgets.

Ad Copy

Making sure you’re crafting creative and compelling ad copy will have a major impact on your click through rates.  One of the best ways to improve your CTR is by using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) function.  This function can be used in the ad title, description and display URL.  Here are the various configurations that can be used:

{Keyword:Your Default Title/Description Text/Display URL}
This results in showing whatever keyword the searcher used where you’ve inserted the function.  There are a couple variations – Keyword – shows the keyword in Sentence case.  KeyWord, shows two term combinations in Title case, as in Blue Widgets.  Makes the title look better.  The default text is used when the keyword searched is too long to fit in the area used.  You can also use words before and after the { and } – such as Buy {KeyWord:Blue Widgets} Online for example.  Again watch your length.

Landing Pages

To maximize the results of your campaigns we recommend the use of custom landing pages.  This is where you send visitors who click on your ads.  Instead of sending the user to your homepage, or a subpage that may or may not be related to the term they used, create a few custom pages for each adgroup that’s very tailored to the keywords you’re using in that particular adgroup.  And make it really easy for users to complete whatever goal you’re looking for them to complete.  If it’s a contact form, put it right on the landing page.  If it’s a product search, send them to a custom product page.  If there are multiple styles/models of the product available, break them into separete adgroups, with separete ad copy, and send them to the specific term they’ve come in on – providing them with a way to get to the other versions of the product.

Using custom landing pages that are tailored to the terms will greatly improve your conversion rates, so while it may seem like too much work, they’ll pay for themselves in spades over time.

To really step up conversion rates, use a good A/B or multivariate testing tool on your landing pages.  This allows you to create virtually unlimited versions of your landing pages, and find the one that converts the highest – with hard data.

Adwords Editor

If you aren’t already using this tool – start.  It makes creating, organizing and modifying your Adwords campaigns much easier than doing it all through the online Adwords interface.  Download a copy today at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/.

Adwords Optimization Summary

Hopefully this gives you a good starting point for setting up or optimizing your Adwords campaigns.  We provide Toronto Adwords Services, so let us know if you need help.