5 Simple Google AdWords Tweaks You Can Make Right Now

Refining and updating your SEO techniques is the name of the game if you want to stay competitive.

Today we’ll go over five Google AdWords tweaks you can use to optimize your campaigns. These are by no means outlandish advanced techniques. They are instead helpful tips on the basics to ensure that you aren’t making any elementary mistakes. Avoid actions that might get in the way of reaching that all-important goal of page one on SERPs.

Google AdWords can be a challenging thing to set up. In addition to the million other tasks, an SEO needs to stay on top of it’s critical to keep a close eye on your keyword match types and quality scores. Working on these subjects can be particular stress for somebody new to the scene. These five points of advice will help you stay true and give you some peace of mind at the same time!

It’s worth taking a look at these points even if you are an experienced and well-established SEO. Spending a few minutes going through these might just give you an insight you may have missed. Often, your techniques can be very unique to you. This means different perspectives can have great value.

Work on your structure

As with any platform that works on bids you have to expect a large amount of maintenance to keep your efforts effective.

Lack of this can cause wasted expenditure and can jeopardize the results you might get from your invested budget. Nowadays, AdWords forms a large part of a daily marketing operation for most companies. Consequently, it’s very much worth it to make things as simple as humanly possible. This greatly helps free up your valuable time. It also makes it both easier to navigate and more likely to produce good results.

Best practices for your online account tend to have to do with the structure of your Google Adwords campaign. You need to ensure that your ad group hierarchy makes sense. It is not good if it ends up being a tangled nightmare to navigate through. As keywords and campaigns can change fluidly and rapidly your daily monitoring needs to be as close to cranking a widget as possible. You don’t need the stress of trying to piece together what is on your screen.

A sensible way to do this is to group your campaigns together around themes that are key to your business. It makes it easier and more intuitive to work with.

Further to this, you can also try methods like creating ad groups for each type of keyword you make use of, while still having the same keywords within these groups. This is a handy trick, as it will let you get a very macro-level understanding of your performance metrics while still grouping together your keywords into themes. This has the added bonus of helping increase your quality scores – win-win.

Be wary of broad match keywords

This is a biggie. It’s good to avoid this keyword match type. There’s a good reason for it.
It comes down to the fact that if you use a broad match keyword you are opening yourself to danger from the fact that there is no actual limit as to what queries will trigger your ad.

It makes sense when you think about it. If I pay for keywords that are broad, such as “oak wood”, I might be selling planks for construction purposes. However, somebody searching for “oak wood paint color” might make me lose my hard-earned budget by having their search bring up my paid advertising.

That means that your conversion rates might be taking a hit without you getting even a remote chance of a benefit. This can be a doubly annoying problem if you don’t identify broad-match keywords as being a culprit. Nothing worse than pulling your hair out over poor conversion rates without a clear reason as to what the culprit is!

Geo-targeted locations – are yours specific?

You want to make sure that you have narrowed down the visibility of your ads as suits your needs.

This is of key importance to a service that is tied down geographically such as storefronts or limited delivery items.

The default setting you will be given is for your ads to appear to users who are physically within the area.  and also for users who are searching for that specific area.

This means that it’s quite uncommon in reality to find a customer who is searching for a specific town within an area while they are located elsewhere. The workaround for this one is to make sure that you alter your default settings to have the option “people in targeted location”.

This means that can better tailor your investment towards those customers located in the area that your service can cover.

It might sound like you would lose out on potential customers this way, but the fact of the matter is that your bottleneck is your budget and not the customers.

They are out there and the most important factor in your Google AdWords success is to target them as best as you can.

Make sure your negative keywords are updated

It’s easy to forget some of the many tasks to do with Adwords. A good tip is that once you have impressions coming in for your keywords you will have data available on the types of search queries that triggered your chosen ads in the first place.

What this means is that you can then identify themes of some keywords and add them as negative keywords.

This means that you will cut down on wasted budget and also help increase your quality score – clicks will go up and this improves your relevancy. That’s a big deal when it comes to the algorithm that governs quality.

Avoid “search network with display select”

You of course have two key options when it comes to the type of campaign. This is the search network only and the other search network with display select.

It’s a common enough occurrence that beginners in Google AdWords management will go for the second option. This is because it means the ads will be provided to a wider audience than the former option and your ads will populate a greater number of banner spaces. This sounds really good on paper, but it is more complicated than that. In fact, you will be running an ineffective AdWords campaign if you make use of this option.

Similar to the point we discussed above, the key is to reduce the number of non-targeted ads as much as you possibly can. Having a broad throw-out of your paid-for ads won’t be getting the high conversion and relevancy you really need.

The point is, that a larger audience is not always a desirable thing when it comes to Google AdWords. You can only hope to work on your targeting. Once your quality score hits a high point then you can think of expanding your budget. The exception here is if you have a large budget to throw around and need short-term results. That might work but isn’t an artful way of working by any means.