The effectiveness of AdWords is undeniable. It’s perfect for pretty much any type of business, as long as you know a few things. Okay – not just a few things. Despite Google’s amazing technology and massive investment targeting small business owners, mastering AdWords requires a steep learning curve, one that is extremely time consuming.
Of course, you can always hire a Pay Per Click management company to keep your campaigns converting (and your sanity), but in case you want to adventure yourself in PPC waters, here are 3 tips to help you stay focused and waste less time:
1 – Small Steps, Consistently
Most nutritionists recommend multiple small meals instead of a few giant ones. The same concept applies to your PPC campaigns.
It’s really easy to find reasons to spend 3 or 4 hours optimizing your adgroups, finding new keywords, split-testing ads, etc… Specially when you’re getting the hang of how campaigns are structured, simply understanding the difference between an AdGroup and a campaign can take a few hours.
When we do consulting for clients that just want somebody looking over their shoulder, I always recommend 1 adgroup a day.
One AdGroup A Day Goes A Long Way
Once you set your first campaign, focus on getting ONE adgroup right. You’ll need:
- 1 Main Ad – you’ll want to add an almost exact copy of this ad, with ONE small change, as a 2nd ad for split testing.
- 1 Keyword, + 2 variations – for example, if you pick pizza delivery in long beach , you’ll end up having “pizza delivery in long beach” and [pizza delivery in long beach]
There you have it. Once you accomplish this, you’re done for the day. Keep this up for a couple of weeks, and you’ll have an extensive campaign in no time.
2 – Let Google Do Keyword Research For You
Once your adgroups begin getting impressions, you’ll notice that even though you have very similar keywords in each, some of those receive more impressions than others. We’ll talk about keyword match types in another post, but basically, Google will take the liberty of showing your ads on searches that are very close to your keywords.
For example, we picked “pizza delivery in long beach” – Google might show your ad when somebody searches for “long beach pizza delivery”. Those are keyword variations and AdWords allows you to see exactly which variations are triggered more often.
An easy way to boost your adgroups is to add RELEVANT variations at least once a week. To do so, go to:
- Keywords > See Search Terms > All
The report will look like this:
From there, you can Add Keyword or Add As A Negative Keyword (if the term is irrelevant to your adgroup)
3 – Let Google Do The Bidding For You
Amongst several time consuming tasks, managing keyword bids is one of the most exhaustive ones. With the average campaign having anywhere from 900-3400 keywords, it can easily take 8-12 hours a week to manage bids for a large campaign.
Luckily, you can let Google control the bidding for you. I dont always recommend this, not because Google is not good at it, but it’s difficult to let a software play with my money (or my client’s money). But if you’re willing to give it a try, here’s how you set it up:
- Click on campaign > Settings
- Scroll to Bidding and Budget
- Click on “Automatic bidding to try to maximize clicks for your target budget”
- Set your CPC bid limit
Once that’s in place, you simply set your Daily Budget limit and AdWords will try to get you as many clicks within your max CPC per day.
PPC Management Is NOT Easy
But it only requires practice. Even though it can be extremely technical at times, you dont need to learn any special coding language. With 30-45 minutes a day, you’ll be able to run your own campaigns and experience the power of AdWords for yourself.
I hope this helps you and your business. I LOVE AdWords, and I recommend it to anybody that wants to grow their business. And, if you’re ever in the weeds, pause your campaigns and give us a call. We’ll be happy to come to your rescue. You may leave us a comment too – here or on Facebook.