Optimizing Your AdWords Campaigns

Pay per click advertising is a form of marketing with major benefits. It differs from other methods of marketing in its ability to allow advertisers and marketers to measure and analyze the results of their techniques, to refine and optimize them to increase ROI beyond almost anything possible in the offline marketing world. Google AdWords is currently the prominent pay per click resource available today. Learning some of the ways to optimize your AdWords campaigns can cut costs while keeping conversions up in several ways.

Here are four ways to refine your AdWords campaign to see where money spent is producing the best return and to adjust settings to maximize return on investment.

1. The Segment option. This is one of the newest additions to AdWords. The Segment option is available within your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Keywords tabs. Within each, the options are different, but allow for viewing of your results in specific ways of measurement. This can include breaking into specific units of time, such as weeks or days of the week.

By viewing your data this way you can discover what weeks are most active for a seasonal market, as well as information such as which days of the week are most prone to getting better conversion rates. By knowing this data, you can reduce costs where your conversions are more expensive, increase bids where you are seeing better conversion rates, and in all these ways increase ROI.

2. A-B Split Testing for ads. This can be one of the most effective means of increasing CTR for your ad groups. Have two or three ads active for each ad group. After a number of clicks (ideally at least 20 clicks on each ad), choose the better performing ad. Replace the more poorly performing ad with a different ad copy. Repeat the whole operation to find which advertisement will produce the best CTR or the best conversion rate.

Doing this can often improve your CTR by a factor of 2 or more, and a higher CTR improves Quality Score as well as increasing lead generation. To get an accurate reading for proper A-B split testing, make sure your campaign setting for Ad Delivery->Rotation is set to “Rotate: Show ads more evenly”.

3. Remarketing with the Audiences tab. This is an element of AdWords that works only for the Content Network. When the Audiences tab is enabled, you can create remarketing lists to target specific visitors to your site. By placing code on specific pages within your site, a cookie is put on all users who visit these pages.

Then when they visit other sites with similar targeted themes, a very relevant ad is shown to these users to give them motivation to return to your site to make a purchase or opt-in. This works by reaching out to visitors who had visited your site previously and displayed some kind of interest in that market. Often this remarketing approach can increase conversions by contacting people who have an established interest in your products and reconnecting with them.

4. Changing advertising frequency/rate settings. Advertising can be adjusted in AdWords to not just advertise for certain days and hours of each day, but the amount for CPC can be adjusted to raise or lower bidding rates for certain days and hours. The setting is within each Campaign settings area, under Advanced settings->Schedule and choosing Ad Scheduling, the selecting “Bid Adjustment” inside the scheduling option.

After doing research for performance for specific days within your campaign you can make changes to cut costs and increase ROI nicely. For example, after viewing that you are getting little or no conversions on certain days of the week, you can pause these days with this setting. In the same way, any days that have better conversion rates can have an increased bid amount to maximize CTR for those days. This can all help improve business results for your AdWords campaign.

By knowing about and using these different options within AdWords you can greatly improve your pay per click results. AdWords optimization is a definite way to increase ROI and open additional opportunities to expand your marketing methods. Properly using these techniques can cut costs, increase profits, and help you make the most out of this powerful tool.