How to Optimize Your AdWords Campaign Performance

Small businesses or medium scale businesses, AdWords can help you a lot in the way of generating leads for your business. Google has made it so easy that it takes only a few minutes to get started with AdWords.

On the other hand, it requires a great effort to manage business through it. Some people manage their own AdWord campaign while others outsource to companies who can take care of their business campaign.

AdWords can be a boon to your business if used correctly. Wondering whether you are using it correctly or not? Don’t worry! We have it covered for you. If you can take care of the following steps, then it’s hassle free to manage your AdWords campaign performance.

1. Keyword Research

Keywords are the building blocks of your campaign. The keywords you choose have a great impact on your AdWords campaign performance.

As an initial step, make a list of suitable keywords that you think is suitable for your business industry. If you are done with that, you can make use of Google’s free tool named AdWords Keyword Planner. Submit the keywords that you have in hand into it and it will generate a detailed list of similar keywords.

Along with that, AdWords Keyword Planner will give a detailed information on how often those keywords are searched on the internet and also number of competitors who are targeting on the specific keywords.

Carefully, select which all are relevant keywords and discard the irrelevant ones. Periodically, analyze which keywords are giving high generated conversions and which are not.

You can set a filter based on keyword conversion rate and can find out the well performing ones. Based on that, you can increase bids for those keywords and decrease bids for non performing keywords.

2. Assign similar keywords for campaigns and ads

Rather than dumping all your keywords list into AdWords bucket, assign similar keywords for campaigns and ads. For example, healthcare management, healthcare service and healthcare clinics should fall under same ad group and healthcare software should be under another ad group. Like this, if you segment your keywords wisely you will be easily able to analyze the data later.

3. Analyze Search Term Report for New Keywords and Negative Keywords

When you are doing a campaign, it’s crucial to regularly check search term report for newly searched keyword and negative keywords.

  • How to find out Negative Keywords?

If you are opting for Broad match or Phrase match targeting, there are chances that your ad might trigger queries that are irrelevant for you. If you don’t wish to show ads for such queries, you can mark it as negative keyword. Same applies for your campaigns also.

Finding out and filtering negative keywords will make sure that your ads are seen by right people only and will trigger subsequent queries that are relevant for your business.

  • How to find out new Keywords?

Search Term Report will also allow you to find out new search terms which have generated conversions. You can add these as new keywords into your campaign/ads. As said before, analyzing the search term report, adding new keyword and eliminating negative keywords, you can control your ad efficiently and generate more conversions.

4. Include ad text related to keywords in an ad group

Don’t forget to add at least a text exactly related to the topic of the ad group. This will in turn help your ad to achieve quality score and also allows customers to easily land into your ad.

5. Make Use of Ad Extensions

Navigating people who click on your campaign/ads to another pages that similar topics can help you to achieve better Quality Score. Make sure that you add links of only similar topic pages; otherwise, visitors will lose interest in the topic and may exit the page.

6. Exact Match Targeting or Broad Match Targeting?

For small businesses which are new to AdWords, Exact Match Targeting is a good choice as it will show ads only when someone searches with exact phrase/keyword that you have included in your campaign. It will give full control over their ads/campaign and prevent them to waste money on irrelevant keywords.

Once you get an idea of how your keywords are performing, you can try your hands on Broad Match Targeting which can be of more useful and also can optimize your campaign performance.

7. Make Bid Adjustments on different device platforms

One of the effective ways to optimize AdWords campaign is by measuring its performance on three device platforms such as computer, tablets and mobile. You can make bid adjustments based on the data received.

Periodically, check the performance of your AdWords campaigns and ad groups on these three device platforms.

For example, if you spend more money on computer bids without analyzing the trend but you get more conversions from mobile bids, you need to decrease the computer bids.

Always keep on check that your budget doesn’t runs out on device platforms. If managed correctly, these device platforms can make a huge difference in optimizing campaign performance.

8. Use Geographic Location Targeting

Setting geographic target in AdWords is an excellent way if you are planning to provide services inside a particular geographic location. Google allows its user to set location targets for each ad/campaign where you can adjust your bids for various locations.

Make sure to increase bids on location that works perfectly for you and get conversions. On the other hand, decrease the bids on locations that don’t give you conversions.

9. Set timings with Ad Schedule Bid Adjustments

Like geographic location targeting, Google also allows you to set ad schedule for each of your campaign. You can set bid adjustments for various hours of the day/days of a week which works well for you.

While optimizing the campaign, make sure to increase bids on hours and days that works well for you and decrease bids for areas where you spend money but doesn’t get conversions.

10. Remove or pause non-performing factors

Last but not least, if you want a sudden boost in your campaign performance, you need to remove everything which is not working. To achieve this, you need to check your account features one by one and remove/pause things that are not working for you. Also check on campaigns that you have invested large amount of money but have poor performance; then, pause on that campaign.

Confused whether AdWords will work or not for you?

Of course! It will work for you, regardless of the size of your business or location. If you can always keep an eye on the AdWords tool and periodically analyze it thoroughly keeping in mind of the above ten points, you can definitely succeed in this area.

If you have any questions, please revert to us.

A Checklist to Optimize Your Facebook Ad Campaigns

Facebook is the leading platform for Pay per Click (PPC) ads. The precision of targeting audience in Facebook is unmatched by any other platform in the history of marketing. Optimizing ads to get best returns has become easier with Facebook adding many new features for better returns on marketing spend.

However, the process itself has become complicated. There is a reason why pay per click advertising is now a profession within itself.

There are tools to optimize how your ad looks, where it is placed, when it is shown and who it is shown to. The acquisition of Instagram by Facebook has also led to integration of Instagram as an extended advertising platform.

Terms such as lookalike audience, Ad relevancy, bidding options can be confusing to many. Fast changes in Ad Manager and Facebook algorithm do not make things any simpler.

In this blog we will look at a checklist to optimize your Facebook Ad campaigns for maximum reach and higher conversions.

  • Optimize Ad Frequency

 Ad frequency is the average number of times each user see your ad. Too little exposure or too much exposure to your ad can hurt your campaign performance.

Too little exposure means that your message will not get through. On the other hand, too much ad exposure will lead to ad fatigue where the audience mentally blocks out your ad or even reports it irrelevant.

Ad frequency of two to three times is recommended for most industries though your optimum frequency may differ. So how do you test your optimum ad frequency? Keep increasing your ad frequency until your Click Through Rates (CTR) and conversions are good. Beyond a point your ad clicks will start to drop and cost per click will start increasing. This means that you have crossed your optimum ad frequency and should keep it lower than this point.

You can manage and monitor ad frequency from Facebook Ads manager > Edit Ad Set. To automatically limit reach, go to Optimization and Pricing to choose daily unique reach option which limits your reach to once a day per user.

facebook ad optimization and pricing screenshot

  • Optimize Audience

 Facebook’s ability to target audience right down to the micro level makes it so appealing to marketers. No other platform gets more specific than Facebook when it comes to choosing your audience. You must use full targeting features available to get maximum out of your campaign.

You can select your audience based on nationality, region, gender, interests, age and language. You can also input your ideal audience and create a lookalike audience.

Selecting custom audience show your ad to selected groups such as current customers, visitors to your site, or custom list of people you input. This allows you to integrate Facebook right into your conversion funnel. For example, with custom audience you can show relevant ads to customers who abandoned your shopping cart page.

facebook create a custom audience screenshot

  • A/B Testing

 The success of your Facebook depends on many factors. Some of them are audience selected (age, country, interests, profession etc.), ad frequency, images, ad title, ad copy, call to action, color scheme. You can have many ads by varying each of these parameters. How do you know which ad copy will perform the best? The answer is simple – A/B testing.

A/B testing is a way to run different versions of same ad and measure which ad performs better. You may find out that a green colored call to action button performs better than blue. Or that a particular image results in increase in click-through rate.

Setting up A/B testing is easy. Go to your ad manager in Facebook and create different versions of the same ad. Do not change more than two parameters in the testing version as you will not know which change led to higher success.  You can test both the version :

1. You can hide one version and start another or,

2. You can create two separate ads sets under one ad campaign. The new split testing features allows you to compare the results of ad sets within campaign.

  • Optimize for Ad Relevancy

Ad relevancy is a score of your campaign performance on the scale of 1 to 10. The score calculates how well your ad is performing with the set target audience. It is calculated based on factors such as:

  • Ad performance and engagement
  • Positive actions such as clicks, video watches, app installs
  • Negative feedback like someone clicking ‘hide this ad’

Many marketers suggest that a good ad relevancy score boosts your ad reach and lowers your costs. However, Facebook maintains that ad relevancy is just a measure of your performance and is not used in calculating ad reach or bidding price.

Whatever the case may be, ad relevancy is a good measure of your performance and should be optimized to maximize your ad success. Try the following to improve ad relevancy:

1. Narrow your target audience to make your messaging more focused

2. Improve your ad visuals

3. Create new ad to keep your audience interested. People grow fatigues of same ads again and again

4. Use split testing to learn what works best with your audience

  • Optimize Bidding

 There are many ways to pay for your adverts in Facebook. Spends could be per click, conversion or impressions.

Facebook automatically recommends the best strategy and daily spend for optimum result as per chosen objective of your campaign. You can also manually control the bids and daily spends according to your budget.

Optimizing for bids is subject to your objectives and budget available. For starters, you can trust in Facebook’s automatic bidding to deliver best results.

facebook ad budget and schedule screenshot

Let’s brief it up

Setting up Facebook ad campaign can seem daunting at first. However with so many options to fine-tune your ad it is well worth the effort. The important thing is to monitor and keep making changes to get maximum out of your ad spend.

Remember, what works today may not work next month. User behavior and Facebook algorithms are ever-changing. Continuous learning and optimization will give you most out of this most profitable advertising platform.