Author Archives: kristina

Stop wasting advertising dollars on bad keywords

Before you can analyze and make decisions on individual keywords, make sure you have conversion tracking set-up first in your Google AdWords account. Conversions are specific actions you care about on your website, such as lead submissions, white paper downloads, or most commonly, sales. If you’re not tracking conversions already, enable conversion tracking within your Google Adwords account first. You’ll get a code snippet to be placed on a page that’s usually a confirmation page for a desired action.

Once you’re tracking conversions, review your data regularly and make decisions based on patterns you’re seeing. If a keyword is getting a lot of clicks but few of those clicks are resulting in a conversion, you may want to lower your CPCs or pause that keyword entirely. This will save you $ and allow your PPC budget to be spent on other, more profitable terms. In the example below, I paused a keyword that generated clicks and had a good CTR but resulted in only 1 conversion and a relatively high cost/conversion.

Best practices for using negative keywords

Negative keywords are an excellent way to eliminate irrelevant impressions and improve the quality of your PPC traffic. They help boost your CTR, improve quality score, lower your CPCs and increase ROI. Here are my 5 best practices for using negative keywords with Google AdWords:

Use negative keywords at the campaign level. Negative keywords in Google AdWords can be applied at the ad group or campaign levels. In most cases, you’ll want to use them at the more scalable campaign level to eliminate specific words or phrases from appearing with any on your keyword combinations pertaining to your entire campaign.
Use the AdWords keyword tool. Look up additional keyword variations for your highest impression generating keywords through the keyword tool. Any searches that are not relevant to your business should be added as negative terms.
Expand your negatives. Make sure that you expand the negative terms you come up with, adding singulars, plurals, synonyms and any other variations you can think of. The Google AdWords system does not expand the negatives for you. For example, if you’re running on a keyword ‘cosmetic surgery’ and you add a negative keyword ‘pic’ the query ‘cosmetic surgery pics’ still might trigger your ad unless you add ‘pics’ as a negative as well. Add synonyms (photo, photos, picture, pictures, pix) while you’re at it!
Run search query reports. Search query reports will show you actual queries that led to clicks on your PPC ads. Any queries that do not apply to your website are excellent negative keywords. I recommend running this report once a week.
Use advanced negative matching options. In addition to negative broad match, you can also use negative phrase and negative exact match. Negative phrase and exact match should be used to restrict specific phrases from triggering your PPC ads, but still preserve and allow your PPC ads to be triggered for some of the words within that phrase. Let’s say you are advertising a cosmetic surgery website, and you’re running on keyword ‘breast enhancement surgery’. Here are some use cases for advanced negative match types with that example in mind:

Optimize your Google AdWords campaigns for mobile

According to recent data, 30% of US of mobile owners are accessing their internet browsers on their phones and mobile is one of fastest growing media channels. Advertisers need to take advantage of the various mobile options that Google AdWords provides. Are your PPC campaigns optimized for it? Here are three tips for success:

Create a separate campaign opted into mobile devices only and opted out of desktop and and laptop devices. This will allow you greater control and an easier overview of how mobile is performing for you. On your Google AdWords campaign settings page, under Networks and devices, choose to opt your campaign into iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers
Enable Phone extensions to display your number on iPhones and other mobile devices with full internet browsers. Calls are often more valuable than online leads and this feature allows you to side-step the website visit option and get that call right away, increasing the chance of converting a visitor to a lead.
Create WAP mobile ads. In my experience they get better CTRs and lower CPCs. WAP mobile ads are shorter versions of your full text ads, optimized for the online browsing experience and with a click-to-call option. Mobile text ads contain two lines of text with 18 characters per line. The display URL is limited to 20 characters only. Consider leaving out the www. if you are running out of space. To create a mobile ad, go to your mobile campaign, click tab Ads -> New Ad and choose the WAP mobile option from the drop down.

Google AdWords tab now available in analytics reports

Analytics recently added a Google AdWords tab to their Traffic Sources section. This tremendously decreases the navigation and time required to analyze Google AdWords performance, which you’d do in analytics by creating and managing custom reports, prior to this new tab.

One of my favorite new features of the AdWords tab is being able to see goals completed directly through Google AdWords and tie it back to individual keywords. Goals in analytics are specific actions you’d like to track. For example, a goal could be a contact form submission. Prior to the Google AdWords beta tab in analytics you’d need to run custom reports to find out how individual keyword relate to your goals. Now, all I need to do is navigate to the Google AdWords beta tab, click Keywords, and voila! I can see each keyword’s statistics, such as time on site, page/visit, bounce rates, AND goal completions, all within a few clicks.