Earlier this week Google Israel hosted it’s forth year celebration convention in Israel. Google invited over 1300 Google adwords advertisers to attend lectures and have Google adwords experts review their campaigns. Among those Google adwords experts were 2 Koranga representatives.
It was a great honor to be acknowledged by Google as an expert, and even a bigger honor to be personally invited by Google Israel to help their advertisers.
The Google adwords advertisers who came to the convention varied between high-tech in house campaign managers and cupboard carpenters who manage their own campaigns. It was quite challenging to help each advertiser optimize their campaign. Sadly there was not enough time to invest in every advertiser and we could only help with basic optimization tips.
In order to optimize the campaigns, we created a checklist which might help you optimize your own campaign.
Before you go on with this checklist you should go over the Google Adwords University presentations
PPC campaign optimization checklist:
The client:
- Know your client – who is your client? How old is he? Is he male or female? What is his income? Where can you find him on the internet? What are his surfing habits?
- Know your product – what are your products benefits? What is its unique selling proposition (USP)? How does it apply to your client?
- Campaign goals – what are your campaign goals? Is it to receive more conversions? Lower the Cost Per Action? Etc.
- Internet site – Is your internet site user friendly? Does it match your goals? Does it have a clear call to action? Is it designed correctly?
The account:
- Good and bad – What are the good elements in your adwords account? What are the bad ones?
- Account preferences – Are your Google adwords account preferences correct? Is your geo/network targeting correct? Does your account budget match your cost?
The campaign level:
- Campaign structure – How is the campaign structured? Is it by geographic location? Is it by subject?
- Content network – Is there a content network campaign? Is there a placement campaign? Do the content/placement campaigns have a variety of ads and banners? Are the content & placement campaigns separate from the search campaigns and from each other?
- Campaign settings – Are the campaign settings appropriate?
- Daily budget – Is the daily budget exhausted on a daily basis? At What time of the day?>
Ad group level:
- Ad group structure – What is the rationale behind the ad group structure?
- Number of keywords in each ad group – Is there a maximum of 50 keywords in each ad group?
- Relevancy – Is there a connection between the keyword, ad content and landing page content.
- Ads – Do the ads have a clear call to action? Do the ads use dynamic keywords? Does each ad group have at least 2 ads? Are the ads optimized?
Keyword level:
- Keyword performance report – Are there words which are not displayed because of low budget? Are there relevant keywords with low ranking? Do the words have a good quality score?
- Search Query report – Find new keyword opportunities, find new negative keywords.
Conversion & tracking:
- Conversions – Do you measure conversion? Do you use conversion optimizer?
- Google Analytics – Is your adwords account connected to your Google analytics account?
After reviewing this PPC campaign optimization checklist, you should ask yourself: how can I improve the campaigns so it will reach my goals? Of course you should set viable goals and not imaginary ones. You should review the whole flow of your marketing efforts from the campaign level via the user behavior on your site until the conversion.
A few months ago, in one of our long and exhausting meeting sessions inside the company, I came to a friend with what I have thought to be a great idea. An idea that would help Yahoo! search marketing attract new clients easily and cause more agencies to allocate budgets to Yahoo!. The basic idea was based on 5 assumptions:
When we start a new PPC campaign we have little to no idea what keywords, ads or placements will have a good conversion rate and produce the desired positive ROI, at least beyond our initial setup that is. The goal is to find what works and what doesn’t as fast as we can. When we do find what doesn’t work it is obvious that it is quickly removed from our campaign. We pause or delete keywords that perform poorly, rewrite ads with low click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates and exclude placements if they are content targeted. But what should you do with the stuff that works?
