Google Adwords Tips 2017 - 21 Google Adwords Experts Weigh in

Google Adwords Tips 2018 – Top 21 Experts Weigh in

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Google Adwords Tips 2018

Today we reached out to the SEM community to gather up the best Google Adwords Tips we could get our hands on. 21 top Google Adwords Experts responded with some awesome insights. Check it out:

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1. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Dustin Lawless | Search Marketing Specialist
youtechassociates.com

My best tip for an effective Adwords campaign is to make a negative keywords template. Oftentimes, there are negative keywords right off the bat you can eliminate from your campaign and avoid any wasted spend right from the beginning.

 
I use TechWyse's negative keyword template and add/subtract my own negative keywords per the needs of the individual Adwords campaign. Oftentimes, I'll add “what is”, “what's”, “what does”, and other common terms indicative of someone doing research, not someone looking to buy something right away.
 
Also, I regularly prune my campaigns by adding in more and more negative keywords. To do this most effectively, another important aspect of conducting a successful campaign is knowing exactly the goods and services your client has to offer. If you don't have a clear idea of your client's business, your campaign is unlikely to be successful. When meeting with your client, ask what they do, ask what they don't do, and ask what people think they do but don't do.
 
 For instance, I had a client (redistripco.com) who does media blasting to remove paint from cars. However, people often confuse sand blasting with media blasting and search for sandblasting when they wanted media blasting. Knowing the ins and outs and subtle details of industries is vital to a successful Adwords campaign
 
 

2. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Rachel Betterbid | Digital Marketing Team Lead
www.coalmarch.com

One of my biggest tips for executing and running an Adwords campaign – regardless of the industry you are in – is to regularly review the keyword search term report. Why you ask? Because reviewing these reports regularly allows you to:
  • See what users were actually searching when your ads were triggered (this gives you better insight into user search – what they're searching for when looking for your solution)
  • Use that data to add negative keywords & reduce the number of unqualified clicks (spending less money on unqualified keywords means having more budget to go towards qualified searches)
  • Get a better idea of what users are searching and add more keyword variations to bid on (easiest way to discover new keyword opportunities and capture additional search traffic)
  • Better understand why certain broad keywords don’t perform well (broad keywords likely pick up on unqualified queries – you can minimize this by adding these keyword variations as negative keywords and possibly put your budget more towards ‘exact' match keywords which will inherently be more qualified)

3. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Damon Gochneaur | Partner
https://aspiroagency.com

1. Use Broad modified terms to act as nets to pull in traffic, use negative keywords to weed out the trash and any winners toss into exact match ad groups by themselves.
2. Become best friends with the Search Query Report. You should be looking at this at minimum weekly, but for any accounts with significant spend, this should be looked at daily.
3. Pay attention to quality score and remove/rework any keywords lower than a 6.
 
You implement just these three steps and your account performance will improve dramatically
 
 

4. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Jonathan Taylor | Senior Manager, Marketing
www.klipfolio.com

Advertisers are crowding around your high-intent keywords and squeezing you out of website conversions. Staying competitive means continuously updating your keyword lists. But what do you do when you've exhausted keywords directly related to your product? I expand my keyword lists by thinking about peripheral keywords (aka, those that aren't directly related to your product). To find these keywords, I use AnswerThePublic, enter my keyword and look at the keywords that come up in that search. More often than not, you'll find keywords that are devoid of competition and that are a match for your audience.
 
 

5. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Mike Kordvani | SEO Specialist
Fueled

A quote I live by in SEO is “The sum of the long-tail is greater than the sum of the short-tail”. People often make the mistake of targeting the broadest biggest words they can think of, when the secret to success is to gather hundreds of specific queries to target instead. It is more efficient, and more powerful. Especially with an adwords budget.

6. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Mathew Ham | President/Owner
www.ComputerRepairDoctor.com

  1. Always be A/B Testing ad text – Adwords provides incredibly detailed data on CTR, ad performance, etc. It’s quick and easy to test new ad content and objectively compare the performance to a previous ad set. Every 30 days you should be creating new ad content and running an A/B test against your next best option. Do this for 6 months and your ad performance will increase significantly.
  1. Use Ad Extensions to the fullest – If you’re not fully utilizing all of Adword’s Ad Extensions, you need to be. It might take a while to setup, but ad extensions are CTR gold. Frankly, it’s becoming a foundational issue these days instead of a competitive advantage. Don’t get left behind, using ALL of Google’s Ad Extensions is a necessity.
  1. Feature your major keyword in Headline Title – This may be a simpler tip, but it shouldn’t be forgotten. For example, at Computer Repair Doctor, we bid on the keyword iPhone Repair. So our Ad Text headline always includes the phrase iPhone Repair. It’s great for ad relevance, and even more important for CTR. Remember, people aren’t reading your ads in detail, they’re scanning. Including the major keywords in the ad text headlines is important to get noticed and get clicks.

7. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Nick Leffler | Owner
Exprance

The most important piece to an Adwords campaign is helping people. When someone does a search on Google they'll likely see lots of ads which are trying to sell something.
 
From glasses to business consultation there are ads for everything trying to sell you on their service. If you want to blend in and never stand out then stick with that strategy. If you want to stand out, though, and make a lasting impression then offer to help.
 
If you're selling glasses don't try to sell the glasses, promote something that helps people pick out the right pair of glasses. Promote a valuable piece of content that will bring in valuable leads. A good piece of content advertised on Adwords will outperform direct advertising.. Help someone decide what style is for them in exchange for their email address..
 
If you ask for an email address to get this helpful information then you have an extremely valuable lead for future glasses purchases. You'll stand out as an expert who's willing to help and not just sell. An ad that wants to help rather than sell stands out and is more likely to get a conversion.
 
 

8. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

James Harper
www.GoEdison.com

When you're dealing with a smaller budget it's critical not to waste money. A lot of people bid on very broad terms and don't understand that those terms actually aren't what they are bidding on. It's just a mention in a keyword phrase. So what we've done lately, when it comes to smaller budget is simple — We put our campaigns on a tight schedule to pack more budget in a lesser time. For instance; If our smaller client has a coffee shop and has a $25-$50/budget, we schedule the ads to only run during their “prime hours”. We would pack all $50 budget from 5am – 10am so we can dominate the local searches for their peak hours opposed to trying to stretch the campaign to go all day. The worst type of adword campaigns are “branding” campaigns. It's a waste of money. When advertising on Google you should have one objective only — CONVERSIONS.
 
 

9. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Bradley Shaw | SEO Expert
seoexpertbrad.com

Create “Near Me” Campaigns

 
This is the most overlooked technique for increased conversions and improving adword performance.  More than 65% of traffic is already on mobile devices when searching for local products and services.
Add multiple radius targets to a single campaign to find the best radius that works for you. Let’s say you targeted 3 miles initially. Now repeat the whole process again and target 5 miles, then 7 and 10 . You will quickly have data to learn about the impact of distance from your business location and later set your bids accordingly. Also, check the ‘distance report’ frequently to see how far the customer was when they saw your ad. This can be found under the “Dimension” tab. Choose ‘Distance’ from the ‘View’ drop down.
 
 

10. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Pamela Wagner | Former Googler | Adwords Specialist | CEO
www.ajaladigital.com

Use the ‘enhanced CPC' feature for bidding when you're measuring conversions. – Make sure to have remarketing lists set up through Analytics (not AdWords!) as that gives you a much broader range of data. – Set up location specific bid adjustments for the best performing cities in your campaign.

11. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Bryan Clayton | CEO
www.yourgreenpal.com

Sometimes big data sources can be right at your finger tips.  We leverage our data, combined with publicly available census data, for marketing insights.
 
For example, in a recent campaign we ran in Nashville, TN , we ran pay-per-click (PPC) Adwords campaign with one ad targeting the entire metro Nashville area. The headline read ‘Local Lawn Pros in Nashville are a click away.’ and I thought the performance of the ad was good with a click through rate of over one percent and conversion rate of over 10 percent on the Nashville landing page but we needed to improve on it.
 
We thought, how can we make this more contextual and relevant to the viewer? Se we researched census data, looking at the average income and home values throughout the Nashville area.
 
We found that East Nashville, an up-and-coming neighborhood, was populated with more working class, and a creative class demographic and we hypothesized this customer segment would be price sensitive but still not want to cut their own lawns. So we segmented those zip codes and only ran a specific ad for them, with a headline ‘The Cheapest Lawn Mowing in Nashville. Lawn mowing from $20.’”
 
We then created a matching landing page. After running the ad for one month, on-page analytics proved the guess to be true. We saw over 200 percent lift in click through rate and and 30 percent lift in on-page conversion.
 
Studying the data your own business generates can tell you which of your online marketing campaigns works best. Do the ads appeal to your target market or another market altogether? The data may also point to completely new areas of customer interest.
 
 

12. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Anthony Capetola | Marketing Manager
Sales & Orders

Intermediate to Advanced: Hyper-LocalTargeting

Especially for serviced-based industries such as Plumbers orDoctors, a hyper-localized approach to structuring AdWords campaigns is crucialfor minimizing wasted ad spend. Aside from a standard ‘Branding’ campaign, business owners/marketers should considerbuilding two separate primary campaigns for their desired target and keywords.

  • GeneralTarget: This campaign should be structured by ad groups according to thespecific keyword variations. For example, a Dermatologist should separatedistinct treatments they offer by ad group such as ‘laser hair removal’ versus ‘acnetreatment.’ This campaign would be used to capture more broad searchqueries and intent.
  • Geo-Specific:This campaign will be used to append the ‘hyper-localized’ terms to primarykeywords. The same Dermatologist from above would follow an ad group stylebased on the locale they practice. As an example, the ‘laser hair removal’ ad group would become ‘NYC laser hair removal’ and the keywords themselves would beappended with the term ‘NYC.’ Additionally, this advertiser could createadditional variant ad groups such as ‘Manhattan’ and spell our NYC to ‘New YorkCity.’

To round this strategy out, add broad or phrase matchnegative keywords to the General Targetfor all locations from the Geo-Specific campaign.

This will allow one to better segment and manage keywords,bids, and budgets based on the specificintent of those searching for your service or offering.

13. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Anthony De Guzman | SEO Specialist
anthonydeguzman.com

1) If you find that you're running out of keywords to add to your account, one tip is to leverage SEO and Google Search Console's report and cross reference that with the AdWords search report to see if you're missing any opportunities.
 

2) If you have developer experience, you can modify Google's Link Checker script (found here) to include server error response codes i.e. 500 to pause your ads in case your site or client's site goes down and resume after. You can also tweak it to pause if your website uses a “site is under maintenance” page.

3) If you're looking to minimize costs for your account, try to find out which keywords your website is ranking for organically and lowering the max bid until you find a sweet spot of low cost yet high conversions (and low CPA).

 
 
 

14. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Jason Scott | Digital Marketing Specialist
www.archwaycards.co.uk

My number one tip AdWords tip is to utilise as many ad extensions as possible. Ad extensions essentially give you the opportunity to increase the size of your ad and include more information with it. The main benefit of this is that it increases Click Through Rates (CTR) by making your ad stand-out amongst competitors. Some of my favourite extensions are callouts, sitelinks, call and price extensions. For companies with a physical location or a branch network, I would also encourage using address extensions as this can really help to drive customers into your store.
 
 
 

15. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Chris Casseday | Director of Operations
GNGF

At GNGF, we work with attorneys across the country using a variety of strategies to improve their overall web presence. One of these strategies is PPC. In most industries, running pay per click ads requires a significant marketing budget each month, and that is especially true in the legal vertical. Each year, you can almost guarantee that legal keywords will always be in the top 5 most expensive in all industries. So with this in mind, we also give these three tips to our clients when it comes to PPC advertising:
 
1. Track everything.
2.  If it is working, invest more.
3. Don’t be afraid to invest more.
 
Obviously, the tracking element is huge. If you’re not tracking the PPC efforts separately from everything else that you’re doing, then you won’t be able to get a true performance picture and be able to calculate your ROI. When it comes to spending more money on ads, we like to shift the mindset from “spending” to “investing” because these marketing dollars are an investment for our clients. In most cases, the ROI for these efforts are extremely high in the legal vertical. We currently have a DUI client that is averaging over 300% ROI each month (over the last 6 months), just on PPC advertising.
 
 

16. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

William Gadea | Creative Director and Founder
idearocketanimation.com

Our business is international, but we hypothesized that there might be a greater comfort factor from some prospects in our home town if they knew we were local. So we created a different campaign that mentioned our locality in the headline, and targeted it geographically: the results were dramatic. Our click-through rate on that campaign is about 15% higher than it used to be for that cohort.

We have also been having a lot of luck with gmail ads that target keywords and competitor terms. It has frankly been the only kind of display ad that gets us the ROI that search advertising does.

17. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Swapnil Bhagwat | Senior Manager – Design & Digital Media
Orchestrate Technologies

One of the effective Adwords strategies is to optimize your keyword list continuously. You can start this with a precise list of 5 – 10 keywords that are highly focused on the offering as well as the demographics of the target audience. Adding them to your campaign as Exact Match keywords will ensure your ads only show up for the most relevant search queries and not any irrelevant variations. Over time, you can optimize them by eliminating the keywords that aren’t getting clicks/conversions. For instance, if “Orthopedic in Seattle” is working, you can add more Exact Match variations by pairing the word “Orthopedic” with zip codes, or landmarks in the city. You can then create a highly focused variation such as ‘Orthopedic near Admiral Theater' and should be able to garner better conversions.

18. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Chris Gregory | Managing Partner
Dagmar Marketing

We believe that allsuccessful AdWords campaigns share one thing in common: careful segmentationand structure. Proper campaign structure allows for better relevance thatbegins at the keyword level and carries all the way to the landing pages.Google will reward your campaigns with better quality scores and ad position,as well as lower click costs. Here are two tips, one about budget and the otherabout process.

Tip #1, Budget & Consumption: The optimization process isall about conversion production and stretching your budget as far as it willgo. AdWords provides the tools that indicate where your budget works best andwhere it falls short. Explore your impression share lost due to budget and dayparts for peak consumption and conversion data. Don’t stop there, however—digdeeper under device categories and shift your funds to the better-performingdevices and scale back on those that underperform. Digging through the data andcrunching the numbers will have a tremendous effect on your conversionproduction.

Tip #2, Business Processes: Understanding your client’s business processes and day-to-day operations will help guide you in setting up technical features in the AdWords platform. For example, Google provides automation tools that allow you to schedule your call-only ads and call extensions to match the hours that the phone lines are being answered. You’ll extend your budget and increase your conversion production in one easy step..

19. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Ajay Lal | SEM Analyst
Acodez IT Solutions

Here are some tips for effective Adwords strategies – Make sure the ad group, keywords, and ad copies are well structured- Always keep an eye on search term reports and ensure the negative keywords are updated.- Keep an eye on competitors using “search impression share” metrics.

20. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Hugh Barry | Director, Digital Media
Maidpro.com

1. Bidding by device type. It's important to be looking at your clicks and conversions by device type. Depending on your business service/product and demographic, results may be better on traditional computers. However, in more urban areas where the average age is younger, mobile is likely to outperform computers as a device.
 
2. Custom landing pages. When running a PPC keyword specific campaign, building custom landing pages for each keyword can be a huge advantage. Also, by creating custom landing pages for PPC traffic, you can design the pages for what your goal is. If you are seeking to get the visitor to fill out contact info form, you might want that form to be the primary focus of the page. Have some supporting content, but it's likely they just want to get a quote – make filling out the form easy!
 
3. Keyword match types. When entering the keywords you want to show ads for, you have several choices to choose from. These include broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match. I recommend starting a new campaign with modified broad match. However, you want to look at what is called the actual search queries at least once a month. By reviewing the actual search queries, you will see keywords you want to add as negative keywords. Typical examples of good negative keywords to add are “free”, “cheap”, “picture”, etc.
 
 

21. Google Adwords Tips by Google Adwords Expert:

Daniela Arango | SEO and SEM Marketer 
Doitwiser.com

Here are some AdWords tips that work for us:

1. It is incredibly important to know how much Google is taking from you when you have ads running. To do so you must divide the cost of each campaign by the Total Conversion Value. This percentage indicates how much a campaign is costing you. This way you can analyze if a certain campaign is really working, needs adjustments or it isn't worth paying for and should be paused.

2 Filters are very useful, especially when you want to know which keywords, ad groups or campaigns are spending more and are not converting. For example, you can set the time range for the last 4 months, click on Keywords, then click on Search Terms and create a filter for Conversions 20.00-. This way you can see which keywords are costing you more and can be cataloged as Negative Keywords. For us, as an example, it helps to determine which keywords are better for selling certain toner cartridges.

3 Use the Top Movers Report in the dimensions tab to identify the campaigns that change the most in relation to cost, interactions and conversions. You can even automatically compare other metrics like impressions, conversion cost, etc. With this, you can identify which campaigns need to change strategy-wise.

4. Use segmentation as much as you can to increase the possibilities of making a conversion. Keep in mind that not only can you segment when you create a campaign, but you also can use audiences to segment bids (increase or decrease) depending on the hour of the day, week day, the device used, consumer's country, region, city, and even between your frequent shoppers and new buyers.

 
 
Thanks for taking the time to read this article. We hope you enjoyed it and found some useful information in here.
 
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