Pin It

Often times, your store’s experiment with paid advertising fails within its first $200… usually without any sales.

Avoid this catastrophe, save face, and look like a marketing rockstar by creating a targeted AdWords campaign that brings in a healthy ROI by cutting out unnecessary spending.

Here’s how…

First, be sure you exhaust the Google AdWords Tool. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it is a Google-sponsored resource that gives you direct search data.

Say for example that you sell red roses online. Type in the keywords you’re bidding on in the Keyword Tool to get all different variations that are being searched on Google.

Be sure to log in to your AdWords account while using this tool, or your data will be limited to 200 suggestions.

Also, when getting keyword suggestions, be sure to click the checkbox next to “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” for the most relevant results.

Google displays all the searches conducted in the past month relevant to the terms “red rose” and “red roses”. Thus, by association, if you bid for these terms, your ad will also show up for all these suggested terms.

Browse the list. See terms that you don’t want your ad to display for? Of course you will. Not only will displaying your ad for non-relevant terms burn your PPC budget, but it will also drag down your Ad Group’s Quality Score, which will force you to bid higher on terms you do want to trigger your ads.

For example, if you’re selling red roses online, do you want to be advertising for the terms “roses are red poems” and “Roses are red poem”?

Of course not. So now, you enter the negative keyword –poem into your negative keyword list, preventing your ads from being displayed for these terms.

When logged in to your AdWords account, you’ll receive 800 keyword suggestions, many of which will be good negative keyword suggestions that will trim your budget.

Another excellent way to see where you’re wasting money is looking at terms that are triggering your ads, but are obviously not going to lead to sales.

To do this, simply log into your AdWords account, click on the Ad groups tab…

and sort in descending order by cost.

This will bring up your most active Ad Groups, and the ones most likely in need of maintenance and attention.

Click on your top ad group, click on the “Keywords” tab, and then select “See search terms -> All”.

This will give you all the keywords that you have spend money on. Go through the list, much like with the Google Keyword Tool, and filter out any terms that would make good negatives.

By following these tips, you’ll be able to trim the fat off your AdWords campaign. It will also increase your ads’ click thru rates, which will increase your keywords’ quality scores, allowing you to bid less for the top spot than your competition.

Life is good when you know these secrets and your competition does not.

Pin It