It doesn’t take long before Adwords starts giving account managers, whether that be a contractor, employee, or yourself as a business owner, plenty of suggestions. The suggestions are a mixed bag of how to improve your account and how to optimise your advertising for better returns.
The question soon arises, should I follow all these suggestions. After a decade of experience in SEO and using Adwords, and being certified with regular training sessions, I have to say there are some major Adwords suggestions I do not recommend following. Here, let’s take a look at a few of them and why…
Avoid the Suggestion to Keep Adding More Keywords to Your Campaign
This is probably one of the most common, well, the most ongoing suggestion you will find when using the Adwords interface. There is a simple answer to this one. The answer is a big fat NO.
Adding keywords you are targetting is fine, however, the more keywords you add also results in the next most common suggestion constantly provided by Adwords, creating more Ad groups for your campaign. Getting back to the original question… Adding more keywords does not, in just about every case, result in more conversions, and that is what we are after – forget all the data and think about the money.
To test what we are talking about here, follow Adwords suggestions and add tens to hundreds of keywords to your account and wait a week or so. Then go to that campaign or ad group and select the keywords tab. You can see how well each keyword is performing. Keywords that don’t generate conversions and cost real cash are not helping you at all.
We highly recommend pausing those keywords that are costing money but not generating sales in the case of ecommerce or conversions in the case of service-based websites (which are still worth real cash money because they are a part of the service’s sale process). If they are not generating money within a couple of weeks, it is highly likely that they won’t. The best way to summarise this is to think of keywords and conversions in terms of “the law of averages”. If the keyword is not converting, it won’t in most cases. On the other hand, keywords that are converting tend to convert a lot, a whole lot. They are the keywords you want to enhance, which you can do by looking at device conversions – that is another article for another time.
Avoid the Suggestion to Constantly Add More Ad Groups
As soon as you start adding loads of keywords as you follow Adwords suggestions, you will soon find that you now start getting suggestions to split your keywords into new “tighter” ad groups. This is a cycle that is never-ending. With so many hours in a day, keeping your keywords limited to a tight, focused group and focusing on blocking search terms by adding them as negative keywords is much more effective than being led down the garden path by Adwords. Sure, Adwords is trying to help those who are beginners but a lot of keywords that don’t end up in product sales or conversions will continue to cost money, money that is being lost.
Avoid the Suggestion to Use the New Adwords Experience, Adwords Beta
Apparently, Adwords Beta is the best thing since sliced bread. It does have some features that help when creating campaigns such as helping to create a second version of your advert when creating new Ad groups but I am yet to find much that is a real improvement on the “old” or “previous Adwords experience” as it is commonly known. Now, let’s just step back for a minute and think about the word “beta” for a moment. Beta means unfinished, or nearly finished and needs to be tested. In summary, Adwords Beta might look snazzy but it is a work in progress.
There is one exception to this rule. When creating script tags for conversions to place on your website, Adwords Beta uses the new Global script, which is much easier to place on a website compared with the version provided by the “previous Adwords experience”. All you need to do with this tag is place one tag on in the header portion of your website and place another script on the even page. So, in the case of getting your conversions to register on Adwords, the new Global script generated by Adwords Beta is simply much simpler. For now, use Adwords Beta to generate your scripts and that is about it.
There is a whole lot more that can be discussed for days on end. If you are running your own campaigns, you need about 2-3 hours each day on a 5 day week to ensure you are getting the most out of your budget, for example, by changing bidding by device and trolling through thousands of incoming search terms that trigger you adverts that don’t apply or do apply (again you can see this in the keywords conversions after adding them as keywords from the search terms tab). Adwords is not quite as savvy as Google Search.
To elaborate, let’s say you are using the keyword “NRL t-shirts”, you will find that many unrelated search terms are triggering your ads. If you are not selling “football shirts” and you see this term is triggering your advert, you want to block it by making it a negative keyword right away. Trust us, there is a lot of this and this is why you do need to spend the time on Adwords until it learns enough through your negative keyword selections not to trigger your adverts with irrelevant search terms.
Creating New Ad Groups Out of Your Existing Campaigns
This suggestion always follows what the suggestions above. You really need to be careful with this. Again, Adwords is giving broad suggestions to beginners while each industry can have and often does have its own very specific terms. Even low volume keywords can generate huge sales because your customers already know what they want, they are searching and comparing on Google Search. Adwords rarely suggests low volume keywords and it isn’t always going to give you the right Ad groups in the same way. In summary, remember your business, your audience, and always remember it is about the money.
There Is More
This is by no means the end of avoiding suggestions that send you down a rabbit hole without making money but we hope it gives you some idea of what you should be aware of.
If sounds like a lot of work, talk to us at RD and get us to handle your advertising with Google, especially with ecommerce because we love ecommerce and making more sales.