Christmas is fast approaching and there is very little time left for improving your Google AdWords campaigns!

So, let’s have a look at what you can do right now to increase your click through rates (CTR) without necessarily paying any more money.

1) Ensure Your Ad Matches the Search Query

Putting the keyword into your ad’s headline is just not enough.

Every one of your competitors does that. And if your ads are as weak as your competitor’s ads it just means that you will have to pay more to get a higher click through rate (by bidding more your ad position will be higher, thus CTR increases). The problem is not always the ad text itself. It might often be that you are showing ads on queries for which your ad is not relevant.

Look at the “Search Queries” list of your top ad groups and think about the search intent of people viewing your ads. Are your ads offering the exact answers to these searches..? If they are not, it’s likely that you are missing clicks despite having the highest ad rank.

For example, referring to the image below, because ad rank 3 appears more relevant than ad rank 1, it’s likely to generate a higher CTR.

So usually you don’t have to be ranking first to get the highest click through rate.

2) Improve the Campaign Structure

If you find a lot of different search queries within an ad group, it is because there are too many keywords in the ad group which are very different to each other. Which in turn means that you will not be able to write relevant ad copy.

Solution? Don’t have many different keywords in the same ad group. Instead, make more ad groups in which you group very similar keywords together. It’s the same with sorting buttons!

3) Don’t Overuse the Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Make sure you use the dynamic keyword insertion correctly. This feature can be very useful in some specific cases but if you are using it in all your ad groups you are probably losing clicks.

See? With improper use of dynamic keyword insertion your ad can look a bit dodgy.

4) Use Ad Extensions if Possible

It is not necessarily important whether people actually click on your ads’ sitelinks or if they actually pay attention to your address. What is important, however, is that the extensions will make your ad stand out (which does attract more clicks) so you should be using them anywhere it makes sense.

5) Expand your Negative Keyword List

This is especially important if you are using broad matched keywords, then your negative keyword list should be comprehensive! Otherwise your ads may be showing on irellevant queries and your CTR will drop. For inspiration see this huge keyword list. I am sure you will find many useful negatives there.

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• Don’t Bet the Farm On It – AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE)
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Fairfax Media are the largest integrated metropolitan, rural and regional magazine and digital media company in Australasia. Fairfax Media has publications and websites throughout Australia and New Zealand.

In October 2010 Fairfax Magazines, a subsidiary of Fairfax Media, engaged First Rate to plan and implement a Paid Search Christmas Campaign. Benchmarked against the successful results from the previous year, First Rate was challenged with the task of increasing sales and revenue by 20% for the campaign period (Nov – Dec).

As the result of First Rate’s paid search optimisation efforts and input from Fairfax Magazines’ Online Manager and Marketing Manager, the paid search campaign achieved a 188% increase in sales, 53% decrease in the cost per magazine subscription (CPA), and an ROI of 1,460%.

Click here to download the case study

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Google rolled out one of its biggest feature in recent years on September 8^th, 2010 – Google Instant.

Google instant was a major change for Google in the way they display search results to its users. They now try to predict what you are typing in real time & display results based on those predictions. This means that your search results will likely change multiple times as you update your search query.

So what kind of impact will this have on PPC?

It’s not only the search results that keep changing with Google instant, the paid results also update in real time. The original concern from advertisers was that their impression volume would increase & have a negative effect on their CTR – did that split second that my ad was shown count as an impression?

Google had preempted this & has assured us that instant would not affect impressions in that manner. There are a set of rules that apply to paid ads when being displayed under Google Instant. An impression is only counted if:

• A user types in a search term that results in a clicks on the page.
• A user clicks the search button, hits enter or chooses one of the predicted results.
• Stops typing and your ad is displayed for at least three seconds

So what impact has Google Instant has on paid search?

There have been various studies on the impacts of Google Instant & it seems to have had a noticeable effect. Marin Software, a paid search management platform provider, released their results from a study they conducted over multiple accounts. On average, impressions & clicks have increased, while CPC has decreased. Campaign costs have increased slightly.

How will Google Instant effect paid search in the future?

There are still a number of ongoing studies, although existing results have managed to suppress initial fears. Google Instant has put more emphasis on long tail terms, making them even more profitable. The important thing is not to change up your paid search strategy radically based on initial findings. Make sure you do your own testing & reach your own conclusions before making major changes to your account.

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A Google AdWords account that is improperly set up and managed usually means that you’re paying more for clicks than you should (cost per click or CPC for short), appearing in a lower ad position compared to your competitors and – perhaps most importantly – wasting resources that could be better devoted to other areas of marketing your business.

Why is Google AdWords Quality Score Important?

To an extent AdWords ads are run similar to an auction format – keywords or phrases are bid on and ranked according to a maximum CPC (or one of several similar available pricing formats) that an advertiser is willing to pay for each click. However, quality score is the differentiating factor in this equation and keeps the system fair for advertiser and Google user alike. The scale is between one and ten, with ten being the highest achievable score. Traditional forerunners to Google’s quality score system involved search engines ranking based on a ‘biggest bid wins the top spot’ methodology.

The quality score model means the Google user is satisfied by finding relevant results to their search query; the advertiser can achieve cost effective ad spend based on relevance (ideally without getting into a price war with their competitors) and Google can maximise ad revenue (!) and continue providing new features.

What Determines Quality Score?

Quality score involves several factors and is closely related to ad performance i.e. how relevant your ad is to a user and how many clicks it receives as a result.

The more straightforward aspects involved in calculating quality score include:

• The quality of your landing page
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query (and thus CTR)

By working with search marketing professionals, you can increase the relevance of your landing page or we can help you to choose search terms better suited to your business needs. First Rate Internet Marketing Consultants are all Individually Qualified in AdWords and First Rate is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.

The remaining factors are somewhat more complex and include:

• The historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google
• Your account history including the CTR of all ads and keywords in your account
• The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group and your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown.

Expert advice is invaluable in these areas to ensure you are achieving effective click through rates from the very beginning of each campaign. This can be done in several ways including the use of negative keywords and geographical targeting tailored to the needs of your business. Ad groups also need to be tightly targeted by theme.

What if the Quality Score is 10 for all Keywords?

Of course, there are situations in competitive industries where multiple advertisers have achieved the maximum quality score of 10 for a given keyword and a bidding war can’t be avoided.

In these situations Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) experiments play an important role to maintain cost efficiency. CRO implementation is one of our key areas of expertise at First Rate and we will red flag PPC situations for you as they arise to ensure additional performance is squeezed out of the landing page.

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