A Quick Guide to Effective Google Adwords Campaign Management

six essential steps to cut costs and increase CTR
A Quick Guide to Effective Google Adwords Campaign

Research your keywords
There is no substitute to detailed keyword research
Get more keywords than you think you need
Differentiate between research and buy keywords in your market

Logical organization of Campaigns & Groups
Campaigns contain Ad Groups which contain your keywords
Groups clustered in very tight matches between phrases and ads
If a keyword does not sit well, create a new Ad Group
Any further difference and that means a new Campaign
Ad for “Coffee Machine” keywords has “Coffee Machine” in the headline

Specific Landing Pages
Take visitors to highly specifically optimized landing pages, usually not your home page
http://www.adnanali.org/adnan-ali-bio and not http://www.adnanali.org

Rotate & Test ads
Create two ads, always run two ads
Always split test these ads
Create a control ad and test if it works against your second ad
Pick the winner (CTR & Conversion) and create another test ad
Change one thing at a time and wait till at least 30 clicks before choosing winner

Win through ctr not high bids
You can easily divide prescribed bid rates by two to start bidding.
Check for performance and ad position. Change bid conservatively if required
Delete non-converting keywords and cut your costs by 40%

Learn how Google adwords auction works
http://www.adnanali.org/internet-marketing/introduction-google-adwords-auction/
The key point is that Quality Score is made up of three components:
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Relevancy of the Ad to the User Searched Keyword
Landing Page Quality

Bonus: Quality score is essential
An ad is only useful to the user if the landing page it leads to helps them find what they are looking for. A hight quality landing page should:
have relevant, original content
be easily navigable
have quick load time
minimum (none, if you ask me) popups or popunders
be transparent about the nature of the business
privacy policy

My experience
Overall Campaign Click Through Rate of 10.91%
Takes some careful planning, practice and creativity in testing ads
Using Conversion Tracking helps me analyze my campaign from the click to the conversion. Set it up at the start of the campaign.
Using Website Optimizer helps me tune landing page performance. Test, test, test…