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Managing an AdWords account is a time-consuming job. You need a lot of time to understand the theory needed to just know the basics of AdWords. On top of that, you still need to allocate time to check on the campaign you are running, while always staying up to date with PPC’s latest trends and updates.
You also need to dedicate time to manage your own business, please your clients and make sure you are delivering a top-class experience. It comes as no surprise that it can be very challenging to manage your time effectively when you are a small business owner.
It’s also not shocking that most business owners don’t give AdWords a chance or worse, are convinced just creating an account and running it on autopilot is enough.
The purpose of this post is to give you the very essentials features that beginners overlook and that should be taken into account to effectively manage your account without dedicating that much time to it.
The more time you spend creating a great campaign, the less time you will eventually spend optimizing it.
First thing is first. A mistake that I see a lot when I begin to manage campaigns that have been running for a while but not performing is that they seem to be put together in a hurry.
The more time you spend researching for your campaign creation and creating such campaign, the fewer mistakes you will need to optimize along the way after the campaign has started running.
You need to be able to at least be able to analyze your competitors and your industry. Come up with the right keywords and negative keywords, and write great ads.
1) Use The AdWords Editor For Creating Campaigns and Making Bulk Changes
Talking about creations, it will definitely make your life easier to use the AdWords Editor effectively. It will save a lot of time that you can dedicate to other things such as reading more about AdWords and getting a better grasp of all the available tools in the interface.
The newest version of the AdWords Editor was improved to include several features that will help you save time such as being able to open multiple accounts at once to cross-reference information from them and an improved search function.
2) Filters
One of the tasks that could eat most of your time is to find specific elements inside your account. Having to browse through different campaigns just to find that one keyword that has a bad quality score will eat a lot of your time. It is a good idea that you learn how to effectively use filters so that you can streamline your searching process to specific parameters that you know you’ll always be checking.
Filters are now incorporated with a custom filter option where you can even specify different segments for your filters. There a lot of great predefined filter ideas out there that you can use to start building your filter list. You can then expand on these as you get more knowledgeable in AdWords.
3) Labels
Similar to filters, labels can help you make the searching process inside your account easier. Instead of having to go back in time to see how a keyword, an ad or an ad group was performing at any given time, you can use labels to mark such elements. Some examples of labels include:
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Performing
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Not performing
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High CPC
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Converting
There is a good amount of pre-defined labels that you can use to start implementing this best practice.
4) The Ad Preview Tool
A very common mistake I see people do is that they search for their own keywords on Google to see if they are showing on the paid ads results and to gage what position they are getting.
This is a big mistake because it results in stacking up your impressions and as you will not be clicking on your ads, your CTR will go down. Lowering your CTR will eventually translate to affecting your quality score and at some point in time you will just stop seeing your ads as Google will deem them not relevant to you.
To avoid doing this malpractice, it is recommended that you use the Ad Preview Tool instead. This is a tool that will allow you to perform searches without increasing your amount of impressions. You are even able to change the search settings that define where you are located and what language you use so that you can analyze how different users will see your ads.
5) Bid Strategies
Bidding is one of the biggest elements there is to AdWords. If you are not able to define proper bids then you are not going to ever have an effective campaign. Personally I will always recommend setting manual bids and to take your time fine-tuning the amounts of your bids in your keywords. But I realize that this is very time-consuming practice.
To avoid using so much time with this, there are some options that you can use inside the AdWords interface to make your bidding process easier.
Using Enhanced CPC
Enhanced cost-per-click (ECPC) is a feature that you can use alongside manual bids. This feature raises your bid for clicks that seem more likely to lead to a sale or conversion on your website. What it does it that it looks for auctions that are more likely to lead to sales for you, and then raises your bid up to 30% to compete for those clicks.
ECPC double-checks itself by leaving part of your traffic alone to work with your regular max CPC bids. Then it compares the two sets of results and adjusts accordingly. So when you choose ECPC, you should see conversion results that are better than, or at least the same as, the results you get without it.
Using conversion optimizer
Once you have managed to get a good amount of conversions with your campaigns (a minimum of 15 in the last 30 days is required to use this feature), you can then start using conversion optimizer.
Conversion optimizers works similarly to ECPC. The main difference is that instead of predicting the result of a click, it will use historical conversion data to analyze which keywords are the ones that tend to convert better. It then raises or lowers bids accordingly to promote those keywords that convert better more. This is a completely automated bidding feature, and it doesn’t work alongside any of the other features.
I recommend using conversion optimizer only when you have a lot of conversions. Even the minimum of 15 in the last 30 days is not enough in my experience. The more conversions you have the more data the system will be able to analyze before moving your bids up or down.
In conclusion
Make sure you put all these features to use when creating and optimizing your campaigns. They are guaranteed to help you improve your performance while making your life easier.
