Success in AdWords isn’t just about setting up a profitable campaign. It’s also about fine-tuning a working – or near-working – campaign to improve its ROI.
Oftentimes campaigns won’t be profitable right from the start. If your campaign is losing 30% from day one, there’s a very good chance that with some fine-tuning, you’ll be able to make that profitable.
Here’s how to fine-tune your campaigns.
Kill All Super-Low CTR Ads and Keywords
When you’re building campaigns, you need to look out for both your own wellbeing and Google’s wellbeing. If your CTR is too low, that means Google isn’t making a lot of money from their traffic. Eventually that’ll result in a low Quality Score and could drag down your whole account.
If you’re getting 200 clicks a month from 200,000 impressions, a 0.1% CTR, and those 200 clicks are profitable, should you keep them?
Probably not. You won’t be making enough money from the 200 clicks to justify dragging the overall CTR and Quality Score of the rest of your account down.
Anytime you have super-low CTRs, even if it’s profitable, it’s usually better to kill it to preserve your account.
Mass Increase or Decrease Bids by Position
Usually you want to be aiming between third position and fifth position. Anything at second position and higher gets a lot of clicks that cost a lot of money – usually browsers rather than buyers. Below number five and you’re not getting seen and may have very low traffic.
In AdWords Editor, you can sort by average position. Sort your ads this way and highlight all the ads that are showing up in first or second position.
Along the very bottom of the interface, select “Advanced Bid Changes.” You can then decrease the bid for all the selected keywords by percentage or by dollar amounts.
Select any keywords ranking five or lower and increase their bids in the same manner.
Track All Conversions and Deactivate Non-Converters
Make sure you’re tracking all your traffic. You should know exactly which keywords are converting and which ones aren’t.
As a rule of thumb, spend twice your payout on any one keyword or group of keywords before deactivating it.
If you get a $20 payout from an affiliate product, be willing to test up to $40 in traffic on a group of keywords before deeming them non-converting and deactivating them.
Be systematic about tracking your traffic and taking out keywords that don’t convert.
Split Test Ads
Always have two versions of your text ads running. Run each text ad until you have statistically significant data on which ads are getting higher CTRs and conversions, then delete the worst ad and create a new one. Then repeat.
These are some of the most important things to do to fine-tune a campaign. Deactivate low CTR keywords. Increase and decrease your bids to keep your ads running between third and fifth position. Track conversions and split test ads.
