12 Adwords Tips That Experience Will Teach You

Some things in life are  just learned with time and from experience. Below is a list of 12 Adwords insights I’ve come to learn over the years. 

1. Geo-targeting: Google does its best to target based on IP address and other factors, but is not always 100% accurate. If you want to exclude 10 towns from your state campaign, rather than just excluding them, also choose the option to include the other towns that you do want to target. In other words, choose both what you want to include and what you want to exclude.
2. Day-parting: Most advertisers will lower bids or turn off campaigns at off-peak hours when their office is closed, or based on the assumption that people are just not converting at 3am. Always day-part based on your analytics data! You might be surprised that conversions are in fact occurring at what might seem like odd times of the day.
3. Tagging URLs: if you have auto-tagging set to ON but you inadvertently tag some URLs in your ad creatives, this could potentially impact your analytics data so be wary of this.
4. Adwords does not have a conflicting keyword report feature, so it’s good practice to run one yourself from time to time. Export your data to excel and do a search for duplicates that may exist across different ad groups. This is especially important if you are using a lot of broad match keywords. If you do have overlapping keywords, the system is deciding from which ad group to display your ad (often the one that makes Google more $), giving Google the control and not you. ALTERNATIVELY – Adwords Editor has a duplicate keyword tool, if you feel comfortable enough to use this platform.
5. Always use all 10 sitelinks. Google determines which ones and how many to display based on relevancy. The more you have, the more screen real estate your ad could potentially occupy.
6. Impression Share (IS) is an important, commonly underused feature/metric which tells you the percentage of time your ad is displayed for a given keyword. You should always be at or near 100% IS for your brand. Many advertisers think that increasing their budget will automatically yield more conversions.  If you are already at 100% IS this may not be the case.
7. Don’t immediately add your competitor names to your negative keyword list. Many customers comparison search (your brand vs brand x) and so you can still have conversions on keywords that include the competition.
8. One commonly overlooked keyword opportunity is “brand coupons” or “brand discounts”. Even if you are not currently offering any coupons, your ad copy can have the message “no coupons necessary/already lowest prices on the web”.  This will take the traffic away from coupon sites such as retailmenot or couponcabin.
9. This is a great tip from PPC Hero. Create a matrix of your features and benefits, then criss-cross them to create different ad copy variations.
10. If you’re going to use broad match, you should continuously be building out your kw negatives list. Google doesn’t always get it right. Review your search terms reports regularly.
11. Always make sure the ad copy tells the user precisely what will occur on the landing page (sign up, order now, download, etc). A generic message might make the user click then bounce.
12. Pay close attention to Quality Score. if it’s low, it means you need to make some improvements. Sometimes moving a keyword from one ad group to another will yield a higher quality score.

Do you have any pay-per-click tips or tricks you have discovered from years of using the platform? Tips that can not simply be found in the Adwords Help Center? Please share them with us!