When we talk about PPC and Google we tend to look for the newest solutions, the hacks and tricks, the upcoming beta products, but many of us forget to do the basics first.
Here are few of the basic things you can do right now and improve your account, before heading to the complicated stuff:
1. Use extensions.
It’s simple and obvious, but advertiser might neglect the ad extensions on all their ads. They are easy to ad, and also easy not to ad. They are part of the formula that determines where your ad will land. Extensions make your ad bigger on the search and look great on mobile. 70% of mobile users admit they have used the calling extension to phone a business they were interested in.
Here is an example of a ThreatWell’s ad with four callout extensions, four site link extensions and one review extension:
2. The correct ad rotation.
In the settings of your campaign you can adjust your ad rotation depending on how you want google to show your ads. In the past the practice was to keep even rotation of new ads for 90 days and choose then optimise. Now Google has got smarter, so if you re adding new ads in old campaign, it will make sure they are not left in the shadow of the older ones. You can choose to optimise for conversions or clicks, depending whether you want to generate leads or improve brand awareness.
Yes, I know it is obvious, but still another check on your account won’t hurt when it comes to finding whether conversion is enabled everywhere and if yes if conversion goals are correctly set up. Adwords performance is measured in conversions, so if you are not tracking them, then you would not know if you are doing well or not.
4.Bidding strategy for better AdWords performance.
Google is showing intention to gradually to completely move away from manual bidding and go into fully automated one. This means we must all be familiar with he best strategy for our PPC. There are different strategies like Target CPA if you are focusing on sales or lead generation, vCPM if you are trying to show your ad to as many people as possible.
5. Optimise AdWords performance with Mobile bid adjustments.
We are living an a mobile first world where customers are meandering between devices where 90% of people start a search on one device and finish the purchase on another. This is why you must optimise your ads to appear on mobile. This means that they must be ranking between 1 to 1.5 average position. If they are blow this level they are most often not appearing on the first page of the mobile search. You can choose to bid higher on mobile devices in the campaign settings.