Spend 10 minutes tuning your AdWords account

Video: Making 10 minutes count on your AdWords account

Now that our AdWords account is set up, we want to revisit it regularly to make sure it's meeting our business objective and we're continually optimising our return on every rand invested.

So let's take a moment to quickly revise three topics we discussed over the past weeks: creating our ad, choosing our keywords, and managing our budgets and bids. This short checklist will help you revise each of these three items on a regular basis and ensure you're getting the most clicks and customers.

1. Check your clickthrough rate (CTR)

AdWords uses your keywords to determine who sees your ad. The more relevant your keywords are, the more likely it is that anyone who sees your ad may be interested in your products or services and will click on it.

Try and revisit your keywords regularly to see which ones are performing the best and which ones to drop. To determine this, look at the clickthrough rate (CTR) for each of your keywords

Your CTR is the percentage of people who see your add that click on it. It's calculated by dividing the number of clicks your ad received by the number of times it was viewed (multiplied by 100 to give you a percentage). If your CTR is less than 1%, your keywords may be too general or too specific. Consider editing or deleting keywords with a low CTR.

2. Are your keywords specific enough?

Another way of improving your CTR is to look at making your keywords more specific. Keywords that consist of two or more words tend to be more specific and therefore may better speak to what a potential customer is searching for. Example: Instead of "boots", a more relevant keyword may be "brown leather boots".

Use the Keyword Tool at adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find suggestions for making your keywords more specific, as well as to find new relevant keywords for your products or services.

3. Invest more in your top keywords

Now that you have a bit of history on your keyword performance, you can identify the ones that are performing the best - i.e. get the most views and highest CTR - and allocate more budget to them.

Increase bids on your best-performing keywords and lower bids on lower-performing keywords. By doing this, you can get more customers without spending more.

4. Ensure your bids are competitive

How much you bid on your keywords will (together with your quality score) determine how high up in Google's search results your ad appears.

'Average position' is a statistic attributed to each of your keywords. It refers to the average position on a search result page that an ad appears in when it's triggered by that keyword. You can find this information in the 'Avg. Pos.' column in your account statistics.

Keywords with an average position of 1-8 generally trigger ads on the first page of search results. Keywords with an average position of 9-16 generally trigger ads on the second page, and so on.

An average position of '1.7' means your ad usually appears in positions 1 or 2, and it may appear more often in higher positions than when triggered by a keyword with an estimated average position of '1.8.'

Take a look at your keywords' average position. If an average position is below eight, your ad may not appear on the first page of Google's search results when someone searches for that word or phrase - and therefore it won't be visible to many potential customers. To increase your ad's position, consider increasing your keyword bid.

5. Increase your ads' visibility

Remember, your ads will only run until you've reached your daily budget limit. If you're getting lots of traffic to your website, you may be missing out on additional clicks if your budget is depleted, so consider increasing your budget for your top-performing keywords.

6. Improve your ad copy

Take a look at how you wrote your ad copy. Are some ads performing better than others? Are all offers or promotions up to date? Did you include a call to action? Here are tips for improving your ads:

• Attractive, relevant headline - Get noticed with a short, simple headline that describes your product or service and includes your most important keywords.
  
• Descriptive text with keywords - Why would someone choose your business over another? Focus on the details that make potential customers search for your product or service and remember to include relevant keywords.
  
• Strong call to action - Ask for the sale. Drive business to your site with a call to action like "Shop now," or special offers. Example: Buy one get 50% off the 2nd pair.

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