From the outside AdWords looks very attractive, you simply set up your campaigns and watch the inquiries come in.

The reality is, without a good strategy in place, you could be throwing your money away with very little to show for it. To create a great AdWords campaign with a limited budget you need to understand some basics strategies around creating a successful campaign.

Here are our top 9 tips to help you get the most bang for your buck.

1. Mobile vs desktop

If you don’t have an effective landing page and your website is not optimised for mobile, then stick to desktop search. Mobile visitors are the least likely to convert on a non-responsive page especially if your landing page is not ideal.

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Best practice tip: Create targeted and conversion-optimised landing pages

An important component of your ad quality score is your landing page, which is judged on relevance, content originality, transparency, and navigability. You will not get conversions from poorly structured or outdated landing pages. Best practice is to create dedicated landing pages for your ads that explain the entire offer that the search query triggered. It’s important to be specific about your offer and include contact details.

2. Limit your ads to key days/times that makes sense to your business

Think about days and times that your visitors are more likely to search and when you can reply. If you take too long to reply to an inquiry, then it is likely they will look elsewhere. If you need to explain something to close a sale, then think about limiting ad times to when you can answer calls.

3. Restrict your search area to localised search queries

You can set a limit of area that your ads will appear or simply target one area close by your business.

4. Focus the budget on keywords that are cost effective

In some industries AdWords is extremely competitive. For example, a search for “web design agency” is $8.65 a click, whereas “Design agency” is $4 a click. So, it pays to look for unique and longer keywords to compete effectively on a smaller budget. Your best performing keywords are those that bring in conversions at the lowest price.

5. Make use of the ‘negative keywords’ function

This function lets you exclude all the words associated with your expressions that don’t represent the needs of your target audience.

6. Make sure you have exact match set up for keywords instead of ‘broad match’.

To keep your PPC expenditure in control, use exact match or phrase match keywords. For example, choosing exact match keywords such as “web design company” will not display your ad for terms like “website design company” or “web design agency”.

7. The first rule to follow is to not spread yourself too thin.

Don’t create more than three campaigns at first so that you can manage them properly. Work on your segmentation and avoid keyword overlaps at all costs, so you’re not “paying” for them multiple times. Generally speaking, you should adopt a very strict monitoring process; monitor the quality index for each keyword. However, it’s not necessary to make changes every five minutes; wait until you have a certain visibility over time. Although it’s good to perform tests, it’s best to limit this practice if you have a tight budget. And above all, remove the keywords that aren’t working!

8. Avoid Dynamic Search Ads:

These ads are not triggered by specific keywords chosen by you. Instead, they are displayed when someone searches for anything related to the content of your landing page. While this seems convenient, it often results in irrelevant impressions and clicks, which push your daily budget up.

9. Make sure you have conversion tracking in place

Not tracking conversions is essentially like driving down a windy road, in the dark, without your glasses. There is no clarity as to whether your marketing efforts are actually working. You could be wasting your money and time on Pay Per Click due to a lack of conversions.

To gain insight into what’s working and what’s not you need to by measure the conversions so you can see what campaigns, adgroups, keywords, ads, and landing pages are receiving the most conversions and make changes accordingly.

We can help you to set up all of these steps and create a cost-effective AdWords campaign that can grow with your business. Speak to us to set up your AdWords and remarketing campaign today.

Get in touch with us here to receive a quote on how we can help improve your AdWords strategy accordingly to your budget.

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