Mark Carey, who records GoogleGuy’s posts on his site GoogleGuy Says, also records posts made by a Google employee who goes by AdWords Advisor. This article looks at the four posts that I thought were the most useful and widely applicable. These posts came originally from WebMasterWorld.
Discuss this AdWords advice in WebProWorld.
Analyzing Sudden CTR Drops
If you notice a sudden drop in your AdWords clicks AWA (AdWords Advisor) suggests first that you examine your account. If this doesn’t reveal any reason for a drop you should contact support and have them review your account activity.
Other factors that could cause a sudden CTR drop include a lowered daily ad budget, a lowered max CPC, your ads may have been reviewed finally and rejected, your ads may have been disabled due to low performance, your campaign date may have ended.
Stretching Your AdWords Budget
If you’re looking to increase your AdWords impressions without increasing your spend be sure to weed out your non-performing keywords.
According to AWA, “in cases where your daily budget is lower than recommended, your ads will not be showing all the time. And in such cases, if you have a bunch of non-performing keywords in your Ad Groups, your ad will end up appearing less for the keywords that you really care about.
“This is because all those non-performing keywords are still being budgeted for by the system that calculates your daily budget. If you get rid of non-performing keywords, they are no longer budgeted for, and your daily budget will then ‘go farther’.”
More Sales Through AdWords
AWA, not without a sense of humor, offers “How to Get More Sales through AdWords” in 25 words or less:
* Targeted Ad Groups!
* Specific keywords describing your products!
* Ads about same thing as the keywords!
* Send user to highly related page on site!
Wow – not bad, that’s only 23 words.
Prequalifying AdWords Clicks
The best way, according to AWA, is to use “very targeted and specific keywords which describe exactly what you have to offer, while avoiding really general keywords.”
I liked AWA’s example. “If you are selling plastic models of movie monsters, you would do well to use keyword like:
movie monster model
movie monster models
movie monster kit
movie monster kits
plastic monster model
plastic monster models
and so on…”
If you have AdWords questions not answered here you could try visiting Mark Carey’s site, Google’s AdWords support site, which shows the day’s top five questions asked, and this page, where you can ask your questions directly.
Garrett French is the editor of murdok’s eBusiness channel. You can talk to him directly at WebProWorld, the eBusiness Community Forum.
