Google AdWords is a fantastic way to increase targeted traffic to your website; and whether your advertising budget is big or small, you want it to st-r-e-t-c-h as far as possible.

So if you’re managing your campaigns yourself, or planning to get started with Google AdWords soon, here are some sure fire tips for getting maximum mileage from your daily budget.

1. Target the right geographic area

If your business is based in Melbourne and you are looking for customers in your local area, you don’t need everyone in Australia to see your ads, or even everyone in Victoria.

The Campaign Settings (under Locations and Languages) allow you to select a city, for example Melbourne.

Or, if your target audience is closer to where you are, you can customise your target geographic area by putting in your address and select a radius around that address where you’d like the ads to show, for example, 16 kilometres.

By targeting the right geographic area, you reduce the number of people in the wrong location clicking on your ads, which gives you more bang for your buck.

2. Schedule your ads to show when your target audience is most likely to be online

The Ad Scheduling feature is also found in the Campaign Settings tab (down the bottom of the page, under Advanced Settings).

Ad Scheduling allows you to set which days and times you would like your ads to be shown; which means that you can schedule your ads to run when your target audience is most likely to be searching online.

Here are two examples:

• If your product or service is Business To Business, you can set your ads to show during business hours and not on weekends.
• If you’re targeting mothers of newborn babies, you can set your ads to show in the evenings, when the kids have gone to bed.

3. Include the price of your product or service in the ad copy

When you’re selling a product or service, ideally you only want to pay for clicks by people who are prepared to pay whatever your price is. So if it’s appropriate, include the price in your ad copy, especially if you have a high end product. This will help reduce clicks from people who have a lower budget.

4. Add negative keywords

When you add a negative keyword to your ad group, your ad won’t appear for searches that include that word.

Adding negative keywords to your AdWords campaigns is one of the best ways that I know to reduce your budget being spent on the wrong kind of clicks. If your ad doesn’t appear for irrelevant keywords, then it can’t be clicked on!

When you’re putting your list of keywords together, if you see words in the keyword suggestion list that you wouldn’t want to pay to get traffic from, add them as negatives.

For example, if you are selling a product or service, add the negative keyword “free”, so that your ad doesn’t show up when people are searching for free offers.   Another example is to add negative keywords like “job”, “jobs” and “employment” to reduce the chance of paying for clicks by people who are looking for jobs (unless of course you’re a recruitment agency or business who wants those kind of clicks!)

5. Set up Conversion Tracking

Google AdWords Conversion Tracking allows you to link your AdWords clicks with key actions that are taken on your website.  Examples of conversions are when someone signs up for your newsletter, submits your online enquiry form or places an order.

By setting up Conversion Tracking, you can see which keywords most effectively lead to your desired actions. And once enough data is available, you can use it to optimise the keywords that convert the best, and pause the keywords that don’t convert as well.

This means that you are optimising your ad campaigns to spend your budget on clicks that lead to results. Not a bad way to make sure you’re making the most of your budget!

If you need help making these changes to your campaigns, please leave me a comment below.

For best results, your AdWords campaigns need regular review and management. You can either do this yourself, or outsource the management to a Google AdWords Certified Partner.

Find out more about my Google AdWords training programs and the fixed price, no-risk Google AdWords trial.

Until next time

Search-Mel