For many businesses, Adwords is their most important channel.  Why So?

  • It brings the most amount of leads/sales.  This is critical both in the growth phases, and profit phases of a business
  • It enables the marketing team to quickly determine, which keywords convert best, helping the organic marketing team direct their efforts.
  • It enables fast A/B testing of pages as traffic can be driven to new landing page designs, without modifying existing indexed pages.

What are the common problems I see?

  • Campaigns set up without enough focus on Keyword Quality Scores.
  • Too much automation.  Dynamic extension links, Dynamic keyword insertion are great ways of getting something up fast… but they are rarely as well done as manually chosen extensions and Headlines
  • Ads that demonstrate the problems of the user are known.  A user searching for  “Thai Food Delivery Pankow” should be shown an ad that references both Thai Food, and Pankow… and they should be taken to a page that offers them Thai Food from Pankow.
  • Incorrect Language.  If search in English, show me ads in English.

 What are the primary causes of these problems?

  • The performance marketing team having KPI’s that address targets, but don’t also require ongoing ad quality assessment.
  • Keyword Quality Score Average should be not more less than 7 in any niche, but ideally would be higher.
  • The 80/20 rule.  At the start of setting up a campaign, the fine details of a setting up a campaign might be pushed in to the “20” basket…. too much work, too little results.  But over time, the big tasks in the “80” group get done.  When that happens, its crucial to come back to the “20” tasks… because… they eventually make their way into the “80” task list anyway.