If you’d like your search advertising to be less of a chore in the new year, I hope you’ll consider using us here at Business Marketing Online to do it for you. It’s affordable, we’re nice folks to work with, and our clients love the fact that we’re always here with advice in any aspect of online marketing, should they need it. But for those of you having to manage your own search ad campaigns, I thought I’d ask the team here to name some things they think you should be looking at in your next review, based on what they find from in-house campaigns that we’ve taken over.
Here are four items we came up with.
Structure the account well. Don’t throw keywords targeting different products into the same ad groups, and possibly even keep brand terms in their own campaigns. Consider single keyword ad groups for the most important search terms.
Use the broadest terms in conjunction with retargeting (often referred to as remarketing). Consider what this means for your ad copy – i.e. that the prospect may be making general searches, but they’re probably familiar with you.
Take advantage of Google’s automated bid management. A few years ago, we’d have said to avoid this like the plague; indeed, having the resources to keep manual control was one of the advantages of using an agency to manage your ads. Now it’s much better, and does what it always promised: enabling us to spend time on other aspects of the campaign.
Use targeting comprehensively. Location, devices, timing – all have a major impact on ad performance. But remember the basics of pay per click advertising: some advertisers still think that they should focus on where there are most prospects, whereas they should be focusing on where there are the best prospects.