Test, monitor and revise

Okay, we’ve written 48 ads, come up with around a 1,000 keywords and linked it all together. We now need to see what’s working and what’s not. I would suggest you give it a few days before you start making any brash or wild judgements on what is working or not.

When you log in to your Google AdWords account you will be able to look into the campaign at the actual ad groups. What you need to do to determine whether it’s working or not is to see whether the adverts have been:

• aired enough
• clicked enough.

1. Getting your adverts aired

So looking at your list of ad groups you will see:

Default bid

Clicks

Impressions

CTR

Avg CPC

Cost

Avg pos

• Default bid- this is the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay for someone to click on your ad. This you would have set at the start.
• Clicks- this will be the number of clicks your ad has received.
• Impressions- the number of times your advert has appeared after someone has searched for one of your specific terms.
• CTR- the click thru rate (CTR). This is the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions expressed as a percentage.
• Avg CPC- the average cost per click. So this is the total cost of clicks divided by the number of clicks.
• Cost- the total amount you have spent on clicks.
• Avg pos- the average position your ad has appeared in. So if it is in position 1 to 8 it will be on the first page of Google. It’s an average so it will be expressed to 1 decimal place.

So to determine whether your ad has been aired enough look at the number of impressions for each ad group. If you haven’t had your advert aired at least 1,000 times in a week then either your subject has no interest, you do not have enough search terms or you are not bidding high enough. So rather than writing off your project straight away and saying there is no interest I suggest you increase the number of search terms first then increase the bids.

Increasing the number of search terms

You do this by repeating ‘Getting the keywords’ section in section 6 of this chapter or visit www.MassiveAndPassive.co.uk/getkeywords.html. You have to think of more search terms to add so that you have more chances of getting your advert aired. Not until you have 10,000 keywords linked to your ads can you ever say that you have enough keywords.

Increase the bid for all search terms

If you increase the bid amount you will sometimes increase your chances of getting aired as you may outbid a competitor and rise the rankings of your ad. This will cause your average position to rise and you will get aired more often. How much you have to increase it by is unknown as it depends on your competitors. Sometimes I just double my max bid for a day and see what happens. I like to find out if my idea is going to work quickly rather than playing it too tentatively and then flogging a dead horse. But this all depends on your budget. I have fallen foul of this and spent £232 in one day on clicks!

Doing the two things above, increasing the amount of search terms and increasing the bids, will result in more impressions. Once you’re over the 1,000 mark we can then start making some revisions to the campaign. You should really aim for 1,000 impressions a day from then on in to really push your website. One of my websites gets over 200,000 impressions a day! This is because I have thousands of search terms, pay up to £1.27p a click and the subject is really popular, being property.

2. Getting your adverts clicked

As mentioned above this is all about relevance and the strength of your ad. I am going to assume you have eliminated all search terms that are irrelevant as it is quite obvious when a search term is not relevant. You must remove all search terms that are not relevant as this will reduce your click through rate, thus Google will charge you more for your clicks.

Now if your ads are getting aired but not clicked there is something wrong with your ad. What Google does is air your three ads per ad group and ‘split tests’ the ads to find the best performer. So at the start Google airs all three in rotation and at some point chooses a winner.

It may be obvious to Google which is the winner if after a few thousand impressions the same ad keeps on getting clicked. If this is the case then Google will just air this one as this is the one that makes Google the most money! They want users to click so you get charged and Google gets paid. A good click through rate for Google is 0.5%.

If it’s not that obvious then it will air until they’re able to do so. Google may never make a choice if they work all pretty much the same. So you have two choices:

• 1.If Google has chosen a winner then delete the other two ads and write similar or better ones and try to beat the performance of the existing ad.
• 2.If Google hasn’t chosen a winner (because they’re either all good or all crap!) then consider rewriting all or some of the adverts in a completely different way if their click through rates are less than 0.5%.

So if you are trying to beat the performance of an existing ad then I suggest keeping the structure and wording the same, but consider the following.

• 1.Change the capitalisation of the ad - you can capitalise the title from ‘Save money here’ to ‘Save Money Here’ or change the display url from www.propertyhotspots.net to www.Property Hotspots.net. This can catch a user’s eye for whatever reason.
• 2.Add or remove punctuation - consider adding or removing an exclamation mark, @ sign, # or whatever else you can think of that makes grammatical sense. So ‘Save Money Here!’ instead of ‘Save Money Here’ or ‘Rated Number 1’ instead of ‘Rated #1’.
• 3.Consider changing one word in the advert. So try ‘Save Cash Here!’ and test that.

Only make one deviation from the top performing ad and see which performs better. So you can have your top performing ad and then two other ads with one alteration each from the best performing ad.

So for example if the following ad was the top performer:

Save Money Here
The best loan rates
Available to home owners
www.phfinance.co.uk

The other two ads trying to beat this one would be:

Save Money Here!
The best loan rates
Available to home owners
www.phfinance.co.uk

Save Money Here
The best loan rates
Available to home owners
www.PHFinance.co.uk

with the exclamation mark added in ad two and capitalisation in the display url in ad three.

If either ad two or ad three performs better, i.e. has a higher click through rate, this becomes the top performer and another alteration is made to try to beat this ad. Then all you ever do is try to beat the top performing ad.