How to improve your Adwords campaign performance

Following on from the postings so far this week, and in the vein of "plan, do, review", today I've put together some ways you can monitor and improve the performance of your Adwords campaign.

By the end of yesterday, you'd set a starting budget for your adverts, targeted your visitors to appropriate pages on your website and were ready to kick off the campaign.

Using the Adwords Editor software, you can do this by using the 'Post Selected Campaigns' button in the menu at the top. After a short while, your adverts will start appearing next to searches for your keyword phrases.

I've assumed that you've already got a Google Analytics account configured to monitor your website traffic. If not, get one now. You will need that information to manage improvements to your campaigns once you have a few weeks of statistics.

The Analytics reports will allow you to track the bounce rate for people clicking on your adverts. This is the number of people who leave your site immediately, in the belief that it doesn't give them the answers they were looking for.

If bounce rates for particular keywords are obviously higher than others, it could be that the keyword isn't targeted or relevant enough. Equally, it could be that the landing page isn't doing a good enough job of explaining how your company can help. Have you used the search phrase in your page title and content? Do you need to add an extra page to your website to focus on these visitors?

People who bounce off your site are costing you money for nothing. Cut your bounce rate and you improve the ROI of your marketing.

Another issue you may have is a low click through rate (CTR). This indicates that your advert text isn't working well enough. To fix this, start by opening up the Adwords Editor software and downloading your campaign statistics.

With any luck you will find that one of your adverts within the Ad Group is dragging you down, with a much lower CTR than the others. There are no magic rules in 'split testing' adverts - your visitors are human and unpredictable. Use the lessons from adverts that work well and try to evolve your campaigns with subtle improvements. If an advert is performing really badly, pause or delete it and start again with a new idea. Try different headlines, selling points, capitalisation and calls to action.

If your adverts are generating good numbers of visitors who are taking a good look around your website, the last major issue is perhaps not having received the number of impressions you were hoping for from your keyword analysis. It's reasonable to aim for 5% or so of total traffic, so if you're falling below this, it may be that you need to raise your maximum bid limit.

Go back to the Google Keyword Tool and put your problem keyword in (further instructions available here).

This time, drop down the list labelled 'Choose columns to be displayed' and add the 'Estimated Ave CPC'. For "estate agents in crawley", the indicated average CPC is £0.76. Unless you're desperate, don't go mad. Raise the limit steadily, starting with around 25% of the listed average.

As you refine your campaigns and gain experience and confidence, try upping your daily budgets and building additional campaigns to target traffic for other local areas.