It’s a new year. It’s time to leave your bad habits in the past. The following paid search management strategies are ineffective and unproductive – and should be stopped as you move into the new year. Optimize your account to set yourself up for success in 2016!
Stop bidding on too many keywords.
Now that Google has improved its matching system so that you no longer need to bid on every single variation of every kind of keyword you can think of, clean it up! Stop bidding on every misspelling, every plural, and every long tail search that comes through your search query reports.
When you clean up the number of keywords that exist in your account, you’ll find that you save time on management and get more impactful insights into performance. You won’t have to change as many bids. You will see all the traffic metrics under one variation of a phrase instead of splitting among all the misspellings.
Stop keeping so many keywords in one ad group.
Keep your ad groups tightly themed, especially when the campaign is budget constrained. If you have a few keywords that work really well, but they’re lost among a huge ad group of hundreds of keywords in a budget constrained campaign, they’ll never be able to shine and have their best shot at achieving your goals. It’s recommended to keep each ad group under about 25 keywords.
Stop running more than 2 ads at a time in each ad group.
There’s no reason to have so many ads running. If you’re trying to test messaging, you won’t reach statistical significance quick enough if you’re splitting traffic among 4 ads instead of just 2. You also won’t understand as much about the differentiators that caused one ad to have a higher click-through-rate than another. Use an A/B testing strategy to gain more useful insights.
Stop adding broad match keywords.
Strictly broad match keywords are so broad that you lose a lot of control over what your ad will show for. Now that we’re able to use broad match modifiers, I very rarely have broad match keywords live in my accounts. With broad match modifiers, you can at least control the fact that a specific word needs to be included within the search. The only strictly broad match keywords I keep live are ones that have been in an account for years and perform well enough that I can’t cut them.
Don’t forget to utilize bid adjustments.
Especially in budget-constrained campaigns, it’s important to look at performance metrics and make bid adjustments based on that performance. If you never get sales in the middle of the night, save money by not showing your ads during that time. If you sell something that is sold more often in southern U.S. states than northern, increase bids in those states. Get your ad to show most often for the audiences that are most likely to convert and less likely for those that are not.
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