Once you’ve created a paid search account for your ecommerce website, you might be thinking “OK, done with that project. I’ll just let that run and move on to the next thing.” However, simply creating an account and letting it run is not going to be the most efficient and effective tactic to bringing in more traffic and revenue. The account should especially be monitored in the beginning stages to ensure the business’s goals are being achieved: increase in revenue, traffic, brand awareness, etc. If you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate to paid search account optimizations, here are just a few important things you should do to get the most out of your budget.
1. Add Negative Keywords
Look at search query reports to find negative keywords for searches that you do not want to show up for. Let’s say for example, your company sells basic men’s undershirts. You might be bidding on keywords like men’s undershirts, men’s white tees, cotton undershirts for men, etc. Those keywords can broad match to searches for other types of shirts like men’s polo shirts and men’s white dress shirts that you don’t sell or other apparel that has similar wording like men’s underwear. You could also show up for extremely unrelated searches like those for the rock band called the Plain White Tees. Since you cannot satisfy the needs of any of these customers’ searches, these clicks would likely result in a bounce or at the very least not result in a conversion. Spending money on this traffic would be wasteful. Adding negative keywords to your ad groups reduces the amount of unqualified consumers viewing your ads, which results in higher click-thru rates, conversion rates and cost per conversion. Neglecting to include important negative keywords can cause a lot of unnecessary spend.
2. Recognize the Wins
Determine your early winner keywords and ad groups and give them attention. If you notice that a specific keyword has a good CTR and converts well, make sure to optimize that keyword to prevent losing out on that extremely qualified traffic. Increase bids to increase average position. Bid on the exact match of that keyword if it’s always that exact search that results in conversions. You may also want to separate that keyword or variations of that keyword into a new ad group to optimize ad text, improve quality score and allow a large enough budget to ensure maximum impression share.
3. Watch Spend
How are you trending so far? If you have a strict budget set, you’ll want to watch spend closely to make sure you’re not going over that set amount. Conversely, if you’re not hitting your budget, you’ll want to increase bids and daily budgets to use your resources to get more traffic. Remember, that you’ll probably need some time to figure out how the account is going to behave. You’ll most likely have to spend more in the beginning until you can figure out what works and what doesn’t.
4. Assess Campaign Structure
Once you get an idea of what people are actually searching on and what kinds of searches convert well, you can structure your account to reflect those findings. Ad groups should be tightly themed to make your ad copy more specific and improve the group’s overall quality score.
If you sell long underwear, for example, you might notice that your long underwear keyword is broad matching to a wide variation of related searches: long underwear, long johns, thermal underwear, etc. Because consumers use so many different phrases for the same product, you’ll want to make sure you bid on all those different terms and consider breaking out ad groups for each of these different keyword variations instead of keeping all those variations within the same ad group in order to make your ad text more relevant. If a consumer searches on “long underwear” and sees your ad calling out “thermal underwear,” they may click on the ad knowing that those two phrases refer to the same thing OR they may choose to click on a competitor’s ad that calls out “long underwear” specifically because the text in that ad more closely reflects the wording in their search. You want to eliminate the latter possibility as much as possible.
These are just a few examples of optimizations you can make to your account in the early stages to get you moving in the right direction. By making some of these quick optimizations to your account, you can limit spend on unqualified traffic and use that money on better traffic – increasing the likelihood of a conversion. The more you optimize your account, the smarter your budget is spent and the more attractive the bottom line!
