SeoCustomer

Most of the small or medium sized businesses (SMBs) that spend money on Google Adwords don’t optimize their Google Adwords. So for all of you I have made this checklist.

When I did some research for this article I found out that over half of the Adwords users haven’t checked their account in the past month and 25 percent haven’t logged in once in over 90 days. Amazing right?

SMBs marketers are often working with much smaller budgets and they often have a lot of different tasks to perform, so maybe they don’t think they have time for Google Adwords in their daily routines.  But I will show them that it’s worth spending some few minutes every day, week and month.

They don’t check their keywords, they are not changing their ads – it’s all on autopilot. But on the other hand this is good news for the businesses which are checking their Adwords. It is much easier to beat a competitor who doesn’t check their account regularly.

You don’t have to spend hours optimizing your Google Adwords, just a few tips and tricks will do magic for your Adwords. So are you ready? Do you have coffee in your cup?

# Daily routines with Google Adwords

Every day I will log into my Google Adwords account for just 5 min. Is everything working well? You will have to check if everything looks normal.

If you normally have 100 clicks from Adwords and one morning you found that you only have 5 clicks – something is wrong, right?

This should only take 5 min.

# Weekly routines with Google Adwords

 Check your keywords

You should raise your bids on the keywords that are doing a good job. A good job means converting clicks to conversions. (You do have some goals for your Adwords right? If not – make some right now).

You should lower your bids on keywords from which you don’t get any conversions. If you don’t have too much time to spend every week on this, you might find that Adwords automated bidding will help you. Remember that you need to give your keywords some time. You can’t create a keyword on Monday and raise or lower your bid the next day. You will need some clicks to be statistic sure how great/bad it is performing.

Every week I will look at the Negative keywords list. You will find it when you click on your campaigns/keywords at the bottom.  Go through the list and exclude the word phrases which are a waste of money. This could save you a lot of money and raise your quality score.

Check your ads

You need to have at least 2 ads for every keyword. This way you can test which ads give you most clicks or conversions. You need to give the ads some time before you can tell which one is the winner.

To give you an idea about how many clicks you need to take a good here at www.SplitTester.com. Maybe you shouldn’t do this every week but only once a month – it all depends on how many clicks you are getting.

Make sure that your ads have a benefit statement and a very strong call to action. When you are sure about the statistic you should throw away the bad performing ads and replace it with a new ad. This way you will continually get higher and higher CTR and Quality Scores over time.

# Month routines with Google Adwords

Check your Quality Score

Google calculates your Quality Score every time somebody does a search that triggers your ad. Quality Score is very important to you because of several factors.

Your keywords cost per click (CPC) – higher quality scores leads to a lower CPC. Yes you actually pay less per click when your Quality Score is higher. It also affects the first page bid estimate – a higher Quality Score leads to a lower first page bid estimate. So it will be much easier for you to get your ad on the first page with a higher Quality Score. Your Quality Score also leads to a cheaper top of page bid estimate. In general your ad position will get higher with a higher Quality Score and lower with a lower Quality Score.

The reason is that Google wants to show the most relevant ad to the user looking for something special. So a higher Quality Score makes Google happy because the user is happier. So if there are a lot of businesses out there who never check their Google Adwords account, they will properly have a low Quality Score on some keywords and because you are working with your quality score you will beat them.

Google calculates your Quality Score with a large number of different factors related to your keyword – Your keyword’s past click through rate (CTR), your display URL’s past CTR, your account history, the quality of your landing page, your keyword/ad relevance, your keyword/search relevance, geographic performance, your ad’s performance on a site, your targeted devices

If your Quality Score is below 5 you should do something about it. So increase your Quality Score by mention your keywords in the title and text on the landing page and in the ad text. If you have too many keywords in an ad group you should split up the ad group to 2 separate ad groups.

If you have some keywords below the average ROI and below your average Quality Scores – theses keywords are costing you money. If you don’t work to increase your Quality Score you should delete them. I have heard the term “Band-Aid Solution”. So you have a choice – optimizing your low performing keywords or put them on pause.

Keyword Research

Your keywords are the backbone of your Google Adwords.  The Quality of your keyword research can make the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful campaign.

So you should expand your keyword research to increase your reach.  Try some other keyword match types such as modified broad, phrase and exact match. In the end you should have a keyword database that is both deep and broad and highly targeted.

Give me a comment – did I forget something?

I am sure you guys are doing this Google Adwords routine in a different way – because not one way is the ultimate way.

So I will love to hear from you – give me some tips – what are you doing daily, weekly or monthly? Did I forget something here.

Give me a comment and show me you are alive.