AdWords Success Strategies: The Essentials

As the PPC team here at QueryClick grows, I'm determined to ensure that our campaign strategies never fall below our high standards – it's vital that any growing company retains the cores values and ideas which helped propel it in a positive direction in the first place. Most importantly, I wanted lay down what I consider to be the cornerstones of campaigns which produce excellent results.

These are ideals which should be applicable and useful anchors for the duration, whether you are creating a new account, optimising an ongoing campaign or taking control of an existing AdWords account.

Campaign Structure

In my 6+ years of managing AdWords campaign, the structure of the campaign is the single most crucial element to get right, and as such should be given plenty of time and thought.

You should be aiming for an arrangement which provides a robust foundation that not only makes the task of creating a relevant account straightforward, but also allows ease of management, analysis and optimisation.

If you view the structure as the mechanism for intelligently distributing funds to groups of keywords, the better your structure, the more efficient this method of optimisation will be. If you are in absolute control of which keywords and groups of keywords are getting the money, you are in control of the ROI.

Build From The Tail Upwards

This is an strategy which is made much easier if you've got the above right. Generally you will have a given budget which you are working towards, meaning you have to make a decision about where to spend the money. Make this decision wisely. Try to fill up your 'quota' without allowing the demand for the most generic keywords to dictate the spread of your budget.

The higher the percentage of low cost, high conversion keywords in your click total, the better your R0I. It's that simple

The below example illustrates how ensuring full visibility of highly target keywords could impact your performance metrics:

Evolve Your Keywords Based On Actual Queries

The basic match types in AdWords are Broad, Phrase and Exact. Unless all your keywords are set as Exact match, you need to constantly have one eye on which search queries are ads. Your best friend in this fight to retain control over your visibility is the the 'See all search terms' report. 

The really great thing about running this report is that it instantly gives you actionable data to work with:

See an irrelevant search term? Negative it
Getting visits from a relevant query not included in the account? Add it

Getting into the habit of regularly running this report will ensure you are constantly and effectively evolving your keyword list.

I'm keen to expand on each of these areas over the next few weeks, allocating a blog post to each area – so watch this space.

If you have any principles core to your AdWords campaigns, feel free to share them in the comments below.