We’ve talked countlessly about AdWords and the different tactics that can be used to optimize your campaigns. And there are so many more discussions to be had on this topic. But equally important to optimizing your account is determining if those tactics are actually working. For example, it may be true that Display Search Ads will generate additional revenue, however you cannot be sure unless there is clear-cut evidence of revenue growth in your AdWords account. So let’s focus on the questions you should be asking yourself to ensure you’ve chosen the right optimization tactics so you can experience the growth you’ve been aiming for all this time.
Are you reaching your goals? Everyone has a different AdWords goal. And for whatever goal(s) you have, you must find the metric that can tell you if that goal is being met. For example, if you are an online cosmetics retailer and you are trying to assess how many people clicked on your lipstick ad, you can review your CTR (click-through-rate)to assess the number of people who’ve clicked through to your website. You can measure this for an entire campaign, ad group, ad received and even see how many clicks individual keywords have generated. Keywords are another way of determining if you are reaching your goals. If you want to assess the impact of a group of keywords, you can run a Keyword Diagnosis to determine their Quality Score. Countless other measurements exist to help you determine if your goals are being met, such as brand awareness, and ROI (return on investment). Just be sure those metrics adequately determine the effectiveness of your tactics so you can move further along the path to AdWords success.
Are you using 3rd party AdWords tools? Sometimes you just need some outside help. And while the dashboard shown when you first log-in can always provide you with useful information, it’s helpful to have an outside source as well. Our ROI Calculator—which we discussed last week—is one such tool that assesses the profitability of your AdWords account. And what better metric is there to measure your account’s success than ROI? For our standard version, all you have to do is enter the revenue and cost of any given campaign and click Get Results. And if you don’t have revenue and cost, you can use the Advanced Version to calculate your ROI in just 5 simple steps. There are many other outside tools which you can use, so just conceive which one will best meet your campaign goals so you can start putting them to use.
Do your bidding tactics match your goals? An extremely important aspect of your AdWords success is your bidding strategy. As we’ve mentioned before in question one, properly aligning your metrics based on your individual AdWords goals is important. So if you have particular bidding goals in mind, properly aligning them with your strategy is crucial to your success. Do you want to improve your brand visibility? Then focus on CPM bidding (cost per thousand viewable impressions). Do you want more purchases on your website? Focus on cost-per-acquisition which focuses on conversions. Whatever the goal may be, aligning your metrics to it and observing the results of those strategies will help you determine if those bidding strategies are useful and if they should be used in the future.
So here are the three questions to ask yourself as you assess the effectiveness of your AdWords tactics. As we’ve mentioned before, you can surmise that certain tactics will help you reach your goals, but you can only prove this if you are able to measure their effectiveness. So take a step back, breath, and think about what your plans are for your AdWords account. And once you’ve chosen the designated tactics which complement those goals, conceive the metrics which will tell you if those tactics are worth using. Then your results won’t be too far behind!
