Eugene Grudanov

Co-founder at Kraftblick

This article’s structure has a Q&A basis. It aims to give you useful tips to make your work with AdWords more productive.

People who have already tried AdWords and newcomers could find here some advice on how to improve your ads and spend money with the highest return.

Find the answer that suits your experience with AdWords the most and read what we advise you to do. Don’t forget to revise remaining points not to lose any important details.

1. Did you try AdWords?

• If “No”…

If your answer is no, just try it. There is a checklist that may help you save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars.

Before testing this channel, you need to decide how much money you are prepared to invest.

Believe or not, “let’s start from $100 and scale up in case of positive ROI” is a terrible strategy for most industries.

To calculate the initial budget, you need to:

1) Find at least 50-100 keywords related to your business.

2) Create an AdWords account.

Open Google Keywords Planner Tools, get past the keywords stage and check out what size of budget you’ll need to collect at least several hundred clicks.

It’s essential to have realistic expectations before testing any hypothesis.

For example, if your website conversion rate is 3%, and Google Keywords Planner suggests $3 bids for the most promising keywords, cost per conversion may be around $100.

Check out how long your competitors have been spending money on AdWords. You can use SemRush.com for this purpose.

If you see that they’ve been devoting significant budgets to this for a long time, that may be a good sign.

If you are ready to test the PPC channel, but you don’t have experience with AdWords, consider hiring an agency or a freelancer to set up the campaign.

It’s not easy to create a well-designed AdWords campaign, so if you don’t want to become a PPC guru, it may be better to delegate this task.

We can provide you with several other questions it’s important to ask any specialist you’re thinking about hiring.

Here are fundamental questions for every potential contractor.

1) Do you have experience working with my industry?

SaaS products, for example, are not the same as e-commerce stores.

2) How do you measure the effectiveness of your ad campaigns?

If you want to get leads, the specialist that aims for “High CTR” may be not a good fit for you. But the best answer should be to ask, “What are your goals?”

3) What can we expect from PPC?

Expect to get a forecast with numbers, and not a vague “more traffic, more leads, more sales” pitch.

Did you try AdWords?

• If “Yes”, and you are satisfied with the results

Great. In this case, you need to focus on campaigns scaling. There are plenty of ways to do this:

Start from creating a separate campaign targeted to your competitor’s brands (use them as keywords). This really works well for some niches.

Make sure you don’t have campaigns with “Limited by budget” status. If your account contains several campaigns with this label, and you are ok with the performance, consider increasing the daily budget.

There is an easy way how to add more relevant keywords to your AdWords campaigns.

1) Open Google Webmaster Tools Account

2) Go to Search Traffic -> Search Analytics

3) Look for the keywords which are not presented in your AdWords account.

From our experience, you can find up to 30% or even more relevant keywords.

Here is the screenshot:

Try Bing Ads

Bing is not so popular compared to Google, but the good news is that it still can help you get more traffic and leads in case you already get all from AdWords.

There are also additional benefits:

1) Bing ads are usually cheaper compared to AdWords.

2) If you already have campaigns in AdWords, it’s effortless to import them to Bing – no need to set up the whole account from scratch.

Did you try AdWords?

• If “Yes”, and you are NOT satisfied with the results

If you are not satisfied with the results that Google Adwords brought to you it’s a high time to determine why. So, go to the next question.

2. How many clicks did you already get from AdWords Search Network?

If you have clocked 500+ clicks, you should now have enough statistical information to analyze the results.

If you’ve received hundreds of clicks and very few conversions, the reason may be that the quality of traffic you get is very low.

There is an easy way to check this out. Open your AdWords campaigns in Google Analytics and look at the Bounce Rate metric. If it’s more than 80% for most of the campaigns, it means that you get low-quality traffic.

That’s how high Bounce Rate looks like.

If you haven’t garnered at least 500 clicks from AdWords Search Network, it’s difficult to ascertain that AdWords isn’t working for you.

The reason? You just don’t have statistically significant results. But we don’t advise you to waste an extra $3,000 to find out.

There are several ways to make sure AdWords is not working for you irrespective to the number of clicks you’ve gotten.

Check out how long your competitors have been spending money on AdWords. You can use SemRush.com for this purpose.

If you see that they tested it for several months and then stopped, that could be an extra indication that Google ads don’t fit your business.

Sometimes it’s not about AdWords. Check out how well other traffic channels lead to conversions. If you have a lot of traffic that doesn’t convert well, the website may be the real cause of the problem.

Make sure you have a clear call to action, and that your website design isn’t roughly the same vintage as the first episode of Friends.

Before quitting AdWords altogether, order an audit of your PPC campaigns. Many companies offer this for free (including ours).

Keep in mind that you’re not looking for ideas for minor changes, like “increase bids here and there” or “try to rewrite your ads.”

You need answers to questions like: “Is it possible to get 50% more high-quality traffic within the same budget? If yes, how can we achieve that goal?”

If the main reason AdWords isn’t profitable for you is high PPC bids, you might considering trying Bing Ads.

Bing isn’t as popular as Google, but the good news is that Bing can still help you get more traffic and boost leads. And it’s usually cheaper than AdWords.

Another good thing is that If you already have campaigns in AdWords, it’s a straightforward process to import them to Bing — no need to set up the whole account from scratch.

What to do next?

First of all, thank you for your attention. We wish you good luck and AdWords domination in 2018!   

If you need any assistance, please let us know. We are Premier Google Partners and can help you get more traffic and leads from PPC channels.*