Google AdWords Part 2 – tweaking your ads to lower the costs of a click.

Although Google’s algorithms are extremely effective in delivering the correct search results, sometimes a site could rank well for non-related search terms, and it’s probably happened to us on more than one occasion. Searching for a room to rent in Barcelona, might throw up a real estate website, or Tourist apartments in Barcelona company. The same can happen in your Adwords ads, and you may receive clicks for people searching for something similar to your product, but not exactly what they were looking for. This can be frustrating, as you pay for the click anyway, and this starts to use up your budget. So as well as adding your keywords to your ads, you can also add negative campaign words, which can often halve your spending budget.
Let’s use the same example as my last post, the Airport transfer company. Clicks may have come through for “limousine transfer” and if the company has no limousines in their fleet, then this is a good one to take out. Baby chairs, bike racks, etc. are all things to consider and to check in the campaign statistics, too – you can see where this goes.


Another way to save costs with your ads is placement of the ads. All ads need to have a default amount and a maximum amount that you want to pay for a click on the ad. This means that you may have to cough up a fair amount of money if your market sector is competitive. People usually look at a few of the sponsored ads, not just 1 and 2 at the top. Those at the right often receive just as many clicks – often more, as they are at the same height as the organic results, so easy on the eye. Changing your preferences to never appear in position 1 or 2, but no lower than 5 for example can save you a lot of money.

Using Ad variations is another sure fire winner. You create similar ads to your main idea, and Google rotates your ad variations, making sure they have an even distribution, and you can work out which are the most effective. For example, one particular call to action may work better than others, or Capitalising the first letter of each word, for example (all Caps are not allowed, neither are excessive exclamation marks, things like this). This will then show you how to re-create this success in the rest of your ads across the other campaigns.

I offer professional AdWords set up and managment and training as part of my SEO services. For more details, please contact me or leave a comment.