I've been using adwords since it was first launched and clicks were 1 cent each, so I've seen a number of changes, good and bad. Currently managing about £25K a month in adwords spend, which gives you a huge amount of scope to learn what works and what doesn't. Here are a few things that absolutely work:
1. Bid on your company name even if you're number one in Google. This seems counter-intuitive, but I can tell you with over 90% confidence that conversions that come from these clicks will be, by far your lowest cost conversions, particularly if you're company name/brand is reasonably well known and searched for. In my experience these clicks are less than 10p each but convert like crazy.
2. Make sure you have conversion tracking switched on, and that you're religiously tracking conversions, if possible daily. Once you know what's converting look at opportunities to increase ad exposure by increasing your bid to grab greater impression share and improved CTR. Do not increase your bids on keywords until you know what is working....you're wasting your money.
3. There's a relatively new bid type called modified match. It's pure genius! It has the precision of exact match with the reach of broad match for bringing more targeted traffic to your landing pages.
4. Make sure you always have two ad's running in each adgroup. After about 30 clicks each decide which is delivering the better CTR and conversion rate; pause (never delete...goog intell here for future) the lower performing one and create a new ad based on the higher performing ad. Rinse and repeat after 30 clicks on the new ad. Do this constantly to improve your CTR which will ultimately improve your quality score and thereby reducing your CPC.
5. Dynamic keyword insertion can dramatically increase your CTR if you do it right, and target appropriately.
6. Start a re-marketing campaign. It can be as 'cheap as chips' and deliver a fantastic ROI. I must admit I've only really got into re-marketing over the past 9 months or so, but when you hit the sweet spot it really delivers big. The tracking data is not great, but a combination of feedback from the business owner and data from adwords and analytics can give you some idea of what works and what doesn't. Make sure you create ad's for all the different sizes to maximise the opportunity to have your ad shown.
7. If you don't have a mobile optimised site, ensure your ad-group settings reflect this by ensuring you're not delivering clicks to mobile visitors (as a side-issue get yourself a mobile site, my analytics data suggests 30-45% of visitors are now coming from mobile devices....and it's only going to grow). Full browser tablets and PCs should be your chosen settings. Google will default to delivering ad's to all devices so you need to amend this manually. This could save you big money immediately.
8. Linked to 7, check your conversion rates on different devices by running a report that segments by device. You might find that you have higher conversion on certain campaigns on a certain group of devices ie PC vs Tablets vs mobile
9. Run a report segmenting your data by the source of the clicks. You need to know whether your conversion is higher from those that come from 'Google search partners' or directly from Google. You can then use this information to make better informed decisions on the way your campaigns and ad groups are structured.
10. Never run mobile and PC campaigns within the same ad group. The performance dynamics are very different. For example I know from my own data across multiple industries and countries that mobile ads get a higher CTR than PC ad's. This is logical given the large number of distractions on a large PC screen that are competing with the google ad's, compared to the first thing you see on a mobile screen being the ad's. The other thing that is very different is the cost of mobile keywords. They are currently about 2/3 cheaper than the same keyword on a standard PC setup. Not sure how long this will last, but for now my advice is to 'milk-it' and send cheap traffic to your mobile website, whether it be to capture leads or to convert these clicks into store visits or phone calls.
11. Make sure you're using all 4 of the different keyword match-types to find the combination that delivers conversions for you. Each have their place and whilst 'exact' match may well be cheaper than 'broad' you could be losing out on high converting traffic by restricting yourself.
Right got to go now, but will be back with some more tips soon.
Hope the above helps.
