When creating and maintaining your AdWords campaigns you may not get the results you desire for, which could be down to poor optimisation. It doesn’t matter whether this is to help your search engine optimisation campaign or to get a few clicks to your website, the better optimised your AdWords campaign the better for you. Here are a few strategies advised by Google to get better results from your campaigns:

Build effective campaigns

By taking the time to set up your campaigns correctly it can help you get higher quality traffic to your website. Here are a few strategies to try with your campaign:

• Separate Search and Content Network campaigns: By setting up a separate campaign just for the Content Network will give you more control over your daily budgets, ad groups, keywords and bids.
• Create many, tightly themed ad groups: AdWords can help target adverts more precisely if you build multiple ad groups, each with a small tightly-themed set of 5-20 keywords. Ensure you use a mixture of both high and low searched keywords.
• Copy your best performing text ads from Search campaigns: For your initial setup it is best to use the text adverts with the highest click-through rates from your search campaigns as this will give your adverts just as much chance.
• Set-up the same starting CPC bid as your Search campaigns: Google recommend starting with the same maximum CPC bid as your Search campaign ad groups. Once AdWords has collected enough data, Google will then use smart pricing technology to automatically optimise your bids on the Content Network to give you more profitable clicks.
• Set up AdWords Conversion Tracking on your website: By installing Conversion Tracking on your website it will help you measure the sales and leads (conversions) you receive from each ad group and placement. This will give you the upper hand as it may show some adverts are performing better than others, bringing you back to the strategy “Copy your best performing text ads from Search campaigns.”

Optimise for better results

It is important that you monitor your campaign’s performance and frequently optimise individual elements, whether it be changing your CPC bids, adverts. Before making any significant changes, such as changing bids, excluding high volume sites, pausing ad groups, you should wait until enough clicks or conversion data has accrued. Google recommend having at least 5 conversions or 100 clicks per site is acceptable before you make any changes.

• Exclude poor-performing sites: Get more qualified traffic and boost your conversions by excluding websites that are performing poorly in your campaign, based on the number of clicks, the average CPC and the number of conversions of each advert.
• Focus your keywords and exclude less relevant keywords: Add more keywords that help describe your product and ad group theme better by using more descriptive keywords. By adding negative keywords also, you are able to refine your targeting and prevent impressions on irrelevant sites.
• Adjust your bids to manage your costs: Changing your bids for ad groups or individual sites based on the conversion rate, average CPC and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) will help you meet your performance goals. You should only bid higher for better performing websites to get more traffic, and less for poorly performing websites. This will avoid spending more money in irrelevant areas and more on the popular areas.
• Use Conversion Optimiser to manage your CPA: Google Conversion Optimiser is a great tool that manages bids at the site level automatically to reach a maximum CPA bid, which is the amount you are willing to pay for a conversion.

Expand your campaign for more traffic

Google recommend creating a keyword expansion strategy for the Content Network will help get additional traffic and boost sales from your campaign.

• Use the Wonder Wheel tool for ad group ideas: Wonder Wheel, found on Google Search, will help you create new ad group themes and keyword ideas. When searching any topic on Google.com, Wonder Wheel will create up to eight related topics for you to consider creating.
• Create new ad groups to reach additional parts of the network: Each topic in Wonder Wheel represents a possible ad group theme for your campaign. By clicking on any of the topics you will see other searches and t themes related to it. Any closely related topics that are less relevant to the product you are advertising can be used for your negative keyword list, as mentioned previously.
• Expand your keyword list to get more traffic: Once you’ve finalised your ad group themes, use the AdWords Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas. Enter ad group theme descriptions or keywords under the ‘Descriptive words or phrases’ tab. From there you can select 5-10 most frequently searched keywords and use them with your ad group. This will help you keep your ad group ahead of the game by keeping your relevancy high at all times.

Remember, these strategies have been offered by Google, by no means do you need to follow these strategies, but bare in mind these are the owners, if they recommend these strategies then they must work to some extent.