10 Adwords Bidding & Budget Management Tips
(All are “As a rule…” and must be verified by you with your own conversion stats!)
1. Bid a few cents more than $.05 increments (i.e. $1.02 instead of $1.00 - you never know who you'll beat out by just pennies.)
2. Don’t immediately increase your budget to increase position – try optimizing your ad copy and headline first (refer to call #4) I can’t emphasize enough the power of tightening ad groups and optimizing ad copy so your copy can be more specific. By improving ad copy overall you can increase positioning, increase CTR, increase clicks, reduce costs and increase ROI.
3. The more qualified and specific your search term, the higher your can set your position preference (i.e. for the phrase [purple fuzzy iPod cover], we could choose to come up #1, but for “iPod cases”, we should absolutely NOT come up #1)
4. Bid lower (often much lower) on searches more like to result in a looker vs. a buyer (searches for “review”, “info”, “guide”, “prices” etc.)
5. Bid just as much for misspellings – they have the same intent! (Tool for generating common typos is http://www.searchspell.com/typo/ )
6. Bid lower for competitor brand names/model #’s (shown to be not as valuable a click – often a curious looker)
7. If you opt for the Content Network (which I regularly pass on), utilize Content Network bids and mark them down by about half
8. Use your Advanced Search option in the Tools section to quickly make bidding changes without having to manually change bids one by one.
9. When going into your ad groups, sort by click cost or total cost and IMMEDIATELY compare it to your conversion statistics
10. Constantly be checking and re-checking to see if there are any NEGATIVE key phrases that you should be adding to your campaign level or ad group level key phrase lists to limit wasted budget.
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