AdWords Optimization Tips: More on Ad Text

A few weeks ago, we asked you which optimization topics you wanted to learn more about. Many of the questions we received were on creating effective ad text, which is the subject of today's post.

If you aren't familiar with our six-part series on optimization tips, you may want to check out our previous post on ad text tips. You can read up on the importance of describing your offering clearly, using proper grammar and punctuation, having clear call-to-actions, and other basic tips when writing ad text. Today, our optimization team is back to cover more tips like including prices and discounts in your ad text, ideas for testing different messages in your ad text, and tracking overall performance of ad text.

Should I mention prices or discounts in ad text?
It depends. While the most important component of ad text is a good description of your offering, you may also want to mention a price. If you consider your prices to very competitive, it may be to your advantage to advertise them. Conversely, if you sell a high quality product and charge a premium price, you may also mention price to set the right expectations and discourage bargain hunters. And if you are only promoting a discount on one of your products, do not give the impression that there is a general discount. In summary, your best strategy is to be straightforward with your potential customers, so the right ones are clicking through to an offer they were expecting to find.

What should I be testing in my ad text?
You can test different descriptions, call to action phrases, promotions, and special offers. Here are a few different points you may want to test:

• Different emphasis: product description, call-to-action, or promotional offer
• Including the brand name versus simply describing the offering
• Including the price in ad text versus including a discount or other special offer to differentiate your business
• Including an audience-specific message such as 'Perfect for Couples'
• Placement of certain messages in your ad text: headline, line 2, or line 3
  

You can also find good ideas for messages to include in your ad text by taking a look at what visitors are searching for on your site. If your site has a search bar, try looking at the search queries to see what they are interested in. Similarly, if you have web analytics tracking on your site, you can also look through the search queries that are bringing people to your site to see which features of your business resonate most with your potential customers. For example, if you offer vacation rentals, you may find that visitors are interested in certain amenities -- you can then include descriptions like 'pet friendly', 'hot tub', or 'concierge service' in your ad text.

When testing different ad texts, be sure to control for some portions of the ad text, while experimenting with the other portions so you'll be able to assess how effective the message you are testing really is. For example, if you are trying to figure out whether the call-to-action 'Buy today' or 'Learn more' is more effective, be sure to keep the description of your offering the same. You can also learn more tips on effective ad text by reading our Editorial Guidelines.

How can I better track the overall performance of my different ad texts?
One easy way to look at the overall performance of your ad texts is to run an Ad Performance report. You can run an Ad Performance report from the Report Center and then use the results from this report to identify low- and high-performing ad texts. For high performing ads, you can try testing a small variation of that ad with a different messaging or a different landing page.

Depending on your goals for your account, you may use different metrics to measure your success. (If you have conversion tracking, don't forget to use the 'Add/Remove Columns' feature in order to include conversion data.) Remember that your ad text with the highest CTR may not have the highest ROI. And don't just pay attention to the conversion rate, but the cost per conversion as well.

For even more sophisticated tracking capabilities, you may want to try A/B testing on text ads with Google Analytics. To read on this topic, check out this article from the Google Analytics Conversion University.

We hope you've found these tips on ad text to be helpful. We'll be back soon with other topics that you emailed us. And in the meantime, please continue to send us your questions on optimization.

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 6 - Ad Text

Over the past few months, Stephanie Lim from the Optimization team has offered tips for assessing your business and goals and optimizing your account structure and keywords. In the final post of this series, she offers suggestions on optimizing your ad text in order to help you achieve your campaign goals.

The ad text you use in your AdWords campaigns is an opportunity to tell customers about the products or services you offer and can also serve to differentiate your offerings from your competitors'. While we can offer a few general best practice tips, please keep in mind that you should test and experiment with different ad text strategies until you find what works for you.

• Be descriptive. Since your ad text is your chance to communicate your offerings to the potential customer, start by clearly identifying what you are selling. You can use ad text to describe specific benefits, features, or special offers and set correct expectations for the potential customer who might be clicking on your ad. Ad text composition is where much of the initial research you conducted while assessing your industry comes into play. Try to emphasize unique qualities, such as 'Handmade' or 'Award-winning,' or promotions such as '15% Off,' 'Free Shipping,' or '30-day Returns' that make your product or service stand out from other businesses that offer similar products or services.

• Use proper grammar, punctuation and capitalization. Be sure that your ad text makes grammatical sense and uses punctuation where appropriate. You can use capitalization to your advantage by capitalizing the first letter of every word in your display URL to bring more attention to your company name and brand. For example, 'www.ShellysSeaShells.com' rather than 'www.shellysseashells.com.' Lastly, AdWords ads can contain up to one exclamation point, so use it to help make your point!

• Let your account structure and keywords guide you. Ideally, the ad text that your potential customers see should reflect the keyword they searched for as closely as possible. If someone searches for 'flights to kalamazoo,' then an ad text headline that reads 'Book Kalamazoo Flights' may be more relevant to them than one that reads 'Babson Travel Agency.' An additional benefit of including keywords from your ad group in your actual ad text is that those keywords will appear in bold type when the potential customers view your ad and will help bring their eyes to your ad. Once your ad text reflects what the potential customer is searching for, you can also try setting up destination URLs to landing pages that that are specific and appropriate to the keywords in each ad group. For example, someone searching for t-shirts should be taken to a landing page displaying only t-shirts, instead of a main store page where there are also jackets, sweaters, and pants.
  
  
• Filter out irrelevant or unqualified searches. If your product or service has a geographical element, it may help to include that information in your ad text. Someone who does not live in Texas, for instance, is less likely to click on an ad that is promoting 'Houston Adult Education Classes.' If your product is high-end, you can discourage bargain hunters by describing it as 'Premium Quality' or 'Luxury.'
  
  
• Define a clear call to action. A clear call to action is especially important if your goal is to maximize your return on investment. Offering the user some guidance on what to do once they reach your site -- such as 'Buy Flowers for Mom!' -- may improve your campaign's performance. The call to action should reflect the action that you consider a conversion, whether it's a sign-up, a request for more information, or an actual sale.
  
  
• Test at least two versions of your ad text. For a given ad group, you can test out several versions of ad text to evaluate which one performs the best for your business. Try to emphasize different points, qualities, features, or promotions with each version. You can find out whether potential customers respond better to questions such as, "Need to Refinance?" or to statements like "Refinance Your Mortgage." You may find that a straightforward approach such as 'Treat Skin Disorders' works better for you than a vaguer, catchier phrase like 'Free Your Skin Now.' In any case, it will be difficult to predict what will perform best for you before you actually try it. Do keep in mind, however, that including too many different versions of ad text will make it more difficult to manage and accurately assess ad text performance.

Thanks to Stephanie for all these great tips! For more advice on ad text or general optimization, you can check out the AdWords Learning Center. We hope this series on optimization tips has been helpful in getting you started on optimizing your own AdWords account. Be sure to lookout for more specialized optimization topics right here on Inside AdWords.

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 5 - Beyond Keyword Basics

Over the past few months, Stephanie Lim from the Optimization team has been offering tips on optimizing your AdWords account. In her most recent post about keyword optimization, Stephanie offered many insights on how to build and expand your keyword lists. In this installment, she addresses other strategies that can help you refine and target the keywords in your AdWords account for even more effective performance.

Keyword Length

Research indicates that the majority of users' keyword searches are between one and five words long and that most users search with multiple-word phrases rather than single-word phrases. (Source: OneStat.com) While it is important to include a variety of keywords to ensure both quality and quantity of traffic, keep in mind that single-word, general keywords such as 'car' or 'mortgages' will be very high traffic but may not be targeted enough, while seven-word keywords, like 'find ways to rejuvenate unhealthy looking skin' may be so specific that no one ever searches on them.

The keywords that perform best for you will depend on your specific products and services and how your customers search for them. People may search for mortgage refinancing with just a few words but may search for engagement rings with a longer search query. For example, a keyword targeting serious jewelry shoppers could be as detailed as 'three stone princess cut platinum diamond engagement ring'. As always, it's important to keep an open mind about keyword length and adjust your strategy based on your campaign results.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords, one of the four types of AdWords keyword matching options, can help target your ads to potential customers and increase your ROI and conversion rates. Unlike broad, exact, and phrase match keywords, negative keywords are keywords on which you do not want your ads to run. You can use negative keywords at either the ad group or the campaign level. When constructing a negative keywords list, try to be as exhaustive as possible, but be careful that none of your negative keywords overlap with your broad, phrase, or exact match keywords, as they will cause your ad not to show. For instance, an advertiser for a financial institution that provides loans but does not offer actual rate quotes may want to include 'rate' and 'rates' as negative keywords. However, if he wanted to include 'fixed rate mortgage' in his keyword list, he should not include 'rate' among his campaign negative keywords list.

Just as you can use the Keyword Tool to find keyword variations and modifiers for your 'positive' keywords list, you can also use it to find keyword variations and modifiers for your negative keywords list. You may also want to try searching on some core keywords in Google Search and looking at the first page or two of organic search results to find possible irrelevant themes for which you would not want your ad to show.

You may want to employ negative keywords to filter out certain searches for a number of reasons:

• Filter out different products or services: A real estate agent who is focused on selling homes may wish to include not only the negative keywords of 'rent' and 'renting,' but also use the Keyword Tool to find variations such as 'rents,' 'rental' and 'rentals.'
• Filter out irrelevant searches: An advertiser selling herbal remedies may discover that the name of a particular remedy also happens to be the name of a musical group. In such a case, it would be wise to include negative keywords such as: 'music,' 'band,' 'concert,' 'ticket,' 'lyric,' 'album,' 'mp3,' and the pluralized versions of these words.
  
• Filter for serious buyers: A seller of digital cameras may want to filter out research-oriented keywords such as: 'review,' 'rate,' 'rating,' 'compare,' 'comparing,' 'comparison,' and the pluralized versions of these words.
  

Deleting Keywords

Most of the strategies we have discussed involve expanding keyword lists. If you are optimizing an existing account however, it may be equally valuable to delete keywords from your account, starting with identifying keywords that are performing poorly. Depending on what your advertising goals are, you may want to apply specific strategies to deleting keywords.

If you are CTR focused, you may want to identify and delete keywords with high impression counts but low numbers of clickthroughs. These keywords may be too general or not relevant enough and are garnering many impressions but very few clicks. If you are conversion focused, you may want to identify and delete keywords that garner high costs but very few conversions. These keywords may be too specific and accrue very few impressions over a long period of time because very few people are searching on them.

You can identify extremely specific or general keywords by running a report and either modifying or deleting these keywords.

As we have emphasized before, optimization is a dynamic process that involves testing, evaluating, and iterating -- adjusting your strategies to best fit your advertising goals and the changing demands of the market. We hope our tips on keyword optimization have given you a good start. And please keep an eye out for the next optimization topic we will cover -- ad text.

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 4 - Keyword Basics

In previous Optimization Tips posts, Stephanie Lim from the Optimization team shared her tips on assessing your industry and audience, knowing your website and goals, and setting up an AdWords account with a structure that is appropriate to your business and its needs. Today, in the first of two keyword related posts, she will discuss how to use keywords to target your audience and how to stay competitive with others who are advertising in the same space. Specifically, she'll cover general keyword advice and formatting, core keywords, and keyword variations and modifiers.

General Keyword Advice and Formatting

Before we discuss how to create and expand keyword lists, it's important to make a few points about keyword formatting.

• Keywords are not case-sensitive, so 'flights to new york city' is recognized as the same keyword as 'flights to New York City.'
• You do not have to include punctuation such as periods, commas, and hyphens. 'Eye-glasses' are the same as 'eye glasses,' but different from 'eyeglasses,' so do include two separate keywords when appropriate -- one with the space, and one without.
• Wherever appropriate, be sure to include both singular and plural variations of your keywords. Though the 'broad matching' feature in the Keyword Tool will generate other keywords to include potential synonyms, you can ensure that you are not missing out on relevant traffic by including both singular and plural variations.
• You may want to avoid including duplicate keywords across ad groups and campaigns in the same account. Your ad will only be shown once for a given search, and these duplicate keywords will be competing with each other to appear.

Once you've understood the basics of keywords, you can begin to think about your keywords in terms of what we will refer to as 'core keywords' and 'keyword variations and modifiers.'

Core Keywords

Core keywords are the foundational themes of your advertising campaign, the most basic keyword phrases that describe your products or services. Depending on your overall advertising objectives, you may or may not want to include these core keywords in your keyword list; but these core keywords can be helpful when you first begin to think about how to advertise what the product or service you are offering.

The account structure you outline will help you identify these basic keyword themes. You can also use the Keyword Tool with the 'Use synonyms' boxed checked to get a broader range of ideas, or browse other sites to see how similar businesses describe their products. Keep in mind that customers may use different terms to find your product or service than the terms you would normally use. An advertiser selling nutrition bars may think of his product as 'protein bars' for body builders, when a large portion of his customers are busy professionals looking for 'meal replacement bars.'

It's important to note that core keywords will often be very general, high-traffic, and highly competitive keywords. As we've mentioned in an earlier post about knowing your advertising goals, if you are focused on conversions or return-on-investment, you may choose not to run on such general keywords, but only on the more specific variations of those core keywords.

Keyword Variations and Modifiers

Once you've identified some core keywords, you can start expanding on variations of those core keywords. You can use the Keyword Tool, with the 'Use synonyms' box unchecked, to find keyword variations that will help you better understand how customers may search for your products or services. You may find that many of these variations are related to your business in some way and may wish to include these in your keyword list. An advertiser promoting laser skin treatment may find that variations on 'wrinkle,' such as 'wrinkle cream' or 'anti wrinkle products' are relevant and should be included. However, the advertiser will not want to include unrelated variations such as 'wrinkle free pants'. Instead, the advertiser may choose to include terms like 'pants' and 'shirts' in his negative keyword list. (Stay tuned for the second half of this topic for more on negative keywords.)

If core keywords are the basic themes that help you build your keyword lists, keyword modifiers will help you home in on a particular audience. If an advertiser is trying to reach the appropriate audience for a designer handbag line, for instance, he may find using general keywords like 'handbag' or 'purse' alone ineffective. Combining these core keywords with modifiers such as 'luxury,' 'high end,' and 'authentic' will help target an audience that is willing to pay top dollar for a high quality handbag, rather than a bargain hunter who is looking for a lower-end one.

Modifying keywords can also help you achieve the goals you defined for your advertising campaign. An advertiser selling electronics, for instance, may be focused more on sales and conversions rather than branding. Her goal, then, is to distinguish shoppers who are closer to buying from those in the research stage of the sale cycle. One way to do this is to use conversion-oriented modifiers such as: 'buy,' 'buying,' 'order,' 'ordering,' etc. She can also include specific brand names, product names, and even model numbers. Users searching on highly specific terms know exactly what they are looking for, and could be more likely to convert for you.

We hope these tips on keywords will help you understand how to use keywords and their variations to strategize, target specific audiences, and achieve your advertising goals. Keep an eye out for the second half of our tips on keywords, in which we will discuss keyword length, negative keywords, and deleting keywords. We wish you the best success on your keyword expansions!

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 3 - Account Structure

In our previous Optimization Tips posts, Stephanie L. offered advice on how to assess your industry and audience as well as your website and goals before beginning any optimization. We hope that these tips helped you get into an optimization mindset. Today, Stephanie provides us more tips on how to apply the information you collected through assessment to optimize the structure of your AdWords account.

Deciding between campaigns and ad groups

One of the most important aspects of structuring an account is deciding whether to use campaigns or ad groups to meet your advertising goals. And one of the most common questions asked by new, and sometimes even experienced, AdWords advertisers is 'What is the difference between a campaign and an ad group?' Campaigns and ad groups are different levels of organization within your account, each with different settings. Campaigns allow you to set your daily budget, target languages and locations, start and end dates, and ad distribution preferences (i.e., whether or not to show ads on the Google Network). Ad groups, on the other hand, allow you to set maximum cost-per-click (CPC), specific ad text, keyword list, and landing page destination URLs. Each campaign can contain up to 100 ad groups.

When deciding whether to create a campaign or ad group for a particular product, service, or section of your website, consider how these settings will help you achieve your goals. One of the most common reasons to create separate campaigns in your account is to set different daily budgets. You may decide to devote more budget to some of your best-selling or most profitable products. Separate ad groups, on the other hand, may be created whenever you'd like to set different maximum CPCs for keywords that may be highly competitive or lower converting. Regardless of how you choose to structure your account, it's important to remain flexible in your strategy -- the structure you envision when you begin may need further refining as you continue to optimize.

Deciding how to organize campaigns and ad groups

There is almost an infinite number of ways to configure your campaigns and the ad groups within them, and AdWords allows you to easily customize according to your business needs. Below are some common ways to structure an account:

• Products and services: If a sporting goods store offers a vast range of products, it may make sense to set up separate campaigns for the different product areas: Camping, Men's Athletic Wear, Hunting, etc. Within the 'Camping' campaign, the advertiser could set up separate ad groups set up for the various items that fall under camping, such as 'Tents,' 'Cookware,' and 'Sleeping Bags.' And within the 'Men's Athletic Wear' campaign, there could be separate ad groups for 'Athletic Socks,' 'Basketball Shorts,' and 'Knee pads.'
• Brand Names: A website that sells a variety of brand-name products may find that branded keywords convert better than generic product descriptions. To test this, the advertiser may want to designate separate ad groups or even separate campaigns for each brand, depending on the variety of products under a given brand label. If you want to use trademarked brand names of a trademark owner who has filed a complaint with Google, you will need permission from the trademark owner in order to use the trademark in your ad text.
  
• Websites: For advertisers promoting a variety of products or services from different companies and websites, such as affiliates or agencies, each company or website should have its own campaign or even a separate account.
• Geographic Location: Service providers that are geographically-targeted, such as furniture stores, real estate developers or car dealerships, may designate a different campaign for each state and then a different ad group for each city or metropolitan area.
• Seasonal products and services: Products that are affected by seasonality should be organized into their own campaigns or ad groups so that these can be paused and resumed according to the season. A flower delivery shop may run different campaigns or ad groups for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, graduation season, and so forth.
  
• Themes or functions: A company that provides only a few products or services may still want to set up separate campaigns or ad groups because the same product or service may appeal to a variety of needs. A catering company may want to run separate campaigns or ad groups for 'Weddings,' 'Corporate Events,' or 'Birthdays.'

Structuring your account effectively will allow you more flexibility in managing your keywords and ad text, controlling budgets, and setting strategic bids. If you think your account structure could use some changes, you may want to test different configurations until you feel that your account is manageable and helping you achieve your advertising goals.

We hope that you have found Stephanie's Assessment and Account Structure tips helpful. Stay tuned for more advice on selecting keywords and ad text!

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew

AdWords Optimization Tips: Part 2 - Assessing Your Website and Goals

Two weeks ago, Stephanie L. from the Optimization team outlined the four topics of optimization that she would cover in our "AdWords Optimization Tips" series: Assessment, Structure, Keywords, and Ad Text. In the first half of Assessment, she encouraged advertisers to assess their industry and audience before beginning an optimization. Today, she will discuss the second half of Assessment -- different ways you can evaluate your website and identify your goals as you begin to optimize your campaign.

Know your website

Whether you are the marketing manager or webmaster (or both) of your business, you know the products and services on your website better than anyone else. And that means you are in the best position to evaluate your website and assess how a visitor may interact with and respond to the content on your site. Imagining yourself as your prospective customer and fine-tuning your site as necessary can result in a better experience for that prospective customer, and thus better results for you.

Some elements to consider as you evaluate your website are:

• Site structure or sitemap: Are your products and services organized in a way that makes sense from your visitor's perspective? Specific landing pages can help these prospective customers find exactly what they are looking for. For example, if a prospective customer is searching for 'women's snowboarding pants,' the ideal landing page may feature women's snowboarding pants in all brands and styles. If she is searching for a specific brand of snowboarding pants, the ideal landing page may feature all types of snowboarding pants by that specific manufacturer.
• Layout and design: Visitors to your site may respond more favorably to a site that is straightforward, clean, and simple to navigate than one that is flashy or slick. Those who do not find what they are looking for tend to leave the site within the first several seconds.
• Ease of use: When visitors come to your site, they should be able to quickly understand how to navigate your site and find the information they're looking for. Navigation and search bars allow your prospective customers to look for more specific items or different styles. Clearly marked buttons that read 'Sign Up Now!' or 'Add to Cart' encourage further action from these prospective customers. On the other hand, broken links, inaccurate or unfinished landing pages and other obstacles make it more difficult for prospective customers to become actual customers.

Know your goals

Your goals, or desired results, are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when setting up a new account or optimizing an existing account. Are you more interested in branding your business, garnering clicks, or maximizing your return on investment? It is important to clearly identify and prioritize what specific goals you want to achieve and design your campaigns around those goals.

Depending on what your primary goal is, you may want to consider the following tips:

• Maximizing clicks: If your aim is to cast the widest net to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general, irrelevant keywords will negatively affect your clickthrough rate, Quality Score, minimum bids and positioning.
• Optimizing for Ad Performance: One component of improving ad performance is maximizing your clickthrough rate. If this is your goal, the first step is to filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should ideally reflect a user's search as closely as possible. If you are running on a keyword such as 'San Francisco travel tours,' your ad text should also highlight travel tours in San Francisco.
• Promoting brand awareness: If you want to promote your brand, you may decide to run a cost-per-impression campaign in addition to a cost-per-click campaign. You may want to supplement your text ads and incorporate image and video ads in your campaign. You could also employ site-targeting to show your ad to people who aren't actively searching for your business but may still be interested in what you sell.
• Maximizing ROI: Maximizing your return on investment calls for a little more understanding about the sales cycle unique to your product or service, and how keyword searches can reflect which stage a user might be in that cycle. If you want to separate the serious buyers from the online equivalent of window shoppers, your structure, ad text and keyword lists can be designed to target specific kinds of users. For instance, users searching on variations such as 'reviews' or 'ratings' are probably still researching the product, and you can filter out such searches by including those words as negative keywords.
  

Last but not least, it is important to determine how you will measure the impact of your optimization so you can clearly evaluate your campaign's performance before and after the optimization. If you are feeling extra scientific, you may want to test altered campaigns against a control group to see what works best for you. Google offers some powerful tools that can help you better track campaign performance, including Analytics, conversion tracking, and the Reports Center tab in your account.

This post ends our discussion of Assessment, the first of four topics we will be covering in this series. We have touched upon a few high level tips today on how to achieve your goals for your advertising campaigns. Stay tuned for future posts of "AdWords Optimization Tips" when we will take a deeper dive on specific advice and tips on structure, keywords, and ad text. Until then, happy optimizing!

Posted by Feng, Inside AdWords crew