10 Easy Hacks for Success at AdWords

Written by Shmuel Aber, CEO of the Saber Team.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have seen my easy hacks for SEO published a few months ago. With the massive shift toward online advertising and the positive feedback we received, I’ve decided to share some trade secrets on one the most elusive topics in digital marketing, Google AdWords.

At the Saber Team, we specialize in helping websites rank on Google and one of our top accompanying techniques is AdWords Marketing. Google AdWords, while one of the most effective and lucrative forms of digital advertising, can be a complete waste of money when incorrectly implemented.

Most of our AdWords techniques are proprietary and complex, but there are plenty of simple tricks that will make a massive difference without investing much time or energy. Here’s 10 easy hacks to get you started.

As with my SEO tips, all of the techniques and hacks mentioned here are simple and easy to employ. No prior knowledge of advanced coding is necessary.

1. Determine your Cost Per Conversion

This is without a doubt the most important thing that you should be doing when working with AdWords. Yes, ideally even before you ever open up a Google AdWords Account.

Simply put, you will need to determine a price that you’d be willing to pay for a successful customer. That price will be your “Ideal Cost Per Conversion”.

If you start buying ads without this number, you are setting yourself up for a potential nightmare. Yes, you might be making sales, but there is a chance that you could be losing a lot of money if your cost of acquiring those sales is too high.

2. Restrict Your Ads to the Correct Time of Day

Timing is important.

Most websites will have an ideal time of day that their customer will be shopping. It is critical to do some research and try your best to figure out the most successful times of day.

A company selling office equipment in Brooklyn may determine that New York business hours will be their best time of day to restrict their ads. A gaming company may determine that 5:30pm – 11:30pm across the country will be their correct time of day. And a kosher restaurant website may only want to run ads during business hours.

Some websites may not think that they have any correct time of day, but after analyzing their metrics for a few months may discover that, for example, the hours of 1:30am – 5am every day has the worst rate of cost/conversion. Turning off the ads for those hours can save them a fortune.

3. Remarketing

The Saber Team manages a lot of AdWords Accounts and remarketing is one of strongest factors we’ve seen that separate successful accounts from the unsuccessful ones.

“Remarketing” means tracking a customer that’s been on your website already (within the past 30 – 90 days) and showing them “reminder image ads” as they move across the internet. These ads remind them to come back to your website and continue along the sales funnel.

These remarketing ads cost only about 30% of the original ad and the effectiveness is hard to believe.

One of our clients, Estate Diamond Jewelry, sells high-end and rare engagement rings. Most of their customers take at least 2-4 weeks before deciding to purchase a ring. If not for remarketing ads, many of their customers would completely forget about them. The remarketing ads, however, follow their customers around the internet, continuously reminding them to make the sale.

It really works.

Important note: There is also the highly successful “Dynamic Remarketing Ads” but that’s beyond the scope of this article, and is quite complex to set up effectively.

4. Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are actually a big deal, and using them correctly will save you a lot of money.

Negative keywords will track the words that you don’t want to be intermingled into the keywords within a group/campaign (or account).

So, for example, when researching keywords for an AdWords Campaign for commercial rugged phones like the Sonim XP8 for Energy Electronics LLC, we discovered that a successful negative keyword would be “Verizon”. There were lots of customers looking to connect the Sonim XP8 device with Verizon, and wasting our client’s budget by clicking the ad, only to discover that this rugged phone only works with GSM networks.

We believe that every successful campaign should start off with at least 20 unique negative keywords. Each subsequent two weeks you should add at least 5-10 new negative keywords.

5. Only Use Manual CPC

Manual CPC (Cost Per Click) means that you have the ability to change the price settings on the AdWords Campaign so that you can pre-determine your bid price for each and every keyword.

There will be a lot of AdWords Experts who argue with me on this, but I’m a firm believer that all of Google’s automated ad programs are deeply flawed and end up wasting an incredible amount of money. Whether Google does that on purpose or not is not something I’ll weigh in on, but the fact remains the same. The only setting that you should be using for bidding on ads is Manual CPC.

6. Avoid the Google Ad Specialists

I’ve lost count of how many Google Ad Specialists I’ve talked to. In my opinion, they’re at best useless and at worst wasting your money. It’s very rare to come across a specialist who actually knows the Adwords system. They usually have a checklist of basic cookie-cutter items that they run through before pitching that you lift your budget or turn on the automated enhanced settings.

If you want effective advice on how to run your account effectively, here’s what I recommend:

1. Reach out to a marketing firm that specializes in AdWords (or independent AdWords specialist) and pay them to run your account. The ROI is so much higher when you have an expert running your account.
2. Read expert blogs. There are some great bloggers who have written some great articles on Advanced AdWords Techniques. Many of them are technical in nature, but the information is great. The downside, of course, is that not all of them know what they’re talking about.
3. Watch educational YouTube videos. There are some great Youtubers who can train you and give you great tips to improve your AdWords Account.
4. Get an Adwords Audit. See below.

7. Small Campaigns

This piece of advice is a lot more complex than I’m going to get into, but the overall gist is to keep each campaign very small and hyper-focused.

Instead of, for example, creating one massive campaign for all the flip phones on the Mr. Aberthon website, our AdWords specialists created 7 different campaigns for each different type of flip phone. Each campaign had a few focused keywords within it and few hyper focused ads.

The workload triples, but the results are worth every extra second.

8. Conversion Tracking

I was hesitant to add this advice because advanced conversion tracking can be quite a complicated process. The reason I ended up adding this item to the list is because Conversion Tracking is so important.

All I’m going to say is that you will want to enable Conversion Tracking to track all sales, contact forms, phone calls, and even Google Analytic events.

If you don’t have tracking, you’ll never properly know how successfully your ads are performing.

9. Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are the addons that you can attach to the ads. They are all fantastic but honestly, the best value that Ad Extension brings, in my opinion, is that they give more real-estate to the ad.

The ad extensions in order of most important:

1. Callout Extension. Short customized text blurbs about your company or product.
2. Call Extension. Yes, make sure that you have them tracked as conversions
3. Location Extension. Connect it to Google My Business.
4. Sitelink Extension. Only connect these to the campaigns that are appropriate as these may remove your visitors from the sales funnel.
5. Image Extension. It’s still in the testing phase, but I think it will be heavily weighted sooner than later.

10. AdWords Audit

An effective AdWords audit is a very worthwhile investment if you have a significant amount of money going through your account.

An auditor will usually prepare a detailed document with all the changes that they recommend. The advice should span from basic mistakes to advanced localized tips that will help scale the account.

Note however, that auditors usually won’t be the ones to make the actual changes to your account unless they’re also the account manager.

The costs of an audit will vary from company to company. Usually a comprehensive audit from a qualified company will start at about $5,000. Click here to get a quote from the Saber Team for an Adwords Audit.