I am sad to say that I am truly staggered by the number of business owners who simply aren’t utilising the correct AdWords tools to maximise their Google AdWords campaigns performance. Surely when you are investing in such a campaign it makes sense to equip yourself with the right tools for the job? A plumber doesn’t go to work without his wrench right?!
The fact of the matter is that business owners and managers are simply too busy running the business to be bogged down in these finer details. But this is truly to the detriment to their campaign, wasted clicks, poor performing keywords, broad match terms that are bringing in irrelevant traffic, the list goes on and ultimately costs money.
So for these tools…
Google Analytics
This is a sophisticated analysis tool. It provides an extremely valuable insight into traffic that comes onto your website. Information like what keywords bought visitors onto your site, how many pages they viewed, what actions they took and most importantly which keywords have yielded you those all important conversions.
Conversion Tracking
You can track conversions using AdWords. When someone has clicked your ad and taken the desired action on your website this counts as a conversion and is tracked. This allows you to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your AdWords campaign.
Keyword Planner
Before adding keywords into the campaign use this free tool to research keywords. You can find out how much traffic each keyword is likely to yield and the estimated competition and suggested bid. Add relevant keywords to your list and then export ready to add into your campaign.
Ad Scheduling
Do you want to run ads for specific hours during the day? Use ad scheduling to serve ads when you want them shown. Whether it is just at weekends or only for 2 hours every morning, you can keep complete control using ad scheduling.
First Page Bid Estimate
Do you want to be seen on the first page of Google but are not sure how much to bid to increase your chances? You can add this column into your dashboard and it will show you for each keyword how much you should bid to appear on this page. Remember that ad rank does depend on a number of factors including quality score so a higher bid does not always guarantee a top spot.
