Adwords Campaign Management requires close attention to detail, ongoing measurement of user behaviour and adjustments to maximize Return On Investment. I am Google Adwords Search Certified professional in Milton, Ontario.
My approach to AdWords is to maximize return-on-investment. I work to get my clients high quality scores, more conversions from clicks and more clicks from qualified users.
I manage my client's Google AdWords accounts for a flat fee, not a percentage of advertising budget.
You can increase your return on investment and lower your advertising budget by:
The reality is that what you want from advertising is more sales. One way to do this is have larger campaigns and draw more users to your product. Larger campaigns cost more money and your return on investment may actually be quite low. Being from a small business background my strategy has always been get the biggest bang for you buck. Online advertising is no different, if you are attracting the right customers then your conversion to sales is higher for a lower cost.
You attract the right customers by firstly knowing who they are. When you think of your best customers, why do they shop with you and not the competition? Is it great service, cheapest price, largest inventory? When you find out why your best customers shop with you, use that in your advertising to attract more customers that are just like your best ones now.
Google analytics will tell you what day of the week and what time of day traffic on your website is highest. You can adjust your AdWords bids to be higher at these times and lower when your customers are not shopping.
AdWords ads can be set up to try out different words (synonyms) and you can measure which ones work best to attract the type of customer you want. You can bid higher on the better keywords and lower on less desirable keywords, or eliminate them, or even make them a negative keyword so your ad will not show when that word is used in a query.
A lot of increasing return on investment is eliminating what doesn't work, or doesn't work well. If you focus on customers and keywords that work the best your conversion from clicks to sales will increase dramatically. Once this is done, then you can focus on a wider audience for your products.
Google Adwords allows you to increase or decrease keyword bids at certain times or certain days. It also allows to stop your ads from showing at certain times of the day, or on certain days. This all part of attracting the right customers but is so powerful in saving money I thought it deserved repeating.
I have a client who sells industrial equipment who had a budget of about $30 per day for ads. His ads ran 24/7 and most days his budget was spent by noon or 1 p.m. By analyzing when he got the most clicks and conversions we were able to determine he was missing a large amount of traffic that happened between 5pm & 7pm Sunday through Thursday. By adjusting when his ads were shown we could eliminate unproductive times and save money so he did not exhaust his budget by noon and was able to capture the 5pm-7pm cohort of users looking for his product. We doubled his ROI and lowered his cost of conversion.
You can achieve a higher position than a competitor while maintaining a lower bid by increasing your quality score See: About Ad position and Ad Rank
You can also read: Using Quality Score to Guide Optimizations: Google Best Practises