Google Pay-Per-Click, or also called AdWords, can be the most immediate method to generate traffic to your website.

For those who think it’s as simple as writing ads, bidding on terms, and being charged for only those who click, well, there’s much more to it, and there’s many tools that most AdWords novices don’t take advantage of.  Proper AdWords management takes a lot of work and effort, and if you’re not willing to give that effort, or take advantage of the tools, you’re setting yourself up for less optimal results. For the sake of this post, let’s just look at the search network; a future post will cover the content network.  OK-Let’s take a look at a few of  those “hidden” tools that can contribute to campaign optimization

You can track computer results vs. mobile phone results;  This is an option you can select or de-select.

You can track by day of week; Google allows you to adjust bidding by day if Thursday/Friday traffic is higher and you want to increase ad positioning on those days

As you can see below, I’ve increased bids by 25% on Thursday and Friday, but decreased bids by 25% on the weekends.

Under the campaign tab, there are column options showing these fields: Impression Share, Lost Impression share (Rank) and Lost Impression share (Budget).  These are not default columns but can provide some useful information from a campaign level:

• Impression Share: The percentage of times your ad is shown
• Lost Impression Share (Rank): Percentage of time your ads are not shown on the 1st page because the ad rank is too low
• Lost Impression Share (Budget): Percentage of time your ads are not shown because your budget is too low

So for the above, the impression shares are low because of a number of factors; the campaign is not 24/7, we’re only doing search and not the content network, specific keyword rank, etc.   The Lost Imp Share (Budget) shows that we’re mostly reaching our budget each day; the ad groups lost impression share are both under 10%.  By increasing budget 10% we can capture more impressions.  The Lost Impression Share (Rank) above shows that a large number of impressions are being lost due to ad position, and in this case I either have to increase bids or continue to work on improving quality score. The formula for ad rank is “Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score”.  For the above, our quality scores are generally good, but our CPC bids are low.  If I increase my bids, we can increase impressions because ad rank is increasing.

Under the Keywords tab, there’s an option called “See Search Terms” where you an see the actual terms that made people click your ad.  This is a great way to add relevant keywords to your campaign, or identify negative terms because people are clicking terms that you don’t sell.

Another hidden technique with regard to ad copy is utilizing “dynamic keyword insertion” into your ads.  The technique allows user keyword queries to be automatically placed into your ad headline or body copy.  Because the user query shows up in your ad, this technique can increase click-through rate and quality score, but you have to be careful that the query/keyword fits well in context of your ad.  The basic syntax goes like this- here’s a sample ad with the dynamic headline:

• {Keyword:Marketing Help}
• Learn more about our Services
• Full eMarketing Strategy & Tactics

“Marketing Help” is the default headline if the user query is longer than 25 characters.  When “Keyword” is capitalized,  the first letter of the query is capitalized. Likewise if “keyword” were lower case, then the query shows as lower case.  Here’s another example of an ad showing the dynamic insertion within the body copy :

• eMarketing Strategy
• If you need (keyword:marketing help}
• Contact us and we can help you

The above are just a few of the tweaks (among many) that can be made to optimize an AdWords campaign.  In a future post, I’ll continue with some optimization methods including more on bidding and keyword selection.  Between all of the settings available, bidding options, landing page optimization tools, conversion tactics, analytics integration, and ad copy testing, managing campaigns does take effort and time.  Not everything has to be done at one time, but focus on a specific area each day.  Fixing pay-per-click doesn’t happen over night, but consistent optimization efforts will pay off.