Are You Tracking Your AdWords Campaign's Keywords?

Are you tracking the conversions from your campaigns on both the Ad Group and Keyword levels? If not, spend some time setting that up.

You Must Test, Track, And Tweak Your Adwords Ads Campaigns Consistently! One of the most important things you can do as a marketers is to test constantly. You test your ad copy's new headlines... attention-grabbing hooks... and psychological response triggers. You can apply tweaks to your ad copy to improve your click throughs and your conversion rate. Conversion Tracking is a way to measure your success.

You need to get your tracking code (Google or Yahoo Analytics) on the product's thank you page so that you can track conversions. Without that you will not know which keywords convert and which do not. You can place Google Analytics code to track visitors conversions of web opt-in sign up forms. Be sure the tracking is on the page after the action: IE thank you page for registration or thank you sales page by placing a snippet of copy and paste hotmail code on the page where the conversion happens. It usually takes 24 hours for it to be activated for your account.

One strategy to improve conversion (but reducing clickthrough rate) is to include "qualifying information" in the ad text, such as a price, minimum-order size, or shipping cost. Then, if someone isn't willing to pay your price listed in the ad text or meet your conditions, they probably won't bother to click.

Keyword research is important as is keyword performance and conversion. You want to see and know what keywords perform the best. Run A Search Query Report. Running this report gives you all the keywords that triggered your ads. You may find keywords or keyword phrases (long tail 4 words or more phrases) that you were unaware your visitors were using to find your products or services related to your business.
Google provides Google Analytics to AdWords PPC advertisers to track the clicks and conversions performance of your ad campaign's keywords.

Tracking URLs provide information such as the source of the click and the search query. When you use Tracking URLs, the destination URL in your ads is appended with information such as the search query, keyword, and match type for each click.

One of the most important (and perhaps under-utilized) features of Google AdWords is the "Negative Keywords" feature. This allows you to specify keywords which -- if they appear in a search phrase -- strongly indicate that a customer is not interested in the products or services that you offer.

Develop the ability to test multiple elements on your site (AdWords Site Optimizer) to make your web site improve on a weekly basis. Experiments to improve your opt-in page. Small improvements on your landing page can make a big difference.

The Bounce Rate Report Is Important. Through your analytics you can isolate your landing page used in your PPC campaigns and learn a bit more about the bounce rate for visitors. Bounce rate indicates the percentage of people that took one look at your page and then left the site. If your CTRs are high on your ad, but your bounce rate is high on your landing page, than visitors are not finding the information that they thought they'd find by clicking on your ad. Why is that? What needs to change in your messaging?


Refer to The Google Analyics Blog and Google Analytics Videos On YouTube.

Basic AdWords Keyword Terminology

PPC (Pay per Click) - denotes the approximated price paid per click of the advertisement advertising under a keyword

Ad Rank - refers to the ad effectiveness of a keyword based on its position/rank on search engines' result page (No. 1 being the highest rank)

Competitors - this refers to the number of competitors advertising under the same keyword

Ad Variations - allows you to create alternative ads to split test