Google has become one of the largest companies in the world over the last 20 years almost exclusively through the revenue generated through AdWords. It’s a brilliant marketing tool if used correctly and following a few simple points will give you a better chance of success.

Timing your spend

Every business will vary with most things, but you need to estimate when you think it is best for your adverts to appear on Google. A good example is that many ecommerce businesses do very well on a Sunday evening and some business services do very well in the early part of the week. Unlike SEO where you will aim to get your chosen phrases ranking on page one and there is no additional cost to when you appear with AdWords you will pay every time someone clicks on your advert so it’s important that you serve your adverts when you believe you will obtain the best conversion.

Target specific locations

One of my favorite features in AdWords is the geographical targeting of campaigns. Unlike many other types of online and offline marketing businesses can chose where their content will appear. For UK focused businesses you can pick certain locations or a radius of a location (for example London and 50 miles around London) and for businesses that attract customers internationally you can select specific countries or even languages.

Mobile and desktop devices

Today the majority of people browse on mobile devices. However, research does suggest that for some business's conversion maybe better on desktop devices. As AdWords attracts a cost every time someone clicks on your advert you may wish to consider restricting some of your campaigns to specific devices as without doubt an effective AdWords campaign is down to the conversion on the spend.

Keyword matching and negative keywords

Several years ago, we were looking at a campaign for ourselves and we ran the campaign twice. Once with a broad match using negative keywords and one with an exact match. Many people are not aware of the exact match feature which will mean that your adverts will only appear on the exact phrase rather than appearing when someone searches on a phrase that includes that phrase.

As with all marketing there is not a one size fits all rule but either running a campaign with negative keywords or as an exact match will most likely give you are more effective result.

Define your test campaign realistically

We speak to lots of people that are tempted to try AdWords but often without fully understanding how it works. Our view is that the marketing done by AdWords is a little misleading where they offer £50 credit to try AdWords as you really need to have a much larger budget if you are going to test and then use AdWords effectively.

The starting point to running AdWords is a test campaign and then simply once that is working expanding it out continuously monitoring the return. To create a sensible test campaign where you will play around with the points covered in this article and many more you need to think of a test period in terms of what you are willing to spend and then how long you want to spend it over. For many businesses £500 over 1 week is a good place to start however if you are looking at considerably less budget than £500 AdWords is probably not the right tool for you.

To conclude

As a business we use AdWords from time to time and a small number of our clients also use AdWords. For most businesses we believe that with a limited marketing budget the money can be spent better elsewhere. However, if you have a larger marketing budget, we hope these points will help you start an effective AdWords campaign.

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