I have my own business and over the last few months I have been paying another company to manage my adwords advert. This company had succesfully kept me at 1st place in adwords for various search terms related to my business. I finally decided to withdraw my advert with the company and have a go at the adverts myself. I spent a few days researching extensively about the best approach and I feel I understand what I need to do correctly. Brief Overview Understand the use of Campaigns, Adgroups, Keywords & Adverts Exact keyword match [example phrase my town] Search network only UK area using my town in the keywords My site is already on page 1 organic results of Google My site is already on page 1 local listings of Google My SEO is good so will compliment my advert for score. I have created my advert and when I put it live I can not get it past the top position on the right hand side. The two adverts that appear at the top above the results are big companies "PC World" & "Currys" who are the same company. I can get to the top of the right hand side with a Max CPC of just £0.50. As a test I took my Max CPC up to £200 and I still could not get above the big companies at the top of the page. How on earth did my adwords agent get me top of the adverts, I really don't know what else to do to get it top. As another test I set up a campaign for my friends plumbing business and with the correct wording in the advert and a Max CPC of £3.00 I succesfully got him top of adwords. As the title asks "am I missing a trick?" Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?
You probably don't fully understand how adwords works. To be in the top position you must either maintain a higher CTR than your competitors or/and have a higher bid per click. Generally a new account comes with a few obstacles. The main obstacle being lack of CTR accuracy. You will have to bid higher and then gradually lower your bid as your CTR improves. To improve CTR you must track your results then modify your campaign accordingly. Eventually you will find certain keywords work better than others, certain ads bring in a higher CTR...over time you will learn to disable what is not working for you and expand on what is working for you. Only then you will be able to dominate the top position. I have the best luck using PHRASE matched keywords and using a NEGATIVE KEYWORD list blocking irrelevant search terms. I use very relevant specific Ad Groups and my ads usually contain relevant keywords that the surfer may be typing in. On my landing page I try to incorporate my higher converting keywords in the content to improve the Quality Score. Quality Score + CTR + Relevance + Bid = Top Position.
Hi anthgav, I am not scaring you , but its true that you can spoil the whole adwords campaign which you agency build & maintain over a long time. I have seen that a very small change in campaign or adgroup or keywords or bid have a big impact on the performance and it take some time to bring(adjust) the performance back, but if meanwhile you again do some changes then it will again take some time to adjust and you cost may increase. I will suggest you not to make any big changes to your already performing campaign. There are lots of thing in adword you need to know to maintain it against your competitor.
Nah... the best thing for you to do is learn the ins and outs of adwords. Most agencies have one goal in mind and that is to deliver traffic to your web site. Whether they convert or not is not their prerogative.
Yup, As Netstar said, I would point out to the Quality Score.. How it is now and how it was before *if you know*
There's no "trick". You just don't know or realize yet how it all works. If you really want to do it yourself, as Netstar said, learn the ins and outs. Learn what you don't yet know and more important, apply that knowledge. If you are not willing or able to do that, go back to an agency. Not all agencies are alike. As Netstar said, their goal is to bring you traffic and it should be at the lowest possible cost. Stay away from bid management agencies who don't take an active role in improving your campaign and simply adjust bids all the time to try to keep your costs low. A few like myself will take conversions into account and help you improve them.
i recentlly got into websites and online retailing, and although at the start u are clueless, u really can learn from the best, Hire someone for a month to take over you campaign, By doing this you can sit back and focus on the more important things, And also you get to see how they work, what they have changed, and how your keywords are worded. this enables you to start dabbling and trying things for yourself. Keyword research is the most fundemental point in my honest opinion, and even as a beginner its the first thing i have had to get a good grasp on. theres so many keywords around people dont even think of, but have HUGE local searchs
Out of curiosity, do you know what bid management tool they were using if any? From your end you should make sure that: 1. you maintain a high CTR 2. the keyword is mentioned within the ad to improve keyword relevancy 3. link to a relevant landing page If you need any help or would like to outsource the management of the PPC campaigns feel free to message me. I have over 7 years of professional experience in PPC and am Google Adwords certified.
Best way was to start your own campaign and also let your adwords company also work for you side by side and monitor results. If you find your own campaign is providing sustainable results then you can take a step ahead
We believe you can not get top center or above high bidders without fairly high relevance in the landing page words and the Ad itself, using at least a couple of words highly related to the keywords. Google has some tips on that - find at bottom of -- Web Success search guide google (has an adwords login)
I think you should write the information from your agents before you do it by yourself. Use the same information and you will get the same position in adwords. Goodluck and Success !