The Google AdWords team recently released a lengthy video full of advice on how your 2014 AdWords data should be used to plan your next campaigns for 2015.
You can view the full video here, but in this post I will recap the main takeaways for you.
Find Where Your Most Valuable Users Are Coming From
The AdWords team suggests using three metrics to determine where your most valuable users are coming from, which are:
- Location: If you’re targeting a specific area you should have a sense for where the majority of your clicks and conversions are coming from.
- Time: Determine which day/hour of the week resulted in the best return, and use ad scheduling to adjust your campaigns accordingly.
- Device: Review your performance on mobile and compare that data against your performance on full desktop browsers.
Determine How Well Your Keywords Are Performing
Keywords are the fundamental building blocks of your campaign, so you need to go through and determine which keywords are working and not working.
When looking at keyword data, the AdWords team recommends focusing on these metrics:
- Click-Through Rate: Filter your keywords by impressions to determine which ones are getting seen most often but are not getting clicked. You want to weed out those low CTR keywords.
- Cost Per Conversion: Determine which keywords are driving the most conversions at the lowest rates. Which keywords are getting clicked most often with fewest impressions? The AdWords team recommends increasing your bid for these low cost per conversion keywords.
- Average position: Look and see how frequently your ads are shown in the top three positions, or how often they are even shown at all.
Determine How Well Your Individual Ads Are Performing
The AdWords team recommends taking a similar approach as the one described above to determine how well individual ads are performing. Which ones are driving the most clicks, which ones are driving the most conversions at the lowest cost, and so on.
Look for trends within these ads that could potentially be leading to better performance. Maybe the ads with an explicit call to action are performing better than the ones that don’t. This will tell you to use more ads with strong calls to action in your 2015 campaigns.
Do a thorough review of the landing pages your ads are sending users to and make sure you’re providing the best user experience possible. Half the battle is getting people to click on the ad in the first place, once they do you don’t want to deter them from converting.
Other Recommendations
The AdWords team recommends setting up Google Analytics to track what users are doing on your site after clicking on one of your ads. Google Analytics should really be elementary for search marketers at this point though.
The team also recommends to monitor your campaigns frequently and adjust your budgets accordingly. If one campaign is performing way beyond all the others, put more of your budget into that campaign to keep the conversions coming.
Watch “Planning for 2015” video by Google AdWords team
