You can be very successful with Google Adwords. It can be the perfect way to drive an immense amount of qualified traffic to your website, which has the impact to immediately boost sales and revenue.

However, to be able to effectively use Adwords, you need to know how to be successful with it. Being successful with Adwords is rooted in a solid understanding of how to run a proper PPC campaign so that you spend as little as possible-- for big results.

Google Adwords is, hands down, the easiest way to drive qualified leads to your website, but they do require methodical maintenance to be successful.

In this post, we are going to look at how you can be successful with Google Adwords to generate a positive return on investment.

1. Monitor Geographic Performance

Adwords campaigns can have significant changes in performance based on the geographical area that they target. Because of this, it’s important that you use location information in Google Analytics and Adwords to advise your purchasing decisions.

Using what you learn from your location data, you can alter the way that your Adwords campaigns are set up. You can avoid spending money in locations that don’t convert and put more budget towards cities, states, or countries that actually drive results for your business. This is smart to do because you only want to target places that will provide profit. You don’t want to spend money on locations that have no benefit to your business.

You may even want to take this one step further and create a handful of campaigns, with each being different depending on which location they are targeting.

Once you have created a few campaigns, you should quickly start to see which locations are providing the best return on investments.

2. Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing campaigns can have a big impact on your revenue and profit. The way that a remarketing campaign works is that, when a customer browses your site and then leaves, you advertise on other sites to bring them back and complete a purchase.

There are a handful of ways that you can do remarketing. These ways are:

1. Video remarketing.

2. Standard remarketing.

3. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads.

4. Remarketing for Mobile Apps.

5. Dynamic remarketing.

To decide which remarketing strategy to use, you should make this decision with a combination of using your data, thinking about what your target audience will appreciate most, and even a little bit of just your gut feeling. After you have had a remarketing campaign going for a bit, you can continue using all three of these things to improve results over time.

3. A/B Test Your Adwords Ads

To get the best click rates and highest quality views, you should A/B test your ads. This means experimenting with copy and the overall look and feel to drive results.

You should create several variations of your ads until you find the variation that performs best. When you create different versions of your ads, you can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t. So, while this may cost a little extra up front, it will ultimately help you save a lot of time and money over time.

4. Use Bounce Rate and Page Views to Understand Keyword Performance

You should spend time examining your keywords to understand which keywords have the best conversion rate. When examining your keywords, you should be able to quickly get an understanding as to which keywords deserve more focus, and which keywords should be removed from your campaign.

It’s smart to examine your bounce rate because this gives you a sense of if people from a specified keyword are spending time browsing your website. A good campaign bounce rate is 20% or less. If people bounce away from your website over 60% of the time, you need to either improve your ads or improve your landing page (or both). If you are noticing your bounce rate is over 70%, you critically need to take action on improving your campaign.

To give you a more technical understanding of bounce rate, this is the formula that is used to calculate it:

Total Number of Visitors Who Only Looked at One Page / Total Views = Bounce Rate

You want a low bounce rate and want people to look at multiple pages of your site. The more pages that a visitor looks at, the more likely it is that he or she will convert into a sale.

5. Consider Excluding Mobile

A lot of times, people create new campaigns and forget to turn off mobile ads. This is an important thing to consider because not all products are conducive to mobile purchases. If your product isn’t something that is likely to be bought on mobile, then don’t promote it on mobile (you’ll be wasting money).

6. Link Adwords to Your Google Analytics Account

Linking your Adwords account to your Google Analytics account is an important thing to do. When you link your Adwords account to your Google Analytics account, you get a detailed understanding as to what is happening between advertising clicks and conversions (or lack of conversions).

When you understand what is happening on your website after a person clicks an Adwords ad, you can quickly come up with smart ways to refine your Adwords strategy to improve results.

Some of the ways that you can use Analytics to improve your Adwords campaigns are:

• Figure out the cost to earn revenue.

• See the bounce rates of ads.

• See how many of your ad visitors are new website visitors.

• Create a remarketing campaign

When you link these two accounts together, you’ll be able to figure out how to make better-performing ads.

7. Optimize Your Landing Pages

While a good bidding strategy is important, your landing pages are equally important. This is where people are meeting your brand and you need to instantly build trust with them.

Optimizing your landing pages means doing some of the following:

• Giving your landing pages titles that are relevant to your campaign copy.

• Putting clear and powerful buttons on your landing pages.

• Putting items on your landing page that build trust (customer logos, testimonials, etc.)

• Strong content that is engaging.

You want an optimized landing page because it will keep your costs to earn revenue significantly lower.

Conclusion

After reading this, you should clearly see that an Adwords campaign requires somewhat meticulous maintenance, but isn’t too hard to win with to make sales happen. Be smart about your campaign buying and planning, track your spending, and always be experimenting. If you do those things, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be successful.