Apply these four tips to dramatically improve the efficiency and ROI of your AdWords campaigns.

Tip #1:  Beware of Broad-Matched Sponsored Keywords
Are you using broad-matched sponsored keywords in your AdWords account? If so, you need to be careful because Google often triggers ads to display from irrelevant search keyword phrases. Showing your ad with irrelevant search queries costs you money in two ways.

First, your ad will likely not get many clicks, which reduces your Click-Through-Rate (CTR) for that keyword and pulls down the average for the whole AdGroup. A low CTR results in a poor Quality Score, which means that Google will require a higher bid from you to keep from disabling that keyword altogether. In addition, Google will charge you more per click for the same ad position than someone else who is sponsoring the same keyword but has a better Quality Score.

The second problem is that the clicks that you do get from non-relevant keywords generally have a much lower tendency to convert into leads or sales.
How do you avoid this problem?

First, you should always start out your new campaigns with phrase-matched and exact-matched keywords. They are safer because you have more control over when your ads will appear. But sometimes you will find that you just can’t get enough paid click traffic this way and you still have money left in your budget. In that case, add some broad-matched keywords back in, but be sure to monitor the actual search term used via your web analytics tool and use Tip #2 below to filter out irrelevant keyword phrases.

Second, from time to time, you should prune underperforming keywords from your campaigns. These are keywords that have low CTR or poor conversion rates. Just set up a reasonable date range in AdWords and go down your keyword lists. To speed up the process, you can sort columns by CTR and Conversions from low to high.  Read Complete Article >

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