3 Ways to Increase Sales in Google Adwords

The competition in PPC advertising is increasing daily. With this increased competition, it is increasingly important for advertisers to continually build and improve their campaigns. Everyone should be expanding their keyword list, improving their ads through split testing, and managing their bids on a regular basis.

In addition to these account best practices and other account management techniques, there are three things that can help you drive more traffic and generate more sales for your site. They are, increase your negative keywords, use the Placement Network, and try out the Display Ad Builder.

Increase your negative keywords

Adgroups that only have [exact] and “phrase” match keywords are missing out on related keywords that are only triggered through broad match terms. Some people shy away from broad match terms because they can bring in unrelated traffic. No one wants to pay for traffic from unrelated keywords. The answer is to expand your negative keyword list.

By expanding your negative keyword list, I’m not talking about adding 10 to 20 more terms. I’m talking about adding hundreds to thousands of negative keywords. Aside from adding the common sense negative terms that you can come up with on your own, there are two places you can look for negative keywords in your Adwords account. The first is by running a Search Query Performance Report.

You can create a Search Query Performance Report by going to the Reports tab, creating a new report, and then selecting the Search Query Performance under Report Type. Run this report on all the campaigns in your account that have broad match keywords in them. This report will show you the exact keywords that triggered your ad for the time period. Pick out the terms that don’t relate to your product and add these to your negative keyword list for that campaign. Running these reports on a campaign level is the way to go, since you add the negative keywords on a campaign level as well. Don’t forget to also look for the terms that just aren’t performing. If you have a keyword that appears to be related but isn’t making any sales, add it to your negative list as well. There is no point spending money on a term that doesn’t perform.

The second place you can go to build your negative keyword list is the Keyword Tool in the Tools section of your account. Put in one of your keywords and search the results for any terms that don’t relate to your product. Add all of these terms to your negative list.

Building out your negative keyword lists will prevent you from showing up for unrelated terms and will still take advantage of all the long tail keywords related to your web site.

Placement Network

Many Adwords users have tried the Content Network, wasted a lot of money on worthless clicks, and have written off the Content Network as useless. It is time for you to reconsider. The Placement Network now allows you to pick the exact web sites you want your ad to show up on. You don’t have to worry about showing up on random sites throughout the network and wasting your ad dollars. You pick related sites where your customers will be and your ads will only show up on those sites.

Here is an example of how this works. Let’s say you sell women’s briefcases. Once you’ve activated placement targeting in your campaign search, go to the Placement Tool to search for related sites. You can search by category, topic, URL or demographics. Use all these different search functions to find possible sites. In this case, the demographic search will be very helpful as you can search according to gender, age, and income. For women’s briefcases, I could look at sites that target women ages 25 – 64, with house hold incomes over $100,000.

Here is a short list of some of the sites that showed up using these search tools: www.downtownwomensclub.com, www.womanowned.com, www.thefashionspot.com, and www.businessknowhow.com. Just add the web sites that you know for sure your customers visit. Don’t worry about being everywhere. Your customers visit more sites than just yours and Google.com. Using the Placement Network in the right way will expand your presence and bring in more traffic and sales.

Display Ad Builder

The Display Ad Builder is a new tool Adwords introduced to help advertisers that don’t want to or can’t pay a graphic designer to design ads, to easily create display ads of their own. If you have a successful Content Network campaign, you should create some display ads and see how they perform compared to your text ads. In many cases, you’ll find you get a better CTR. In some cases though, the extra traffic won’t necessarily mean extra sales. Keep a close eye on these ads and make sure they are performing and bringing in sales.