Improving Adwords CTR
Adwords Tip #2:
There are quite a few tricks for improving your CTR. The first of course is to always split test your ads. Pretty obvious, but make sure you do it. I use ClickMuse, which is a free tool that will email you a report each time one of your ads is finished with a split test. Remember to make sure your ad tests are statistically significant. Also, rotate the ads evenly to achieve more accurate results. Under your “Edit Campaign Settings” choose “Rotate: Show ads more evenly.”
Become familiar with dynamic keyword matching. Did you know you can use dynamic keyword matching in your Display URL? So for example, if someone is searching for “red shoes”, your display URL can show “MySite.com/Red Shoes” – Remember, you don’t need to include the ‘www’ in your Display URL.
Another trick is to do a search for “red shoes” on Google, and then copy the ads to an excel spreadsheet. Then click the search button a few more times and keep track of which ads are being rotated for each competitor. If one competitor ad is appearing much more frequently, it may be that it’s a better performing ad – which will give you insight into what’s working for your competitors.
Of course, make sure all your ad groups are extremely tightly focused. If someone is searching for “Christian ringtone” – then make sure your ad says “Christian Ringtone” and not something more general. I know this sounds obvious, but I see many people not doing it. And don’t simply use dynamic keyword matching and lump all your keywords together. I make ad groups for each high volume 2 and 3 word phrase. Each ad group usually contains no more than 4 or 5 terms.
If you aren’t doing this already, make sure that you create two identical campaigns: one with only the search network enabled and one for the content network. This will help you manage the performance of your account.