3 Rarely Used AdWords Settings You Should Be Aware Of
*The following tip was shared by Eric Gesinski who does Tulsa SEO and web design in Tulsa*
Google AdWords is used often by many internet marketers to help draw targeted traffic to their web sites. There are several elements within AdWords there are not often seen that can help improve CTR and position without wasting money. Here are three ways to improve your AdWords results that you might not have known about.
The Bid Adjustment setting. Essentially everyone who uses AdWords knows you can adjust bids for each ad group, or even for each keyword independently. However, there’s a setting within the campaign settings that allows you to set what hours of the day you want to display your ad.
Not only this, but the advanced version of this setting (the “Bid Adjustment” mode in the Ad Schedule settings) will allow you to adjust your CPC by a percent for any hours of the day you choose. In this image, you can see an example where I’ve increased the CPC to 200% of the default amount for specific hours during certain days of the week. Testing has shown that these times have the best conversion rates, and by doubling their CPC it moves their ads to a much higher position. This increases their clicks and conversions, but only increases their cost for a limited time during the day.
Setting a radius for your ad location. Depending on where you want your ad displayed, sometimes it’s better to choose multiple countries, sometimes it’s better to pick a smaller area. For local markets, it’s good to be able to pick more specifically. You can pick the city to get the metro area, but if you want a fuller area within a specific range of miles or kilometers, you can use the Custom option within the Location settings.
Here you can set an area for a certain number of miles/kilometers around a city or a zip code. The benefit to this option is that when you target customers this way, your address will show in your advertisements (which is also set in the Location settings, in the “Show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced)” option). You can even create a custom shape to include or leave out specific areas by choosing “Custom Shape” in the Custom section of the Location settings, as shown below.
Changing your ad frequency. This is one setting that is more often known about, but sometimes forgotten. By default your ads are optimized to show the ad that gets a higher CTR more frequently. However, this does not really properly split test ads you’re running. A proper A-B split test should evenly show your ads, that way you can objectively determine which ad performs best.
After this you can adjust the worse performing ad to continuously improve your CTR. To do this, change the setting in your campaign settings that’s labeled “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping”. Set it to rotate, and you’ll be able to see which ad gets a better CTR for an even number of impressions. Yes, it says “Optimized” is best for most advertisers, but you’re an advanced advertiser. Use “Rotate” for proper testing.
Use these campaign setting adjustments to help optimize your pay per click campaigns in Google AdWords. Using them effectively can drop costs, increase CTR, and overall improve your profits through this marketing tool.
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11 Responses to “3 Rarely Used AdWords Settings You Should Be Aware Of”
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Ad scheduling is very important for certain niches! For example, I use to run Adwords campaigns for a client in the video game industry. We’ve notice that the conversions were higher at night and even past midnight, because the demographics (teens, and college students) are up that late playing video games.
So I set the ad schedule to pause our accounts during the day, which is potentially during the time our demographics had class, and unpaused the campaign in the evening.
Great tip here! I’ll add some Adwords tip on my blog soon and will give you guys a reference in the future! Thanks for sharing!
With a limited budget, it is essential to get maximum bang for the buck. These are excellent aspects to consider and the 2nd and 3rd are unquestionably right. On the first, you will still get CTR data even for the less effective ad so I think I would prefer to get more CTs than merely get a more precise estimate of CTRs. JM2C.
These are some good tips. Location targeting isn’t an exact science based on IP address, so it can be best to test some different settings with this, as well as target terms with the location/s included in the phrase across a wider geographic setting, but your point about showing your address location with the advert is valid.
The fact that you can use custom shapes when targeting blows my mind. That’s awesome!
@Josh – Yes, you can use custom shapes, but these are very rough approximations of targeting. IP targeting is still very rough, and it seems that for small businesses, bidding on city names and zip codes has a better return.
Good information here. I never can get my AdWords to work for me.
Very interesting. I have experimented with geographic targeting with limited success for a few clients who only want local business. However, it’s not exact, as we have had mixed results on certain campaigns.
Thanks for info I have a lot of troble keeping the bid prices down because of quality score
I have experimented with geographic targeting .
Great tips! The radius feature should really help out when you are trying to focus on Local SEO.
Wow I never knew you could do custom shapes! hmm me thinks Ill check it out later today.