Reporting & Analysis Advanced Exam

Optimizing Performance

Introduction to Optimization

Overview of Optimization

Optimization is the process of adjusting parts of your account -- like your keywords and ad text -- as well as your website to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads. Through optimization, you can help meet your advertising goals, be it to gain traffic, lower costs, or improve conversions.

Based on your advertising goals, optimization can involve ad text improvements, new keywords, changes to keyword settings, strategic changes to your bids, better organization within your campaign, and changes to ad targeting options.

 Here are a few more examples:

Campaign improvements	Ad group improvements	Website improvements
Organizing campaigns Changing language and location targeting Changing ad delivery times and position	Editing keywords Editing ad text Organizing ad groups Changing bids Using keyword matching options	Changing your website to improve flow and relevancy Choosing the right landing pages

Benefits and Goals of Optimization

Why optimize? Very simply, optimization makes your advertising more effective. In AdWords, this can mean a higher Quality Score, lower costs, and better return on investment.

When it comes to the ongoing success of your advertising, it's crucial to optimize your AdWords campaigns. Regular optimizations can help successful campaigns stay successful. Since the online world is always changing, it's important to periodically evaluate each ad campaign and make tweaks that will help keep it running effectively.

Depending on your goals and the type of changes you make, optimization can have a major impact on several aspects of performance. For example, optimization can help you achieve these benefits:

• more clicks and traffic to your website
• higher profits and improved return on investment (ROI)
• lower costs
• ability to accomplish any other advertising goals

Your advertising goals, or desired results, are perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when optimizing an account. For example, are you more interested in making sales, branding your business, or increasing traffic to your website? It's important to clearly identify and prioritize the specific goals you want to achieve with your AdWords ads, and then optimize towards those goals. This will enable you to make strategic changes to your account to improve its performance.

Here are some typical advertising goals and the possible focus areas for each goal:

Goal: "I want to get more clicks."
Increase your ad exposure by adding relevant keywords and site placements to your ad groups while making your ad text more compelling.

Goal: "I want to increase my clickthrough rate (CTR)."
Focus on ad quality. Attract more clicks by refining your ads, and eliminate extra impressions by using negative keywords.

Goal: "I want to improve my return on investment (ROI)."
Focus on your ads and keywords to attract the right audience. Then focus on your website. Be sure your landing page and entire website is set up to let users find the specific thing being promoted in your ad.

Key Strategies for Optimization

It's important to know that your ideal optimization strategy will depend on the advertising goals you define for your campaigns. With specific goals in mind, you can perform strategic optimizations that are more likely to get you the results you want. In most cases, using a combination of many optimization techniques together -- such as improving your ad as well as editing your keywords -- is the best way to improve the overall performance of your account and increase your Quality Score.

Here are some key strategies depending on your primary advertising goal:

Improve Your ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is a measure of the profits you have made from your advertising, compared to how much you've spent on that advertising. To identify and optimize your ROI, you need to measure conversion data instead of clickthrough rate, traffic, or other measures. To optimize for ROI, aim for high Quality Scores which can reduce costs, encourage conversions with enticing ads and by using the right landing pages, and target customers who are likely to convert.

• Lead potential customers to the most relevant page on your site
• Add a call-to-action in your ads to highlight the action you want customers to take
• Include unique selling points to make your ad stand out
• Allocate your budget according to performance
• Group highly relevant keywords and ads together so that your ad text will match a user's search
• Target the right region and language for your business
• Use Conversion Optimizer to get more conversions at a lower cost

Improve Your CTR

Clickthrough rate (CTR) improvement is really about making your ads more relevant to your potential customers. Optimization should focus on creating more relevant and compelling advertising to help drive more targeted traffic to your website. Filter out irrelevant searches by refining your keyword list and incorporating negative keywords where appropriate. In addition, your ad text should reflect a user's search as closely as possible. For example, if you're running on the keyword "Paris travel tours," your ad text should also highlight travel tours in Paris.

• Use keywords in your ad title and text to make the ads more relevant
• Use negative keywords to eliminate unwanted impressions that won't result in clicks
• Create a relevant keyword list to target when your ads will show
• Use keyword insertion to make your ad more relevant to a diverse audience

Increase Your Clicks and Traffic

If your aim is to draw as much relevant traffic to your site as possible, you may want to consider running on a broader range of keyword variations. Keep in mind, however, that running on very general keywords can negatively affect your Quality Score and increase your costs.

• Create keywords for unadvertised parts of your website
• Find new keyword variation ideas using the Keyword Tool
• Increase daily budgets (to allow more clicks to occur) and maximum CPC bids (to raise your ad position) and/or increase your Quality Scores
• Reach more customers and maximize traffic by targeting the Display Network
• Broaden your location targeting settings

Promote Brand Awareness

Branding campaigns are designed to increase traffic to your website and enable a customer to interact or learn about your company's brand. If you want to promote your brand, you might decide to run a cost-per-impression (CPM) campaign in addition to a cost-per-click (CPC) campaign.

• Supplement your text ads with image and video ads that are great for branding messages
• Use Display Network placements to show your ad to people who are interested in what you sell
• Choose a landing page that focuses on the interaction with your brand