Increasing the conversion rate of your Adwords campaigns might often be on your mind, right? That’s understandable, really. True, reading about the tips, tricks, strategies and methods that can help you slowly and surely increase conversion efficiency can be of great help. However, nothing beats having a personal experience of how simple ideas can help increase conversions by a substantial 10%. That’s what I wish to share with you, the lessons I learnt and the proven effective tips and tricks, while making my Adwords campaigns yield more results. Ready?

Micro group your AdGroups for better targeting

So, what is the core success factor for your Adword campaigns? Let me answer – Targeting your audiences well with advertisements is what matters. Imagine a user looking for ‘custom made king size beds’. If you have a broad AdGroup called ‘furniture’, the user might be shown an advertisement about ‘ready-made king size beds’, which is entirely contrary to what he/she actually wants to see. The solution – create niche AdGroups. In this case, it would make sense for you to create groups like ‘ready-made furniture’, ‘tables and chairs’, ‘beds and sofas’, etc, so that the most appropriate ad-audience match can be created. With such highly targeted and relevant advertisements working for you, AdWords conversions are going to increase.

Negative keywords are also important, so keep your list updated

In order to achieve higher targeting, making use of negative keyword lists is important. When I decided to invest some time on my year old AdWords campaign, I was fortunate to have a database of 7,000+ search terms. I studied the same and was able to create an exhaustive list of negative keywords. Once your list is ready, just add the identified negative keywords to the campaign and AdGroups levels. Now, you will begin to observe better performance from your AdWords campaigns. No wonders, masters of AdWords campaigns rely on negative keywords as a prominent way of account optimization. In effect, with negative keywords being also considered, your Ads will be presented on more relevant search terms, this having strong impact on conversions when targeted traffic lands at your landing pages.

Keep a close match between your Adgroup and keywords

A better Quality Score for your Adwords campaigns comes as a result of better ad relevance. Of course, this also helps in getting a boost for your Ad Rank. With a higher Quality Score, you can drive in more clicks without having to increase your budget. Here are some important lessons

• I made it a point to keyword optimize my text ads. Not only did I include the target keyword in the ad title, but also at least once in the description lines.
• I believe that writing crisp ads should be the focus. Sometimes, too verbose and ultra-creative advertisements tend to lose out because of being technically not keyword relevant. So, be careful with catchy phrases that might not have a purely literal association with the product being advertised.

Bid management

I had some important realizations while trying to experiment with the optimization of my year old AdWords campaign, here are some important takeaways-

• I’d suggest all AdWords account users to be vigilant in terms of identifying locations where the greatest amount of conversions occur. This is where the bid adjustment needs to increase. Similarly, identify the low conversion areas and adjust bids accordingly. The idea here is to make your bids target success!
• Again, you need to identify core keywords in all AdGroups where the conversion numbers are high, and increase the bid adjustment to 50%. On the contrary, low conversion keywords also need to be identified, with bid adjustment being brought down correspondingly.
•  Here’s a tip that needs to be assessed in terms of relevance for your target audience. My landing pages were targeting the sort of audience that I didn’t expect to use mobile phones to browse the web. So, I adjusted my bids for mobile devices accordingly, hence utilizing my budget better.
•  Also, I’d ask you to bid more on core interest categories most closely matched to the target audience and moderately on complementary interest groups.

Relevance is the Key – match your landing pages with your Adgroups

Increasing conversions is not an easy task, and that’s because even if users land on your landing pages, they’re not going to stay there if they don’t find relevance of the landing page to the ad that brought them there! In order to ensure that my campaign’s conversion rates went up, I hit upon some methods that you can adopt too.

• Create landing pages for specific Adgroups. If you have 10 Adgroups, create 10 landing pages, as simple as that. Every Adwords expert will advice you the same – relevancy is the key and you have to be very specific in terms of it.
• Clean and organized landing pages work well; information overload can put visitors off. Just focus on the USP of the ad, and provide content that builds upon that.
• Your landing page must inspire trust. I read extensively about optimizing landing pages for better conversion rates, and advice you to do the same. Learn about implementing simple and certain ways to make your visitors subscribe to services, and tips to make your landing pages look genuine and trustworthy.
• Plan your content, ensure proper flow, use clear calls to action and leverage arrows and directional cues to ensure their success.
• Check out how the most successful landing pages work; pick up design attributes and implement them in your landing page, avoiding an unprofessional or scammy look.
• Present contact forms, but don’t ask too many details so that users find it easy to leave their comments or contact you.
• Build trust by providing your contact number at the top of the page, include a ‘pay now’, ‘buy now’, or ‘try now’ option on the landing page, to maximize conversions.

Making your Adwords campaigns more successful with or conversions depends on how well you can analyze existing data, how smartly you can work with Adgroups, and how skillfully you can create keyword optimized advertisements and corresponding landing pages. I had to sweat it out with Excel formula’s to put together my final result. Also, remember to practise multivariate analysis a lot; tips and tricks from people who have done it are like gold-dust.

So, what’s your experience on Adwords conversions?