In the course of my work as a Consultant at HubSpot, I advise scores of companies on Inbound Marketing and AdWords strategies. Many of these companies are making the same kinds of mistakes in their AdWords accounts that are costing them money, time and leads/customers.

Here are some quick and easy fixes you can make to improve your results:

1. Keep Search and Display Network separate – this is an easy trap to fall into as Google makes it almost the default condition to setup your campaign to operate on both the Search and Display Networks (We will discuss the difference between these in our next post). To be sure you don’t combine these you want to select Search network only for all of your campaigns to start (later on you can add in Display – it’s a different medium – with more possibilities for success – but also a lot more possibilities to run into trouble). To be sure that you are doing this and for ease of analysis later on name the campaign appropriately, e.g. Executive Travel – Search or Executive Travel – Display
2. Target the countries and languages that you work in – not the entire world! – So when you are setting up your campaign, in the settings tab – you should be choosing target country United States and target language English (this is not to say that you shouldn’t be advertising in other places and in other languages, just that for most of the businesses that I deal with – they do most or all of their business in the US with English speakers. If you are selling international or to non-English speakers – create a separate campaign target directly at those countries and choose the languages you want to target too.
3. Don’t start out with too many keywords – a few well-targeted keywords will do better for you than hundreds of not-so-well targeted keywords.
4. Make sure your landing page ties in directly with your ad – or another way to put this is – Do NOT use your HomePage as the destination URL for your ads – probably the biggest error that most of my clients make is to send people to their homepage when they click on an ad. Google calculates a Quality Score for each of your keywords and the algorithm for calculating the Quality Score includes several factors:
   1. The Click-through rate (CTR) of the keyword
   2. Landing Page Quality - the Relevance of the Landing page to the Ad - this means you want to make sure that that page that you send people to is directly related to the Ad and the Keyword(Tip: use the Keyword in the headline of the Ad). But it is also OK if the landing page is thematically related to the keyword. The Landing Page Load Time is a factor too
   3. The CTR of the AdGroup’s Display URLs
   4. Account History – here older and more active accounts have a slight advantage of newer accounts
5. Make sure to have two to four ads per ad group – keep your adgroups tightly themed. So each adgroup will typically have a small number of related keywords (it would be good to have one keyword per adgroup – but very impractical). Let Google test each of the ads in the adgroup – it will display them evenly if you choose the setting under Ad Rotation: Rotate evenly: Show ads more evenly for at least 90 days then optimize

That setting will let you see which ad is doing better and let you kill the poor performer and test other ads.

Using these 5 tips should help your performance getting started. If you would like me to review your AdWords account just contact me here