Managing your own AdWords campaigns is a daunting task that many businesses struggle with. There are countless guides and help forums that can provide an AdWords newbie with tips to improve their campaigns, however there are some trade secrets that most people aren’t aware of.

Check out our top five AdWords secrets that can help you improve your AdWords campaigns. Implementing these strategies will generate more traffic and targeted leads for your business.

1. Site Category Options

When creating a display advertising campaign on AdWords, it’s important not to waste impressions on placements that are irrelevant to your business and, most importantly, on placements that your target market doesn’t frequent.

If you are selling children’s clothing, you don’t want your ads showing up on gambling websites or sexually suggestive website. Site category options allow you to exclude website categories from your AdWords display campaign. You can exclude error pages, parked domains, mobile apps, and other categories that could potentially waste your impressions and affect your brand.

Using site category option exclusions can improve your display click through rate by reducing irrelevant impressions and refining your targeting. With a more targeted campaign, you’re more likely to see a higher conversion rate from your AdWords display campaign.

2. Target Outrank Share

Target outrank share is a bid strategy on Google AdWords that allows you to automate bidding across multiple campaigns, and help your ads outrank the competition. In marketing, that means bidding higher than your competitors. Very sneaky Google!

AdWords will increase or lower your bids in order for your ads to rank higher than other ads. You can set what percentage higher you are willing to bid in order to outrank your competitors.

This is a great strategy to help improve your ad position in the ad auction, and increase the quality clicks to your website.

3. Search Term Reports

Google Search Term reports under your AdWords account allow you to see the keywords visitors are using to generate your ads and click through to your website. Depending on the match type of your keywords (broad match or phrase match), visitors could be using different phrases when searching for your products or services.

With the Search Term report, you can find additional keywords to add to your keyword list. Look for keywords that are generating quality clicks, click through rates (CTR), and conversions for your website. Add these keywords to your strategy to improve the targeting of your AdWords search campaigns.

On the other hand, the Search Term report could provide you with keywords visitors are searching that are unrelated to your campaign. These keywords can be added to your negative keyword list to reduce irrelevant impressions, improve your targeting and increase your click through rate.

Overall, both uses of the Search Term report can only benefit your AdWords campaign, your marketing strategy and your business as a whole.

4. Device Bid Adjustments

When you look at your Google Analytics device overview report, where is the majority of your conversions and traffic coming from? If you’re like many of our clients, mobile is the top source of online traffic to your website.

Improve your AdWords campaigns based on this information by using device bid adjustments. Under your device settings, increase the mobile bid percentage by 15%-20%. This tells Google that you want to bid slightly higher on mobile searchers. You’ll give yourself a better chance of ranking higher in the ad auction, and increase your mobile and local search traffic.

Remember, having mobile optimized ads and a mobile-friendly or responsive website design are incredibly important to improve your quality score for mobile searches.

5. Mobile App Exclusions

How is your click through rate (CTR) and conversion rate on the Google Display Network? Most advertisers don’t see a click through rate over 0.20% on the Google Display Network. Display campaigns have high impressions, low click throughs and limited conversions.

One way to limit the irrelevant impressions of your display campaign is to exclude mobile apps from your display campaign. Mobile apps with AdSense tend to eat up a lot of the impressions on a display campaign, and most app users don’t want the ads interrupting their app experience (no, I will not pause my Candy Crush game to visit your website – #sorrynotsorry).

If you’re confident that mobile apps are not the place to advertise your ads, exclude them in the site category options. However, just because you choose not to advertise on mobile apps does not mean that you should not have mobile display ads.

If you would like help taking your AdWords campaigns to the next level, speak to a Google Certified AdWords expert at Eden! We provide AdWords consultations, strategies and campaign management.

Contact us today!