Boston Web Consulting
Search Engine Optimization and Adwords Reporting

You know when I wrote this post about the best day to advertise that I should have written the day where you will get the most impressions so perhaps you might get the most traffic if you increase your click through rate… Wow, I just wrote a very long run on sentence. Really from that simple chart it would be hard to make real changes to your Adwords campaign(s). You need to look at different angles of the data. For example, here is a chart of the impressions by hour that I was getting:

You can see the most impressions are during the early hours but it really picks up during lunch. So lucky for you that you can increase your bids to try to grab more of that traffic.

So what day has the most traffic? Here are some stats from one of our clients:

Monday historically has the most traffic. Therefore, you will need to compete harder that day for the most traffic to your site if you are using Adwords. You still need to track conversions but if you up your bids on Monday and then target the right hours you may be getting the traffic levels that you were hoping for.

It is so easy to get going with Google Adwords that many jump in like a cannon ball into a pool and occasionally they can get hurt! In reality, Adwords can be a brutal marketplace where you can lose money pretty fast if you don’t know what you are doing. Google has some good tips here on the basics (which despite the heading that it is for Healthcare and Real Estate) can be used for any industry vertical or local market.

Planning is key for success. So if you are planning to dive in yourself, I would suggest reading a lot of material including Google’s Adwords blog and most of the helpful material that the Adwords team provides. I would master their material before purchasing any more material from other sources.

I think you should always to be very targeted to your local market and the local audience. The more specific the better! And then tailor a specific landing page for that targeted prospect.

Recently, the adwords team changed the URL policy of what can been used as the destination (Read more details here). In summary, you need to make sure that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL. Make sense right? Well there were cases where the display url make did not match the destination url. Why would one do that? Increase click-throughs of course.

One always looks for advantages but I would recommend to keep things back to the core of the copy of the ad and keep the display urls simple and where possible relevant to the copy of the ad. Have a great benefit statement and where possible give them a reason to click - such as a free report, etc.

In the future, we will be posting more tips on how to improve your ad copy.

Broad Matching can be very useful to fine tune a AdWords campaign.  How?  Use it for a week to capture what are the terms to use for Exact Matching.  Now that you can use the reporting with AdWords for “Search Query Performance” to see which terms are converting for your campaign. 

Read more about Search Query Performance here: Inside AdWords: How to use the new Search Query Performance report.

The key to success within AdWords is constant testing - expanding, contracting, pruning.  Think of your campaigns like Bonsai trees - constant attention to gain true beauty but in the case of AdWords - more profits.

It is interesting to see to my customers striving for a higher CTR or click-through-rate on their AdWords accounts.  Sometimes they are drawn to looking at their daily statistics a bit too much.  And yes a higher CTR may reduce your overall bids but don’t get blinded by that statistic.

What is more important?  Conversions is much more important than CTR in the long run.  If you can convert your traffic from AdWords, it is far more important.  Whether you are selling goods, service or just trying their email address, the goal should be conversions especially for small businesses given that most of you have limited budgets.

So start tracking how much it is costing to convert that visitor and not so much on the cost per click.