What is ad relevancy?

Ad relevancy is how relevant your ad is to what the user is searching. Ad relevancy is a very important factor to increase your click-through rate, ad rank, ad position and conversions. When someone searches for “coffee beans” it will do no good to have a tea shop showing up in the results. The chances of you getting a sale will be very low. But what if your tea shop sells coffee beans too? If this is the case, you can make your ad relevant by creating a landing page that only displays a list of coffee beans for sale on your tea shop website. In the end, you want your landing page to be as relevant as possible to the keyword because consumers already know what they want to buy when they are searching for something. You should try not to send users to your homepage either because most likely the keywords you’re targeting are only a small portion of your website. For example, if you’re an auction website like eBay and you link all your ads to your homepage for every keyword the users you are targeting will get irrelevant results. When they search for “car parts”, they might see e-books, watches, t-shirts, laptops and other things on the eBay homepage. Rather than doing this, you’d want to link it to the eBay Motors category or better yet create a landing page that will increase the likeliness for a call-to-action like scheduling a free check-up for your car at a dealership.

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What are ad campaigns?

Ad campaigns consist of ad groups. In Adwords, campaigns allow you to choose the campaign types such as showing your ads on search and/or display networks. It also allows you to set the geo-targeting, whether you want to target people in Australia or United States. Maybe your website is only in one language. You can set which languages you want to target such as people who speak English or French. You can also set your bid for mobile devices. For example, if your website is not mobile friendly, you may put a -100% for mobile so your ads won’t show up for users who are on their mobile device.

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What are ad groups?

An ad group is a set of keywords, ads and bids you group together. Ad groups help you organize your campaign and separate the different types of services or products you provide. It is not good to have one campaign with one ad group that contains 500 keywords in it. It’s better to have many ad groups so that you can target and check the performance of each group that runs. A good metaphor for this would be if an ad campaign is a photo folder, ad groups would be subfolders within that folder that could be “my vacation photos” folder and “birthday photos” folder. The files within the subfolders are the actual ads.

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What are ads?

Ads are set within the ad groups just like keywords are. The ads must be relevant to the keywords you’ve set. You should always have a few different ads within an ad group to see which ad performs best for your keywords. Whether it’s text only or image ads, it is good practice to have at least 3 different ads to start off with. You can add more if you like but don’t add too many. The ads that have the highest click-through rate (CTR) should be keepers and those who perform poorly should be disabled and removed.

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How can I track my Adwords data in Google Analytics?

You should always link your Google Analytics with Adwords to track where your visitors are clicking, how much time they are on your site, how many conversions you get, which page makes your users leave your website the most, etc. There is an option to do that in Adwords, so don’t forget about linking your Adwords to your Analytics. It is very important to analyze how well your campaigns are working so you can make adjustments to it. You’ll have to use auto-tagging which allows you to import Adwords data into Analytics automatically. You can also manually tag but we recommend auto-tagging for additional details you wouldn’t get from manually tagging. Auto-tagging will allow you to see what happens after a user has clicked your ads. When you enable auto-tagging, a parameter called gclid will be added to your landing page URL like this: www.domain.com/?gclid=548abc.

To enable auto-tagging in Adwords, go to the gears icon and select Account settings. In the preferences tab, you’ll find a Tracking section. Click Edit and checkmark Destination URL Auto-tagging and Save changes.
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Auto-tagging will provide you with these detailed reporting in Google Analytics:
• Campaign
• Source
• Medium
• Content (creative)
• Keyword
• Query Match Type
• Ad Group
• Destination URL
• Ad Format
• Ad Distribution Network
• Placement Domain
• AdWords Customer ID (in case you have multiple accounts for your company)
• Hour of Day
• Placements
• Keyword Positions

If you don’t link your Analytics with Adwords and don’t use auto-tagging, you’ll get (not set) as the # of visitors that came from your campaigns. This does not help you because you’re getting clicks but you don’t know what happens after the click. This makes it impossible to measure your goals.

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What is quality score?

Quality Score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords and landing pages. The higher your quality score, the better your Ad Rank (better ad position and lower cost-per-click).
Quality Score is decided from the expected CTR (click-through rate), ad relevance and landing page experience. If your ad is not relevant to the keyword, you will get low CTR and ultimately a bad Quality Score so make sure your ad copy is relevant to your keywords and create good landing pages.

Here are some ways to improve your Quality Score:

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What is the Adwords Editor?

Adwords Editor is a great tool you can use to edit your campaigns quickly in bulk. This tool is a must have. You can download accounts, import and export files to make changes to an account, view statistics for your accounts, copy and move items between ad groups and keep working when you’re offline.

To download the Adwords Editor and to learn more about how to use it, you can visit:
http://www.google.com/intl/en_US/adwordseditor/

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