When planning your Google AdWords campaign, it is vital to use the correct tools in order to get the most out of this marketing platform. We asked Declan Hollywood of Google South Africa to break it down for us. Here are some helpful tips on how to optimise your Google AdWords campaign.
Before you even get into tools, the most important thing is how you structure the account. With an AdWords campaign, you should have separate campaigns for each of your product lines, for each of your marketing channels and so on. So if you’re targeting one campaign at search and one campaign at the display network or YouTube, they should all be separate campaigns, because the optimisation techniques differ across our different platforms and indeed across different devices. If you don’t break up campaigns really granularly and get the structure of the account correct, you’re going to be shooting yourself in the foot before you even get started.
In terms of tools – assuming the structure of the account is correct, it really depends on what your objective is. If you’re trying t to drive more volume in an AdWords account, and increase the number of impressions or clicks that you’re getting, some of the most important reports that you can look at are the impression-share reports. These are reports that show you your share of voice and the keywords you’re hitting on. They give you an accurate representation of what percentage of the opportunity you’ve missed out on; be that due to budget limitations or because you’re not bidding competitively enough, it gives you a very granular insight into what areas you should focus on in terms of driving more volume.
There are a whole host of techniques and tools at your disposal, a lot of it is about familiarising yourself with them. There are AdWords exam centres, help centres to understand the tools that you can use. If you’re looking to improve your ROI, the search query report is extremely important to analyse in terms of understanding what the actual queries are that trigger your ad. You can save a lot of money by analysing those reports. Are there negative keywords you should be implementing in the campaign? Are there new Ad groups that you should be building out with more targeting ad text? A lot of it is manual work, and you need to put in the effort to ultimately understand the search queries triggering your ad and take action on that.
To summarise, here are the top 5 tips:
1. Structure account correctly (separate campaigns for product lines and channels).
2. Define your objectives and analyse/monitor reports.
3. Familiarise yourself with the tools available.
4. Consider negative keywords, new Ad groups and more targeted ad text.
5. Don’t ignore the manual effort that is required to get the most out of the Google AdWords campaign.
Thanks for this great advice, Declan.
To view our previous interview with Declan, click here.
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