Welcome to part 2 of the Clicks Rule special.
You may be familiar with a technique I shared in recent post called the 10% Clicks Rule (if not, you may want to come back once you’ve skimmed through Part 1: Overview). In essence, the 10% Clicks Rule is a technique that aims to improve the relevancy of ads for search queries which have broad or phrase-matched to one of you keywords. Since it is impractical to give every possible keyword or search query its own ad group with personalised ads, the 10% Clicks Rule helps to identify those ad groups which are most likely to benefit from your time and effort.
Part 1 was all theory. What I want to do now is provide a step-by-step guide explaining how to identify those ad groups in your own AdWords account which could greatly benefit from your insight. All we’re trying to do here is run a Google AdWords search query report at ad group level, filter out exact match keywords (to leave broad and phrase match only) and highlight those ad groups with more than 10% of broad and phrase clicks. These are the ad groups we want to look at. So if you’re a seasoned AdWords and Excel pro, feel free to skim through the bullets or jump ahead to Part 3: Does it Work?. For everyone else who might need a little more guidance, continue reading for a detailed step-by-step guide.
Once we have the search query report in front of us, we want to summarise clicks by ad group.
Next we want to filter out exact match clicks and calculate each ad group’s broad and phrase match click volume.
You should now have a list of ad groups with totals of their broad and phrase clicks. Let’s now calculate each ad group’s percentage of total broad and phrase clicks.
Now that we have percentages calculated for each ad group, make a note of those ad groups…
These are the ad groups with a lot of broad-matching and phrase-matching going on. These are the ad groups that could benefit with your time and effort.
You’ve now got everything you need to start make powerful changes to you AdWords account. You can stop here and use your own intuition to make improvements to these ad groups, or continue reading for some ideas and suggestions on what to do next.
Your search query report should look something like this.
Take a moment to familiarise yourself with your search queries. People are typing these searches to find your products or services. You need to decide what action to take. For each of your search queries, you could either:
First decide if any of the search queries are irrelevant to your business (option 1). Make a note of any irrelevant searches in a separate Excel sheet – you can add them as negative keywords later.
Great. Let’s now assume that all remaining searches are relevant to your business. You now need to decide between options 2 and 3 – whether to add the search query as a new keyword in that ad group, or in a new ad group.
To decide whether option 2 or 3 would work best, have a look at the ‘ad group’ column for the search query. It is this ad group the search query is being matched to. Open up AdWords Editor and now find that ad group. Look at the ads. These ads are being shown whenever someone searches for the search query. Are they relevant? Do they mention the search query in the heading or descriptions? Could they be improved in any way to increase relevancy, Quality Score, CTR and conversion rate?
If you think the ads are relevant to the search query, add the search as a new keyword to that ad group (option 2). If you think you could write better, more relevant ads for the search query, add the search query as a new keyword in a new ad group and write better ads for it (option 3).
Hopefully if you’ve made it this far you’ve managed to have a go yourself and found some juicy ways to improve your AdWords campaign. While I hope you found it simple and straightforward to follow, feel free to share your thoughts and comments.
In the final part of the Clicks Rule trilogy, I look at real AdWords examples and explore how it can actually help improve results of AdWords campaigns. Part 3: Does It Work?
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