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Objective: Learn what an optimisation is and why all advertisers should optimise from time to time. Then, get started by taking inventory of your website, account and competitors' websites.
An optimisation is the process of adjusting parts of your account — like your keywords and ad text — and your website to improve the performance of your AdWords ads. Optimisations might consist of adjusting:
| Your campaign components | Your ad group components | Your website |
- Organising your campaigns
- Modifying language and location targeting
- Editing ad delivery times and position
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- Editing your keywords
- Editing your ad text
- Organising your ad groups
- Changing your bids
- Using keyword matching options
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- Choosing landing pages
- Editing website for flow and relevancy
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Very simply, optimisation makes your advertising more effective. In AdWords terms, this means a higher Quality Score or higher ad quality. Since quality is directly tied to your ad's performance, position and costs, optimisations can bring you greater advertising success and lower your costs. Every advertiser can benefit from regular optimisations.
In most cases, using a combination of many optimisation techniques together — such as improving your landing page and editing your keywords — is the best bet to improve the overall performance of your account and to increase your Quality Score.
Now that you know the basics about optimising, where do you get started? How do you know what needs optimising? Begin by taking inventory of all things that make up your online advertising campaign. Review the following and take notes of what is and is not working well:
- Your website and landing page quality: Look at your website from a user's perspective. Does the design flow well? Is it well organised? Is the information useful, honest and clear? You want your website to be easy to navigate and to communicate your business clearly.
- Your account: Review the performance of individual keywords and ads across different campaigns in your account. Check stats such as your keyword click-through rate (CTR), costs and ad position. If your CTR is low or if your costs are high, optimisations are in order. To learn different ways to check your account performance, visit the Quality and Performance Basics lesson.
- Competitors' sites: Browse your competitors' ads and websites to help you understand the similarities and differences in your products or services. You can also identify factors that make your business more compelling than the competition (such as special promotions or unique products), which you can then highlight in your ads.
After reviewing the above, the optimisation process begins. Continue to the next lessons to find out how to improve landing page quality and account performance.
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