Overall Thoughts

For this week’s post, there was a lot of information. And it may be a little lengthy, so hang in there! But, what I did learn this week is that there is so much thought, time, and effort that goes into tracking ads and their success. So let’s jump in!

ROI & Conversion Tracking

Your first question is probably what is ROI and conversion tracking? Well, ROI means Return On Investment. And conversion tracking is basically keeping track of all the actions that you want your customers to take when they click on your ad and go to your website. This will help you see how much of a profit your making from your ads compared to how much your spending on those ads.

ROI is one of the most important things for advertisers because its showing you the real effect that your ads have on your business. Knowing your ROI helps you to evaluate and decide whether the money your spending on your ads is leading to healthy profits for your business.

How ROI Works & Why it Matters

ROI is basically a ratio of your business’s net profit to costs. To calculate ROI you take the revenue result from your ads, subtract your overall costs, and then divide by overall costs. Or you can look at it like this: ROI = (revenue-cost of goods sold) / cost of goods sold.

Like I said earlier, this is one of the most important things to advertisers, it shows the true success of your business! By calculating this, you’re seeing how much money your actually making for how much your spending. ROI can also help you to see better ways to spend your budget and improve the success of your ad campaigns.

Conversion Tracking – Use it!

Conversion tracking is very, very helpful when looking in terms of ROI. Conversions are customer actions that are considered to be valuable in terms of ads and clicks on your website. This type of tracking is used mainly to show you what is happening after a customer interacts with an ad for your business.

Using conversion tracking helps you to really fine-tune your ads. It can help you see which keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns are doing best (and which aren’t doing so good) to help you understand where your spending needs to be targeted. To set up conversion tracking, you simply need a website and the ability to edit the site so you can add a conversion tag (HTML coding that enables you to track the conversions).

Looking at Ad Performance

Now that you’ve got ROI and conversion tracking going, you need to get your ads to perform well to boost those ratings and bring you a better profit. The best way to optimize ad performance is to focus on negative keywords. We’ve talked about this in past posts, but we’re going to go into more detail here.

Understanding Negative Keywords

Negative keywords allow you to exclude certain search terms from your campaigns in order to help you focus on the keywords that matter most to your customers and business. In order for these negative keywords to work, you need to pick search terms that are similar to the keywords you’ve already chosen, but that could potentially steer customers to search for a different product. Basically, you’re finding search terms that are related to your product, but are not exactly your product.

Types of Negative Keywords

There are three types: broad, exact, or phrase match. Each type is different in the way that negative keywords work best when you add synonyms, singular or plural versions, misspellings, and other close variations. Keep in mind: If you use exact keywords or phrases or words that are strongly related to the content ads won’t show. Let’s talk about each type.

Broad match negative keywords are the default of negative keywords. But you still have to be cautious, if you choose words where when a search is done and it contains all of your negative keywords (even if the words are in a different order), the ad won’t make an appearance in the search. So don’t be too broad, be reasonable.

Exact match negative keywords will cause your ad to be a no-show in a search if the search has the exact keywords in the same order. So again, be reasonable. Don’t be so specific that your ad can never be found.

Phrase match negative keywords will cause your ad not to show up if the search has the exact keywords in the same order. But, the search can include additional words. Most of the time though, the ad still won’t show up as long as all the keywords are included in the search.

Be cautious: too many negative keywords may make your ads reach fewer people.

Don’t Be Afraid to Use All Types

You can also use all three types to make more efficient ads. For example, you could use broad match to target your ad towards a bigger audience, but then also use exact match to target specific groups of customers. The best way to know what works for you is to experiment.

Expanding Keywords

The last topic we’re covering today is expanding keywords. You want to expand the reach of your keywords to improve your ad rank. The rank of your ads makes them more competitive and therefore more popular- leading you to have more success with the popularity of your ad. To boost this there are three ways to start: increase your bids, increase your ad quality, and enable/ improve ad extensions.

Of the three ways to boost ad performance, I strongly suggest looking into improve ad quality. Best performing ads are the ones found most relevant. Think about how you search for things on the internet and apply that to your ads. This way, if you know what you’re customers are looking for, you can target them and focus on making your ads, campaigns, and keywords relevant to them.

Concluding Thoughts

When looking at the success of your ads, be patient and don’t give up. Take the time to experiment and research what your customers want to see and what they think is relevant. Also regularly review your ROI, conversions, and ad optimizations! This way you can keep up with your customers and keep your business afloat. Good luck with your ads!