0498 70 98 608 Google AdWords Tips for Effective Campaigns in 2018
Anyone can create and launch a Google AdWords campaign. Monitoring it, optimizing it, analyzing it, and adjusting it until it’s efficient, profitable, and delivering a return on investment is another story. To make sure your website shows up on Google right when people are searching for your products or services, you need to make the most of everything Google AdWords offers. Here are eight Google AdWords tips for building effective campaigns and tapping Google’s full potential.
How to Build an Effective Google AdWords Campaign
- Choose your keywords carefully
- Write effective, compelling ads
- Pick the right campaign type for your goals
- Configure your campaign settings
- Use ad extensions
- Choose the right bidding strategy
- Send clicks to the right landing page
- Set up and analyze conversion tracking
1. Choose Your Keywords Carefully
This step may seem basic, but it’s critical to the success of any Google AdWords campaign. Choose your keywords carefully so your ads aren’t triggered by searches that have nothing to do with your products or services.
Do your keyword research before you build the campaign, so you can group keywords on similar themes into dedicated ad groups.
To help, Google AdWords offers a very useful tool: the Keyword Planner. It suggests keyword ideas based on your website and topics, along with estimates of each keyword’s reach.
Important: adding certain punctuation to your keywords sets their match type. Keywords can be broad match, phrase match, exact match, broad match modifier, or negative keywords. Using these match types correctly is essential for a relevant campaign (and Google keeps changing them: in 2018, it expanded exact match close variants).
2. Write Effective, Compelling Ads
Keyword selection plays a major role in your AdWords campaign’s success, and so does strong ad copy. Your ads need to be appealing, honest, and closely tied to your keywords, which also feeds your Quality Score.
Create several ads per ad group so they rotate, and analyze which ones resonate best with searchers.
Bonus: ad customizers let you tailor your ad text to each person’s search. Make the most of them.
3. Pick the Right Campaign Type for Your Goals
Google AdWords offers several campaign types:
- Search Network only
- Display Network only
- Search Network with Display Select
- Shopping
- Video
- Universal App
Each campaign type matches specific goals: sales, leads, website traffic, product and brand consideration, or brand awareness and reach. Choose the campaign type that fits the goals you want to reach.
4. Configure Your Campaign Settings
Google AdWords gives you a wide range of campaign settings. You can target people by keyword, location, language, time of day, or device (on the Search Network), and by topic, audience, interest, or demographics (on the Display Network). Configure all of these settings carefully so your campaign delivers the best possible return on investment.
5. Use Ad Extensions
Did you know you can enrich your ads with the many extensions Google AdWords offers? Sitelink, callout, structured snippet, call, message, location, price, app, review, and promotion extensions all help make your ads more relevant to searchers.
6. Choose the Right Bidding Strategy
Google AdWords offers several bid types, each suited to specific goals. Depending on your campaign objectives, we’ll recommend bidding on cost per click (CPC), cost per thousand impressions (CPM), or cost per acquisition (CPA).
Within each bid type, you can fine-tune your bids so you never exceed the budget you’ve set.
7. Send Clicks to the Right Landing Page
For your ads to pay off with the audience you’ve defined, you must send people to a relevant landing page, one that shows the products or services they clicked on. Speed counts too: Google AdWords even introduced a mobile speed score for landing pages.
A real-world example: someone searches for a store near them that sells kids’ swing sets and sees your ad. Send them to the page on your site that features swing sets, not a generic page or a page about sandboxes.
If you’ve grouped your keywords by theme into separate ad groups (see tip 1), this step should be easy.
8. Set Up and Analyze Conversion Tracking
Google Analytics is the essential tool for measuring the return on your Google AdWords campaigns. Once it’s set up, you’ll see exactly which keywords, ads, or campaigns drive engagement on your site.
By linking Google AdWords and Google Analytics and analyzing your data, you’ll be able to improve your campaigns’ performance and ROI. For today’s setup, see our Google Ads conversion tracking guide.
Need Help?
Do these tips seem hard to put into practice? Already running an AdWords campaign that doesn’t follow them? Référenceur, a Google Partner agency from Belgium and Luxembourg with a French- and English-speaking team, can clean up your existing campaigns or build new ones designed to improve your return on investment, working with U.S. businesses remotely. Request a free assessment or learn more about our Google Ads management.
Where things stand in 2026: Google AdWords was renamed Google Ads in July 2018. Broad match modifier was phased out in 2021 and folded into phrase match, and ad extensions are now called assets. Universal Analytics stopped processing data on July 1, 2023, so conversion analysis now runs on Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Ads conversion tracking.