3 Rarely Used AdWords Settings You Should Be Aware Of

Google AdWords is used often by many internet marketers to help draw targeted traffic to their web sites. There are several elements within AdWords there are not often seen that can help improve CTR and position without wasting money. Here are three ways to improve your AdWords results that you might not have known about.

The Bid Adjustment setting. Essentially everyone who uses AdWords knows you can adjust bids for each ad group, or even for each keyword independently. However, there’s a setting within the campaign settings that allows you to set what hours of the day you want to display your ad.

Not only this, but the advanced version of this setting (the “Bid Adjustment” mode in the Ad Schedule settings) will allow you to adjust your CPC by a percent for any hours of the day you choose. In this image, you can see an example where I’ve increased the CPC to 200% of the default amount for specific hours during certain days of the week. Testing has shown that these times have the best conversion rates, and by doubling their CPC it moves their ads to a much higher position. This increases their clicks and conversions, but only increases their cost for a limited time during the day.

Setting a radius for your ad location. Depending on where you want your ad displayed, sometimes it’s better to choose multiple countries, sometimes it’s better to pick a smaller area. For local markets, it’s good to be able to pick more specifically. You can pick the city to get the metro area, but if you want a fuller area within a specific range of miles or kilometers, you can use the Custom option within the Location settings.

Here you can set an area for a certain number of miles/kilometers around a city or a zip code. The benefit to this option is that when you target customers this way, your address will show in your advertisements (which is also set in the Location settings, in the “Show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced)” option).

Changing your ad frequency. This is one setting that is more often known about, but sometimes forgotten. By default your ads are optimized to show the ad that gets a higher CTR more frequently. However, this does not really properly split test ads you’re running. A proper A-B split test should evenly show your ads, that way you can objectively determine which ad performs best.

After this you can adjust the worse performing ad to continuously improve your CTR. To do this, change the setting in your campaign settings that’s labeled “Ad delivery: Ad rotation, frequency capping”. Set it to rotate, and you’ll be able to see which ad gets a better CTR for an even number of impressions. Yes, it says “Optimized” is best for most advertisers, but you’re an advanced advertiser. Use “Rotate” for proper testing.

Use these campaign setting adjustments to help optimize your pay per click campaigns in Google AdWords. Using them effectively can drop costs, increase CTR, and overall improve your profits through this marketing tool.