how to get more traffic from google adwords

One of the major goals of running a internet marketing campaign is to generate more sales and revenue. In order to do so, you will need to generate more hits or traffic to your website.

In the strictest sense, there are only two ways you can increase traffic to the site. One is to increase the overall or total impressions that you get in the ad network. The other is to get more people to click on the ads and visit your website, in other words to improve the Click thru Rate or CTR.

Every action that you perform, such as increasing the bid, changing the location, optimizing ads etc are all indirect ways to improve on these two metrics: total impressions and CTR.

getting more impressions

There are several different ways you can get more impressions in Adwords. Some of the commonly used techniques are:

  • Higher bid for your keywords: This will make sure that you are competitive and potentially show up in more searches.
  • More keywords in ad groups that are related to the existing keywords: Again you will match against more keywords or search queries.
  • A higher budget for the campaign: This is relevant only if you are running out of budget for some reason.
  • A broad match type for the keywords: This will match against a large pool of search queries.
  • Use both search and display networks: Display networks are notorious for low CTR, but this can increase your impressions.

A good starting point is to start by looking at the Search Impression Share data for your keyword. If you are already getting a large percentage of the share, then it will be harder to get more impressions for that keyword.

adwords-ctr-for-keywords.png

better click thru rate (ctr)

Once you have worked on optimizing towards getting more impressions, you can optimize to get more clicks for these impressions. Effectively, what you are doing is trying to improve the click thru rate or ctr for each of your keywords.

Again, the techniques are pretty straight forward…

  • Bid high for your keyword. This can get you a slot higher up on the page, which increases the CTR.
  • Write better ads that entice users to click, that can potentially improve your quality score and CTR
  • An optimized landing page that can also improve your quality score

It is important that you optimize every part of your campaign, if you want to run a successful campaign. I would rate increasing the CTR to be more important that getting more impressions, but both matters eventually. Optimization is important to get the highest return for your investment.