I recently joined the team at Converge Consulting and have been introduced to the world of higher education marketing. Before joining Converge, I worked for a large marketing company where I managed over 200 paid media campaigns for small and medium sized businesses. My clients consisted of almost any type of business you can think of—plumbers to chimney sweepers, veterinarians to private investigators, lawyers to armed couriers; the list is endless. I learned so much about these different industries but more importantly, I was able to develop a strong skill set when it comes to anything Google AdWords.

I am now building, managing and optimizing a number of paid media campaigns for clients in the higher education industry. Although this industry is extremely different from many industries I’ve worked with before, my tips for running successful Google AdWords campaigns can translate to any industry. I will take you through main campaign sections and provide my best practices for running Google AdWords campaigns.

Ad Groups

When it comes to deciding on how to divide your campaign into different Ad Groups, the main things you’ll want to consider is the differences you want to showcase in the campaign. If your landing page, types of keywords, or the message your at title and ad text need to be different, this is when separate Ad Groups are needed. For example, if you are advertising for a variety of masters programs at your institution, you will want different keywords and ads relating to the specific program and will also want your landing page to differ by program. By having your campaign split into more specific Ad Groups, your ads will appear more relevant to the internet users’ search query so your click through rate (CTR) should be higher. By having a higher CTR, this helps improve your quality score which can greatly benefit your campaign in a variety of ways.

Settings

There are a variety of setting options you can use for your campaign; the important ones being the campaign type, locations and bid strategy.

Campaign Type
With your AdWords campaign, you can choose to advertise on the Search Network, Display Network or both. This decision is completely based on user preference. Some choose to only advertise on the Search Network because then the ads are targeted specifically to those internet users that are searching for your keywords on the search engines. When advertising on the Display Network, your ads are eligible to appear on a variety of websites that are relevant to your keywords. I would starting out advertising on both the Search and Display Network, monitor the differences in performance and adjust accordingly if needed.

Locations
When deciding on what location targeting you should choose, you should consider the goals of your campaign and also characteristics of your institution. For example, if your institution does well with attracting prospective students locally, focus your advertising on locations you want to draw more students from. On the other hand, you can analyze your current student body to determine the likelihood of where you believe prospective students will come from and then base your location targeting on that.

Bid Strategy
When choosing your bidding strategy, you will want to consider how much time you will have to manage your campaign. If you plan on being very involved, you can opt into “I’ll manually set my bids for clicks”. With this option, you will manually set cost per click (CPC) bids and then can look to change them frequently based on performance. If you do not have as much time to manage your campaign, you can look at a bidding options where AdWords will set bids based on your budget or conversion goals.

Ads

When writing Ads for your campaign, there a few key things to keep in mind.

Relevancy
You want to the ad to be as relevant as possible to your keywords and landing page. Keep in mind what you are trying to advertise and rely heavily on your keyword list and text from your landing page when developing ad text.

Grammar, Punctuation and Capitalization
Make sure your ad text makes sense and make sure to spell check everything before going live with your campaign. Be consistent with what words your choose to capitalize and don’t forget you can use one exclamation point per ad.

Call To Action
Its important to include call to action text in every ad so the prospective student knows what you want them to do next. When determining what call to action to use, keep in mind what you are trying to accomplish with campaign. “Request More Information!”, “Apply Today!”, “Schedule Your Campus Visit!” are examples of call to actions that are frequently used in the higher education industry.

Multiple Ads
Its important to create at least two ads per Ad Group in order to test and evaluate what ad text and strategies work best for your institution. Some things to test out would be different descriptive phrases, different call to actions and dynamic vs. static ad headlines.

Keywords

When developing your keyword list, use your landing page and Google AdWordsKeyword Planner tool to develop keyword ideas. Its important to also use your knowledge and common sense. For example what keyword phrase would you search when looking to get your masters in accounting? Some other keyword strategies to consider would be using different keyword match types and geographically modified keywords.

As your campaign runs, use the “Search Query Report” to determine what searches are leading to visits to your website. Based on this information, look to add additional keywords, add negative keywords or delete keywords that are not performing well.

Audiences

The ‘Audiences’ tab is a newer feature in Google AdWords where you can use remarketing lists to cater search ads to internet users who have visited your website or a page on your website before. With your remarketing list search ads (RLSA) you can create customized ad text, adjust bids and use more broad keywords to target these internet users. RLSA can be confusing—I suggest listening the webinar “Improving Your Search Campaigns with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads” before trying this out with your campaign.

Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions are my favorite tool to use when creating campaigns. Ad Extensions are additional features that can appear with your ad in order to help differentiate your ad from your competitors’ ad. The Ad Extensions that I use most often are the location, call, sitelinks and social extensions. Setting up these Ad Extensions is pretty self explanatory but there are some important things to keep in mind.

Ad Extensions appear more often with your ad when you have top ad positioning. While location and call extensions can be triggered at any ad position, sitelinks are only triggered when they appear in top positions due to top placement formatting. For this reason, its imperative to consider this when determining your bids. Ad Extensions can significantly improve your CTR which can lead to a higher quality score. As I mentioned previously, a higher quality score can benefit your campaign in a variety of ways.

Dimensions

You can use the ‘Dimensions’ tab to segment campaign reporting in a variety of ways. Segment the reporting based on time of day, user location, search term and more. Then use this information to optimize your campaign accordingly. For example, if you see that your ads receive the most impressions during 7am-1pm, look to use ad scheduling to allocate a higher percentage of your campaign budget during this time-frame.

In Conclusion

When building and optimizing your campaign, its important to keep in mind that there are not necessarily  ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways to do things. As long as you track and measure your results, its good to test out a variety of ideas based on the goals of your campaign.

For more information on paid media, view our archived Google AdWords webinar “Save Money & Achieve Better Results with Google AdWords” with Mike McCready, Manager of Marketing & Web Development at NorQuest College.