Getting started
Before we begin, I just want you to know that AdWords is incredibly simple – and that’s what makes it seem so complicated. There is one caveat you should be aware of before you risk your money with AdWords… It’s really easy to spend money on AdWords and have nothing to show for it.
Clicks are one thing, but clicks without sales are another…
In order to stay ahead of your competition, you need to do a few things right:
- Group keywords into narrow ad groups.
- Match your landing page content with each ad group, and make sure the most important keyword in each ad group appears on the landing page at least once (preferably front and center). Write ads that incorporate the chief keyword in each adgroup employed both in the headline and the ad copy text. Test using that keyword in the display URL itself, such as “www.example.com/Chief-Keyword”.
- Periodically review your top 20 keywords in terms of volume and/or CTR or Conversion rate and create separate adgroups specifically for them.
- Continuously split test your ads and landing pages. Optimize toward best conversion rates and cost per acquisition (CPA).
- When using phrase match and/or broad match, curate a list of negative keywords carefully to limit wasted spend on irrelevant search queries.
- Separate different match types into different campaigns or different ad groups. Don’t group keywords with different match types into the same ad group.
- Review quality score on a biweekly basis, identify problem keywords and consider moving them to a new adgroup/landing page combination.
- Use geo-targeting to focus on your most profitable locations (even if your focused on the US or the entire world – some areas have more valuable clicks that others). You can use bid multipliers for different locations to try to control your adspend. You also may want to consider different ad text for different locations, which would require that the same keyword be placed into multiple geo-targeted campaigns.
- Use ad scheduling (dayparting) to ensure you are advertising during the best time of day, operationally for the business. You may want to use bid multipliers to compensate for changes in your average position caused by your competitors choices and auction dynamics during different times of day and week. Again, optimize toward best conversion rates.
- Research and solve the number one “need” in your market. Posture your ad content accordingly.
- Separate your Search from Display networks and create specific Display Network only campaigns and ad groups.
- Setup conversion tracking in Google Analytics, link Adwords and Analytics, and import those conversions into Adwords. Make sure that both Adwords and Analytics are linked to Google Search Console (formerly called Google Webmaster Tools).
A step-by-step plan
Before you can setup your campaign, you need to figure out who your ideal customer is…
Let’s say you sell a natural remedy for gastritis. The goal is to find one single keyword that will be at the absolute bullseye center of your market, so that you can compete and eventually dominate there better than anyone else. Let’s take an example: people who suffer from gastritis and are looking for a natural (non-pharmaceutical) remedy they can purchase online.
That’s a pretty good description right there.
Once you’ve developed this – physically write this down on a piece of paper and keep it handy. You’re going to refer to this often. The goal is to write a one-sentence description of the ideal person who is ready to buy from you once they’ve seen your offer.
Here’s a couple of examples from this and other markets:
- “My best prospect is someone who already believes in non-pharmaceutical and natural remedies for gastritis and is actively searching for the best one to purchase.”
- “My best prospect is someone who has already made up his or her mind to buy shoes online.”
- “My best prospect already knows car share services exist and is proactively searching to join one.”
Now pick a starting phrase to enter into Google’s Keyword Planner, as an example, “natural gastritis remedies.” This keyword targets people who are looking for a natural solution, as opposed to pharmaceutical; gastritis, as opposed to heartburn or more general issues; and remedies, as opposed to facts or data or information.
Google gives us a list (note that the default is “Ad Group ideas”, you need to click on “Keyword ideas” to best see the data you are going to need in the following steps:
Now, go through these keywords and compare them to your written description of your ideal customer. Ask yourself three questions about each keyword that seems to be a candidate.
1. “Would more than one out of three people searching for this term be my ideal customer?”
Choose the keyword if it fits and ignore the ones that don’t. Yes, it’s subjective and you may be left with only a few keywords – that’s okay. You can also download the entire list with the “download” button and import them into a draft campaign/ad group using the desktop application Adwords Editor. This is highly recommended if you’d like to organize all the possible keywords Adwords identifies as relevant and group them yourself into “bottom funnel” (or the closest to your ideal persona and to purchase), mid-funnel (people who are in the research and comparison phase), and top-of-funnel (people who are just starting out their search and may not yet have decided or self-identified as being interested in a natural versus pharmaceutical remedy; for instance, someone who searches for “gastritis” or “gastritis medicine”) and negative keywords you’ll want to remember to use in your phrase match and/or broad match campaigns or ad groups.
Keyword examples that I think would fit our description above might include “herbal gastritis remedies” and “homeopathic gastritis remedies.” Terms that do not fit our ideal customer might be “homeopathic remedies” (not specific enough to gastritis) or just “gastritis” (not enough people looking for remedies and wanting only natural ones).
2. “How many people are using this keyword for searching?”
Check your remaining keywords with Google’s Keyword Planner and determine the search volume. You could also take each keyword and perform additional search for other variations that you believe would match your written customer description.
3. “How much money are people making from this keyword?”
The Google Keyword Planner has a way of telling you how much money is made on keywords by the maximum cost per click people are already paying and the “Competition” comparison, which will list low, medium, or high. These figures can help you form an idea of the amount of transactions available in the market and their approximate comparative cost.
The keywords where people spend the most in terms of average CPC and have the highest competition and avg. monthly searches are usually the keywords where advertisers are generating the most volume and making money. Don’t confuse this with margin, which may be higher for keywords that are less competitive and have a lower average CPC. However, it gives you an idea of how much value your competitors are finding in the space.
It’s good to develop an ultra-short list of focused keywords that meet three criteria: (1) They’re the best match for our written description; (2) they get a high avg. monthly search volume. Usually the “competition” and “average cpc” will both be high for such keywords, but if either is lower than you might have thought, take it as a wonderful window of opportunity.
You can collect as many relevant keywords as you want. You could also create sublists for each keyword by running each keyword through Google’s Keyword Planner. You’re off to a great start when you’ve got 6-12 tightly-matched groups of keywords (which of course are now your first ad groups.)
Expanding your keywords
When you’re ready to expand your keyword list, you might want to look beyond Google’s Keyword Planner. Another good keyword tool is Wordtracker’s paid tool (www.wordtracker.com). It is a subscription based service that will provide wide (lateral/thesaurus) searches and search counts, as well as provide hundreds of synonyms and related keywords and topics. It can be purchased for a month at a time, if you don’t intend on using it indefinitely. In addition to keyword research, Wordtracker provides a lot of support for PPC marketing.
Checking the competition manually
Search your keywords on google.com (multiple times for each) and familiarize yourself with your competition. How many competitors are running ads for your selected keywords? Which ones are consistently in the top 3-4 results? What do their ads say? How do they position their unique value? Which are best matching their ads with the different keywords (user intent) you input?
You’ll want to estimate how many competitors you’re bidding against. Google shows eight ads on the right side of the page, plus two or three in the colored space at the top, totaling ten or eleven. It’s the same on page two, three, etc.. Scroll through every page and count up the number of competitors ads running. Pay attention – AdWords will repeat their favorite advertisers on the top left of every page, so watch for the first 2-3 ads on the right to show up again. Once you have the complete count you’ll have a general idea of the competition in each keyword auction.
Once you have a campaign running, you should do this same exercise at the minimum on a biweekly basis, but use the “Ad Preview and Diagnosis” tool in the “Tools” menu in Adwords so that you don’t accrue unclicked impressions for your own ads!
Some rules of thumb
- To be on page one, you need to be one of the eight to eleven smartest (not necessarily highest-bidding) advertisers.
- You can always get low positions by bidding Google’s minimum required bid.
- Often – but not always – more bidders means more expensive clicks.
- More bidders means you have to work harder to make your message stand out from the competition.
- More bidders means investing more time and money in testing before you’re profitable. Assess whether you can survive the learning curve.
- Best of all, more competition often means more money to the winners!
How much are your competitors paying and how have their ad strategies changed over time?
One of the tools that I find useful is www.spyfu.com. Like Wordtracker, this is a subscription based service you can purchase in monthly increments on an as-needed basis. You can search by keyword, URL or phrase and SpyFu will give you estimates of bid prices for that keyword and give you a rundown of which websites are bidding on those keywords. They also collect the history of each advertiser’s adcopy, which can be very enlightening and allow you to shorten your learning curve. Please note that the data is “scraped” and as such may be dated and/or incomplete but it is still highly useful to check out the competition. Another related tool is www.iSpionage.com.
Setting up your Google account
Go to www.adwords.com to get started and either click on “start now” or enter your user information if you already have an AdWords account.
When you first start a new campaign, Google wants to know which network you want your ads to use. I recommend you starting with Google’s Search Network.
- Give your Campaign a name. Don’t worry, you can always change it later.
- Since we want to focus on Google Search Network, use All Features so you have access to the maximum options and control.
- Uncheck the buttons next to “Include search partners.” That way, (for now) your ads will only show when people do direct searches on Google. You will not show up on other sites around the Internet where people are not searching for you directly until you know your conversion rates and CPA’s on google.com.
- Next, you need to set the geographic location you’re going to advertise in. Remember you can use negative location targeting as well.
- If your ads are in English, you should choose English. Best practice is that for each language you target, create a separate campaign(s) and make sure your ad copy is written in the language you target. Language targeting is triggered by the user’s computer settings.
- There are two possibilities here, either choose to manually set bids for your clicks and manage them at the keyword level, or (more advanced), another possible starting point is to choose “advanced options” and employ a flexible bid strategy (first you would need to create this in “Shared Library” in lower right of the Adwords UI) targeting Page Location>Top of Page. If you use the first option, you can use the Estimated First Page bid and Estimated Top of Page bid that Google provides to help you manually set the keywords’ opening bid. Many professionals recommend bidding slightly higher than your comfort zone for the first couple weeks. We recommend to try to get between position 3-4 to balance out volume and CPC and get a good read on your conversion rates at those positions. If you choose the second (more advanced) option of targeting the search page location, this will allow Google to control your bids but it has the benefit that you’ll quickly see what bids it takes to remain in a certain position, which you can still control by raising or lowering the flexible bid by a given % (an option within the bid strategy settings). You can then remove the automatic bidding after a few days and go back to manual control.
- Google wants to know your daily budget. What’s the maximum amount you’re willing to spend per day?
- Remember, Google gives low priority to new advertisers who are completely risk-averse.
- If you can only afford $50.00 per day instead of $200.00, it’s better to set a limit by cutting out keywords you’re bidding on (by pausing them). Why? If you cut your daily budget, Google won’t show your ad for the full day. If you lower your CPC, your CTR will drop and you may not get any traffic at all. Also, if you lower bids, your site’s conversion rate might be affected simply by displaying in average positions on the page that are rarely clicked on. You’ll be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Try to stay in no higher than average position of 4.0 (the top of the right-hand rail) with your keywords when you are starting out.
- Also, lower positions on the page seem to convert to sales better than in the top positions. If you’re on a tight budget, it’s better to just go to position 4-5 and be seen the whole day on page one rather than position 1-2 and only seen 5% of the time.
- We recommend Accelerated Delivery because Standard Delivery has the disadvantage that you might not show on each search during a user’s multi-search session.
- Ad Extensions: We recommend you to have these ready to go, approved by google and configured in each campaign before you turn traffic on. They can make a big difference, so launching without any of them is not recommended. If you do nothing else, try to at least add callout extensions, sitelinks, and a review extension (for this last one, you can always fall back on your BBB accreditation if you are listed on the BBB’s website). Adding a phone number is always good if you conversion rate by phone is very high.
- Choose to advertise during the hours you are most likely to convert a click into a paying customer. If this is business hours, limit your initial campaign test to business hours. You can always expand from there.
- We recommend to always rotate ads indefinitely as that will give you the most control over your split testing. If you choose other options, the risk is that Google tends to pick a winning ad copy variation faster than you might expect and will throttle back impressions of the other variations to a very small rate, which doesn’t give them another chance.
- Leave it blank, it’s a feature that gives Google control over your ad copy, which is not something you should do.
- Campaign URL options are an advanced feature not covered in the context of a basic course, but to perform advanced tracking on your URL’s you will want to read more about them. Don’t worry, you can leave this blank and always come back to it at a later date.
- Once you’ve setup your option, click “save and continue” in order for changes to take effect.
Writing the ad
Write your ad using the following suggestions:
- Use your major keyword in the ad’s headline.
- Description line 1 is a benefit – use your best guess of what outcome your ideal custom wants to happen. Ads often perform better when benefits come first.
- Description line 2 is a feature of the product or service offered.
- This is the display URL and is the second most important element of the text ad (right behind the headline). Experiment with subdirectories and using capitalization in the subdirectories for higher CTR. This URL does not need to resolve to an actual page on your site (ie., the subdirectory doesn’t need to actually exist), but of course the base domain needs to be the same as the destination URL of the ad, and you can only use one domain per adwords account.
- This is the destination URL (typically to your landing page). This URL is not visible in the ad so you can use tracking codes within the URL. You should avoid dropping all traffic to your homepage in the hopes that they will look around. Instead, you should send people to your an offer (i.e.: download page for the thirty-day free trial) or landing page that directly addresses their specific query from the adgroup they came from.
- You can designate a “mobile” specific landing page. This is an opportunity for you to directly target your “mobile only” audience with a landing page designed specifically for this user.
- AdWords has incorporated advanced URL tracking options that allow you to manage tracking and redirect information without resubmitting your ads for approval.
Adding keywords
The next step is to insert your keywords. I like to start a campaign with quotes “” and brackets [ ] around all of the keywords to ensure a more targeted audience.
The strategy is to use a single broad-match keyword or a single exact-match (using square brackets) keyword in an ad group for starters. By doing this, expect Google to expand out and find the appropriate searches for the broad match terms and also restrict the action for the exact match keywords.
Note: Use plain quotes for phrase match keywords – not the fancy curled quotation marks used in Microsoft Word or Google will disapprove those keywords.
You can start with the obvious negative keywords . Just mouse over it so that the pencil appears, and then click to see your options.
Group bids
The last setting Google wants to know is how much you’re willing to spend for every click. You could set the bid for as little as $0.01 if you wanted, but Google would probably require a higher minimum bid and your ad would probably never show.
You’ve already researched the cost of your keywords earlier and know what the costs are to be in the top positions.
Let’s use an example of $16.00 a click – a very competitive keyword. Even though you are bidding $16.00 a click, the average would only a fraction of that.
Note: Google’s Keyword Planner will tell you the estimates to be in positions 1-3. Generally, this prediction is generous, unless you’re willing to bid the maximum amount or more per click. Typically, your ads will show up on pages 2-3 of the search results, or they’ll show up on page one for a fraction of the time. After the account is setup you can bid separate amounts for individual keywords.
After you’ve entered all of the information and you’re satisfied with the prices and estimates for now, review and edit everything you’ve done so far, sign up for the new account, enter your credit card information, and start your ads.
Begin split testing immediately
The first goal is to increase clickthrough rate (CTR). You do this by writing a second ad and begin split testing against the first ad. The #1 key to gaining higher clickthrough rates on Google is to continually split testing ads against each other.
Don’t worry about rotation, Google will rotate them evenly for you and a winner can be picked later.
Increasing traffic
The next area to focus on is traffic. Start your campaign with a very small keyword list (with three matching options) – watch how this performs before adding separate keywords.
After you’ve collected some data for the initial keywords, it’s time to put the keyword research completed earlier to use. Separate the keywords into two overall groups – one into a “positive” keyword list and the other one with keywords you definitely don’t want. These will be the negative keyword list.
By filtering out the searches you don’t want (negative searches), you can actually increase your traffic (increasing the clicks of people interested in your offer).
Summary
Here’s a summary of what you’ve done:
- Write out a describe who your perfect customer is. Someone that’s already convinced that they need your product or service. Keep this as short and concise as possible.
- Now that you know who your ideal customer is – research the keyword that person would use to find you.
- How many monthly searches do they get?
- How much do these words cost?
- How competitive are the keywords?
- Break the keywords into ad groups of tightly matched terms. Keywords with the most potential will be in an ad group by themselves.
- Create two ads for each ad group (split testing)
- Create a landing page with an offer related to our keywords. Do not send people to your home page or contact page. Highly optimized campaigns will contain several landing pages – especially for keywords with high potential.
- Don’t use Google’s suggested bid price if using manual bidding – start at a lower price.
- Optimize your budgets by adjusting bid prices – not by relying exclusively on Google’s daily budget tool.