Aimee Vo

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Aimee Vo
843 days ago

Google's user interface has changed since July last year however the core marketing fundamentals to campaign management still applies. Butterscotch has some short but straight to the point video tutorials on Google Adwords. 

I wrote an article recently on it, so there is a bit of copy and pasting here:

The most important thing to remember with Google AdWords is: that the user (ie searcher) has a good user experience when they click on your ads. If they don't, Google will know this from the quality score and they will punish you in AdWords with a higher cost per click and lower ad placements. The better the advertiser you are, the better experience the user has thus the higher your quality score. This will reward you in your campaigns significantly - you will end up paying much less than your competitors, receive higher returns and better results.

The click cost will depend on:

* What keywords you are bidding on or what you tell Google you are willing to pay

* What your competitors are willing to pay on those keywords

* How well written your ad is - is it relevant?

* The click through rate (CTR) on your ad

The CTR is super important in terms of how well your AdWords campaign works. If you think about how Google makes its money: the more times your ads get clicked on - the more money Google makes. Therefore if your ads gets clicked on twice as much as your competitor's ad (because you wrote a better ad than they did), this means Google is making more money with your ad hence they will charge your less and still show your ad in a higher position. On a side note, Google has an amazing Google AdWords learning centre where you can grasps the basics of PPC advertising if you are new to it. For now, I am just going to talk the strategies I use to help businesses about achieve successful with Google AdWords.

There are many important things you need to understand when running Google AdWords......

1. You have to be very specific:

By specific I mean you need to give the customer exactly what they want. Lets use the example of an advertisement on dog training and you have a product on how to train a German shepherd to go to the bathroom outside. If you bid on the word 'dog training', that person is not looking for a product on how to train a German shepherd to be potty trained. They may be looking on information on how to teach their dog on how to be obedient, how to sit or maybe stop barking. So in relation to being specific, you have to be very specific with what keywords you are bidding on. For the example above, you need to bid on keywords like 'dog potty training', 'German shepherd potty training' or 'German shepherd training'. The reverse of this is true, the more general you get, the more money you will spend and the worse result you will get. Of course if you have a process that converts very well, then you can get very generic with it however you should almost always start out very specific. So if you are promoting Nike running shoes, you don't want to be bidding on 'running shoes' (that is too general), you want to bid on the specific style of the Nike running shoe as keywords.

Another thing on being specific, is that you have to give the searcher exactly what they want on your website. So if you have a whole website on dog training along with products, and you bid on 'how to potty train a dog', you must send them to the specific page that mentions potty training a dog. If you send them to the home page and the home page isn't about potty training a dog, that user is not going to get exactly what they want. So it is very important to give them what them exactly what they are looking for.

Being specific also applies to which keywords you select, what you write in your ad and how you structure your campaign. Your keywords should be tightly grouped in your AdWords group (which means its a small group of laser targeted keywords) so do not put thousands of keywords in your campaign - Google does not like that. Within your campaign, you should have AdWords groups with 2-26 keywords and pointing to the specific page on your site that gives the searcher what they are looking for.

2. Understanding Quality Score:

Once you have added your keywords, Google will tell you your quality score. Its important that you have a good to great quality score in your keywords (usually rated out of 10), if you get a poor or ok quality score, it means you have done something wrong. It could be that you are bidding on the wrong keywords, that your landing page is not specific enough for those keywords or Google does not think your ad is related to your keywords or that the page you are sending people does not have those keywords in it.

The quality score will be determined from a number of things:

• You need to have a high CTR: A high quality score must be over 1% and this will also depend on how your ads are showing up. If your ad is appearing on the 2nd or 3rd page, then this will mean your quality score is lower but if you are in the top 5 or 6 positions, your CTR should be over 1%. Therefore you need to work on getting that CTR as high as you with a baseline of 1% as the CTR. You should always get a CTR of over 1%, even as high as 15% and the way you get a high CTR is by testing. You write 2 different ads and see which ones performs better. Usually after 30 to a 100 clicks, you pick the ad that gets a higher click rate and write a variation on it. You then go on and write another ad that is different to that one and see which one performs better again (beating the control). When you have found a theme that performs very well, you can tweak your ads by adding a question mark, quotations around it, switch the descriptions lines or even change your url. You can do any of these things to tweak your ad so that you can get a higher CTR, thus a higher quality score.
• Its Not A Bidding War....Most people when starting out with Google AdWords usually say "I want to be in the top position, at number 1 and I am willing to pay more than anyone else to be there". This is the wrong way to go about it. It should not be a bidding war, it should be a fight over who is the better advertiser, that is what Google really wants. Google wants you to write an ad that gets the highest CTR so that they make more money ie. the more clicks, the more money you pay them. So if you can write a better ad than your competitors, Google will be very willing to reward you for that. They reward you by charging you less per click and putting you in a higher position on the page. Lets say your ad gets a 2% CTR and your competitor gets a 1% CTR, it probably means you are going to pay half as much per click and be ranked higher than your competitor because Google will know the user is having a better searching experience. Hence you should always have two ads running and check which ad is performing better. If one is performing badly, pause it, write a better ad and see if you can beat your better performing ad.

3. Tracking:

AdWords is probably the best system for tracking that exists. It is very easy with Google AdWords to set up your keywords and track how well they are performing ( i.e. by making you money). What is most important is to track whether the clicks are making you sales or converting into leads or sales. If your clicks are not converting, you are obviously just wasting money so it is very important that you track down at a keyword level which ones are making money for you. This is called keyword conversion tracking and there are a couple ways of doing it. The best way is to have Google do it for you. Google has some keyword conversion tracking code which they will allow you put it on your thank you or finished page and they will let you track a sale or a conversion.

The other way you can track conversions is by assigning a specific URL to every keyword (help can be found at the Google AdWords Tutorial). The better you understand how to track conversions, the better your results will be with AdWords. You will find that as you get more clicks on your campaign and by tracking everything, different keywords will perform very differently even though they may seem very similar. For example 'dog training' maybe very different to 'train my dog', you may find that one of them may convert much higher than the other one.

On another level, you can track conversions through the success of your ad campaigns. Some ads may perform better than other ads, for example one ad may have a price and the other may not, this means anyone that clicks on the ad with a price knows that they have to buy something when they go to that page - that ad will convert at a higher percentage than if you did not have the price on the ad. It will probably have a much lower CTR but also a higher conversion rate. This is really something that needs to be tested on every campaign to see if you are getting a return on investment because in the end the goal is to make the greatest amount of money. Track everything!

4. Bidding:

Over the years bidding has changed, it use to be bid low and then raise your bid and to see what the lowest point was. That is probably not the wisest thing to do anymore - at least not right now. Right now what I suggest is start by bidding high, what this does is allow you to get a good position on AdWords and a good CTR. As you establish the CTR, Google will recognize that you are a good advertiser and then you can lower your bid everyday to what Google is actually charging you (whilst maintaining your high CTR). What you need to figure out is whether you are getting a good returns for the money you are actually spending so if you are spending a $1 and getting $2 back - you know its worth continuing the campaign.

5. Last words:

Please don't get emotional attached to a keyword because you 'like' the keyword or believe it should work. Do not expect to learn everything upfront and then go implementing a Google AdWords campaign effectively. If you have your own full time business and love what you are doing - then get a professional in to run your own PPC campaigns.