e-book Series HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON GOOGLE ADWORDS

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1 e-book Series $ HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON GOOGLE ADWORDS

2 HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON GOOGLE ADWORDS TABLE OF CONTENTS 19 Spear Road, Suite 102 Ramsey, New Jersey Phone: Fax: Google AdWords Overview... Understand How Google AdWords Works... Campaigns... Keywords... Groups... Ads... Optimize Your Accounts... Optimize Campaigns... Optimize Keywords... Optimize Ads... Check Landing Pages... Conclusion

3 $ $ Google +Adwords Web Images Videos News Apps More Tools More than results (0,22 seconds) Google +Adwords TM-Google.com AD 1.CAMPAIGNS The definition of an advertising campaign is a coordinated series of linked advertisements with a single idea or theme. Therefore, in AdWords, a campaign is a combination of keywords, ad groups, and ultimately ads, that work together to gain you traffic for a particular idea or theme (or a particular website promotion). All your settings and budgets are geared by the campaign. You can, of course, have as many campaigns as you like. By splitting things into campaigns you can control your spending and monitor the performance of different sections of ads and keywords with ease. HOW TO SAVE MONEY ON GOOGLE ADWORDS GOOGLE ADWORDS OVERVIEW Google AdWords is a means by which any business, even those with small marketing budgets, can advertise in a cost-effective way and target carefully those whom they advertise to. Small and start-up businesses can begin their Google AdWords marketing relatively cheaply, and increase the amount of AdWords spending they do as funds permit. If you are unaware what Google AdWords is, it is where you pay to have search entries for your website positioned at the beginning of Google search listings. The more you are willing to pay for this, the better your search listing placement will be, certainly for the more sought-after search terms. One of the nice things about Google AdWords is that there is a comprehensive reporting system, making it very easy to see the effectiveness of your campaigns, down to which particular key word searches were the most, and least, successful for you. Google AdWords is actually very easy to set up and get working with. It does not take much effort to be able to set up the payments along with some simple ads and off you go. But the problem is that an AdWords account is also very easy to set up and forget. As a result, quite a few businesses leave their AdWords running or they set them up badly in the first place. As a result they lose money, rather than gain conversions and sales. UNDERSTAND HOW GOOGLE ADWORDS WORKS A Google AdWords account is made up of four key areas. These are: 2.KEYWORDS Keywords are the search terms that people type in when they are hunting for something in Google. Your ads are triggered by searches for particular keywords. If you sell woollen carpet for example, you would want your ad to appear if someone typed woollen carpet into Google. 3.GROUPS Within your campaigns you can choose to create ad groups, which (as the name suggests) are sets of ads grouped together. You do this to make it easier for you to monitor a selection of ads and keywords, and it makes it simpler for your management and budgeting. 4.ADS These are the basic building blocks of AdWords. These ads appear on Google (as search results). The aim is to get as many people as possible to click on your ad, leading them to visit your website. A combination of particular ads become ad groups (and these combined become a campaign). CAMPAIGNS A campaign is the overarching factor affecting how your keywords and ads will work, when they will show and how much money you have to pay. Many of your AdWords choices are done at campaign level, and as such they affect the keywords relevant to you, the ad groups and the actual ads themselves. SOME OF THE AREAS DETERMINED AT CAMPAIGN-LEVEL ARE: Where your ads actually appear online: will you just advertise on Google itself, or also on its partners like ebay, AOL and Amazon? Will you have display ads or simply search-entry listing ads? Where, in the world, will you advertise you can choose from worldwide advertising, right down to having AdWords simply showing up within a certain postal code of a particular country. What is your bid strategy? With AdWords you can control how your budget for a campaign is spent, including an option 4 5

4 In many situations phrase match gives the best results. It is neither too general, leading to your ads appearing on irrelevant searches, or too specific, meaning that your ad doesn t trigger for searches that are slightly different from how you anticipated them to be. Using keyword phrases, rather than single keywords, also seems to ensure you get the right traffic through to your ads. You also have the ability to stop your ads appearing by selecting negative keywords - words that you specifically don t want to trigger your ads. If you sell woollen carpet and not synthetic carpet, you would have synthetic as a negative keyword. That way, your ad would not appear if someone typed synthetic carpet. letting Google change things based on your particular AdWords performance. What is your budget? You limit your total spending per day in the campaigns. No matter how popular your keywords and ads are, you will not spend more than the campaign spending limits you have set. Specified ad scheduling: you can limit your ads to appear during certain hours of the day and design a plan for when to show your ads. KEYWORDS Keywords are an essential part of Google AdWords. You need to have these right if your ads are going to show up for people who are likely to buy your product or service. Keywords (these can actually be multiword phrases) will trigger your ads when they match the search terms that people type into Google. You have a number of options about how you choose your keywords. You can choose keywords that form part of a sentence, and even pick the order in which the words appear to trigger your ad. There are three Match Types for keywords to help you: Broad match: Broad match will make your keywords show up in any search term that includes all your key terms even if they are not particularly related. For example if someone typed natural woollen carpet your woollen carpet keywords would trigger your ad for woollen carpet. However, your ad would also be triggered should someone type where can I buy woollen jerseys and second-hand carpet - the words woollen and carpet are both in that search, but they are not really targeted towards the people you are interested in. Phrase match: Phrase match means that the keywords will only trigger your ad if the search terms are typed in the correct order. So if someone typed Where can I buy some woollen carpet then your ad will trigger. If however someone typed Where can I buy carpet that is woollen then your ad will not show, as the words do not appear in the correct order. Exact match: Exact match requires that the exact phrase or keyword is used before it will trigger your ad. If you had woollen carpet as an exact keyword phrase, it would only trigger your ad if someone typed woollen carpet (by itself) and not if it formed part of a sentence. GROUPS The ad groups ensure that you target certain ads to certain keywords. Each group contains the ads targeted to a particular keyword. One particular ad group may be the ads that get shown when someone searches for PS4 games. Another ad group may be the ads that appear when someone searches for Xbox One ads. ADS The ads are the part of your campaign that people actually see. So it is important that the ads are carefully worded and that they say what you intend them to say. They need to have a good headline so that this entry stands out to the person searching. They need to contain enough interesting information that the searcher will choose to focus on them. Therefore they also need to include a good call to action. OPTIMIZE YOUR ACCOUNTS STRUCTURE You need to ensure that you have a clearly structured account campaign. That way you are covering all of your important keywords, avoiding duplication. If you are part of a team, a clear structure means that any team member can understand the campaign. TRACK WITH GOOGLE ANALYTICS You want to be able to see the effects that Google AdWords have on your traffic and conversions. Therefore, you need to be using Google Analytics. There are a few steps you need to do to enable this: 1.Enable conversion tracking on your purchase or lead confirmation pages 2.Make certain that you have Google Analytics correctly set up 3.Link your Google Analytics and AdWords accounts 4.Take notice of, and look at, trends in the data BRAND AND NON-BRAND SPLIT The reality is that branded words perform differently than non-branded words. Statistics show that the click through rate (CTR) and the Quality Score are better in searches for branded terms. Allied with this, the search intent tends to be different, cost per conversion is different and (possibly as a result of this) ad copy is different for branded terms too. Therefore, for best 6 7

5 There is no point in targeting ads to places where you do not sell. This is particularly relevant if you are selling an off-line product or service to a local area. optimization any branded terms you use, should be placed in separate campaigns from any non-branded search terms. FOCUSED AD GROUPS You will receive far better results if you have a number of ad groups, with a limited number of keywords in each group, rather than having a few ad groups with many keywords. It is far easier to tightly focus your ads if they are simply targeted at a few keywords. If somebody searches for a particular keyword, and your ad comes up as a high-level option for them, they are not going to click on it if it does not sound relevant to the key term they searched for. You need to be able to use your ad groups to ensure that any potential user only sees the most relevant ad for them. OPTIMIZE CAMPAIGNS AD SCHEDULING / DELIVERY With ad scheduling you can limit your ads to the times when your most valuable prospects are actually searching. If your main target is East Coast North American consumers, there is no point in running your ads during the early hours of the morning for these consumers. You also want to think about your ad rotation, i.e. what choice should Google make when you have multiple options in an ad group relevant to a key term. You have several options for this. Rotate evenly is great for split testing multiple ads, but it does require you to manually monitor the results to see if there is a winner. If you just let it run, with all ads in the group appearing at equal frequencies, ads that underperform will keep serving as well as your successful ads. An alternative is to set the ads to either optimize for clicks or optimize for conversions. In these cases, AdWords will test your ads on its own and show the winners more often than if you were to do it manually. Optimize for clicks gives preference to ads that, based on past performance, are expected to attract more clicks than other ads in the ad group. Optimize for conversions gives preference to ads that are expected to provide more conversions, usually in the form of sales, based on past performance. LIMIT YOUR DAILY BUDGET You don t want a nasty surprise bill because there have been many more clicks than you were expecting. You need to put a daily limit on your AdWords expenditure. In your early days of using AdWords, it is a good idea to keep this level relatively low, while you are still learning and experimenting. LOCATION TARGETING There is no point in targeting ads to places where you do not sell. This is particularly relevant if you are selling an off-line product or service to a local area. Restrict your location to where you actually sell your products. It is possibly worthwhile, while you are still learning and refining your use of AdWords, to limit your location to a small sample market, and then gradually expand once you have more experience and a better idea of which ads work and which ads are not successful. You might then start to build up, targeting the most profitable areas first, gradually adding less profitable regions as your budget permits it. You might even consider adding extra languages as you widen your spending, if that is likely to grab you extra profitable traffic. BE WARY USING AUTOMATIC PLACEMENTS One of the options you can choose, when it comes to displaying your ads is Automatic Placements. Automatic placements are different from managed placements, where you specifically choose the places where you d like to show your ads. Your ads can appear using automatic placements if you ve selected one of the campaign types: Display Network only or Search Network with Display Select. In that case, AdWords uses your selected keywords and other methods in an attempt to best match your ads to relevant placements on the Display Network - this Network is the official name given to the collection of websites -- including Google websites like Blogger, Google Finance, YouTube and Gmail, -- these that show AdWords ads. These may not, however, give you the results you desire. The automatic placement may, in fact, give you some poorly chosen placements. It is possible, though, to exclude placements that you think are irrelevant or undesirable. To find where your ads have been placed and how they have performed, go to the Dimensions tab in your AdWords account, and select View: automatic placements. If you notice that some placements seem to produce unsatisfactory results compared to others, e.g. low conversion rates, high cost/ conversion ratios etc., consider excluding them by following these steps: 8 9

6 Keywords Optimize Keywords Delete Keywords Consider Mobile Your Quality Score is one of the key factors that Google uses to determine how far up the search rankings you go for any particular search term... 1.Click on All online campaigns 2.Select the Display Network tab 3.Click on Placements above the results table 4.Scroll down until Campaign placement exclusions comes into view, and click on the red +Exclusions button below it 5.Select the campaign/ad group that you are wanting to add the placement exclusions to 6.Select placements under the Campaign/Ad group exclusions 7.Next, you will enter the website URLs which you want to exclude in the box. Then, push the Add placements button 8.Don t forget to save CONSIDER MOBILE One decision you need to make, with any particular AdWords campaign, is whether to include mobile searchers or not. It was during 2014 that the number of mobile internet users exceeded the number of users using desktops and laptops. Not all websites have adjusted to the challenges caused by using mobile devices with small screens and limited input options however. Many websites are not yet fully responsive. For any new campaign in AdWords, you will need to make a bid multiplier for any mobile searchers. You will definitely want to test it out, but in your early days, it is probably safer to have a reduced bid for the mobile audience, and then increase it once you have done some testing. This is particularly so if your website is not responsive or mobile-friendly yet. If you have a defined target audience who are unlikely to convert using mobile devices (for example the elderly) you might want to opt out of mobile bids completely. OPTIMIZE KEYWORDS REVIEW OPPORTUNITIES You want to make certain that you are using best possible keywords for your situation. Take a good look at your search term report. Do any new keyword opportunities, that you are not currently using, stand out? Once you know which search terms actually triggered your ads, it is probably easier to imagine which similar ones would also be of value to you. You should be able to come up with some exact-match keywords that will also be of value to you. There could also be some valuable suggestions on the AdWords Opportunities tab, with potential keywords that could bring you further hits. If you do use any of the suggested keywords, make certain that you put them into relevant Ad Groups. INCREASE YOUR QUALITY SCORE Your Quality Score is one of the key factors that Google uses to determine how far up the search rankings you go for any particular search term (remember, simply because you have paid for advertising does not automatically mean that you get a top-ranked position it is likely your competitors have also paid for ads on the same keywords). Your actual ranking is determined by a combination of your bid and your quality score. Therefore, your aim has to be to improve your quality score. It is possible that you can keep a high ad position for a lowered bid, if you can obtain a high enough quality score you want to aim for at least an 8. Some ways you can improve your Quality Score include Make your ad copy compelling, which should Increase your click-through rate Ensure your keywords are tightly themed around their particular ad groups Make sure your ad copy is relevant to all of the keywords within a particular ad group Make certain that the content on your landing pages matches your ad copy if searchers cannot find an answer to the problem they were searching about they will neither convert nor return Make certain your landing pages are both easy to navigate and readable Don t use keywords with Quality Scores lower than 6 unless you have a really compelling reason to do so DELETE KEYWORDS THAT UNDERPERFORM You are only going to want to use keywords that constantly perform. It is not just keywords with a low quality score that should be deleted. It is generally considered that keywords with a 0.50% or lower click-through rate are underperforming. It is not worth continuing with any keywords that the metrics show have performed poorly in relation to your desired KPIs. You might even consider lowering your bids on average-performing keywords

7 Ad Gallery is the AdWords free ad design tool. Ad Gallery & Templates If you remove badly performing keywords and reduce the bids on average performing keywords, your top keywords would get a larger share of your daily budget (keep your budget the same, just alter the spread). You should now be getting a better return on your advertising dollars, and your account s overall performance will improve. USE NEGATIVE KEYWORDS By using negative keywords you can avoid the problem of your ads appearing for people who are definitely not going to be clicking through. This is particularly relevant if you are only targeting a particular part of a wider group as referred to previously, if you sell woollen carpets people after synthetic carpets have no interest in you, so there is no point in wasting your ads on those people so you would use the negative keyword synthetic to eliminate your ad from searches for synthetic carpet (yet your ads would still come up for people simply searching for carpet ). There is some evidence to suggest that using negative keywords is one of the most important factors of success when using AdWords one piece of research even suggest that 90% of all AdWords campaigns that are unsuccessful, are ones that do not use negative keywords. It is therefore vital that you think through carefully which negative keywords you should be using. A combination of researching terms in Google, brainstorming, and analysis of any existing search queries should help you come up with a list of suitable negative keywords. For example, if you type carpet into Google, various suggestions come up. While most are retailers names, one that stands out is carpet cleaning. If you are selling woollen carpet, you are not going to get click-throughs from people wanting to clean their existing carpet, so cleaning is probably a negative keyword for the woollen carpet sales business. OPTIMIZE ADS USE AD GALLERY Ad Gallery is the AdWords free ad design tool. If you want to advertise on the Google Display Network with images, dynamic or video ads it is the most costeffective way of ensuring that you have an attractively-designed ad. There are a number of templates to help you build your non-text ads. The templates are fully customisable so you can include your own graphics, logos, product images and calls to action. PROOFREAD Nothing looks more amateur than a typo in your ad. Whatever you do, make certain that you proofread everything you have written. If people are trying to work out what it is that you really mean, they will be missing the real intent of your ad. Should any ads with errors slip through the net make certain that you pause your campaign as soon as you notice the mistake. Replace the ad with a corrected version. INCLUDE CALLS TO ACTION Ads supplied using Google AdWords will obviously come higher up in search results, than organic search results. But, like all forms of advertising, you are going to want people to react to them in a certain way. Therefore, you need to ensure that they have a clear and obvious call to action. It might simply be a line like Call us for a free quote. Statistics show that ads with calls to actions perform better than ads without them. These are your chance to tell a potential customer what they should be doing once they get to your site. You want to suggest to them what they should be doing next, so that you can help you reach your goal. If you have a free download for them, make sure you have a call to action strongly suggesting to them to download your file, e.g. Download a free ebook on Of course, it is important that your landing page matches what you have said in your ad. If you have said that people will get a free ebook by clicking on your ad, it is vital that the landing page does actually lead to a free ebook. AD QUANTITY Make certain that you have at least two ads in each ad group. This makes it much easier to find and serve the best ad for any particular keyword. If, for any reason, an ad gets disapproved, there will still be others in the ad group that can be served. It stops your campaign coming to a halt while some issue gets sorted out. If you always have multiple ads in each group, it also makes it easier for you to test success rates. Try each ad out and see how they perform. Look at the best performing ads, and create further ads based on the features in those winning ads. Possibly create different ads focusing on different features of your product. One option is to set your ad rotation to optimize for clicks so that the networks serve the best ads most

8 LOGO.COM HEADLINE Your text and + description in here LINK LINK LINK LINK There is no point in targeting ads to places where you do not sell. This is particularly relevant if you are selling an off-line product or service to a local area. CHECK LANDING PAGES MAKE SURE YOUR LANDING PAGES ARE ACCURATE It will be a total waste of money if your ad does not send people to the correct landing page. Make doubly certain that you have used the correct link. Assuming that your link takes you to your desired landing page, you want to make certain that the person browsing will want to follow your call to action. It is very important that you are using the best landing page for any particular search term. Using destination URLs at the keyword-level makes your landing page particularly relevant. Make certain that your landing page is not for a product that is out of stock. People will leave instantly and not return. OPTIMIZE LANDING PAGES If you have made an effort to optimize your ads themselves, it is equally important that you optimize the landing pages that they take the potential customers to. Remove any distractions. Have enticing headlines. Ensure you have a clear call to action here too. You need this page to be seen as useful, of value, and part of a clear path to the solution of a problem. Headline Your text and description in here LInk LInk LInk + CONCLUSION It is possible to use Google AdWords very successfully. Done well, they can generate good traffic and high conversions. However, like many things in business, Google AdWords is not something that you set and forget. You need to think very carefully about how you are using it. You need to work on all parts of your advertising the campaign, the key words, the ad groups and the ads themselves. One of the key points is that this is not a one-off. To get the best results from your AdWords campaigns, you need to be constantly monitoring progress and making changes. If you follow the suggestions here, you are well on the road to success. However, it is a constant job. You always need to be analysing the results of your campaigns: improving your word choices, determining whether you are chasing the best key terms and changing your advertising copy as and when needed. That way you can limit wasteful spending and ensuring your advertising dollars are solely targeted at the most relevant audiences. In this way, you can save money on Google Adwords

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