Adwords Marketing

Adwords Beginner? Some Valuable Tips

This isn’t a comprehensive beginner’s guide to Adwords. It is possible that there could be a few inaccurate observations. However, what this attempts to do is to put together in one place the most important things that beginners should know about. As you go along and get more proficient at this game, you can add your own helpful tips to these. So here goes!

Make your titles dynamic: This just makes your ad much more targeted and it doesn’t cost you anything. When you use dynamic titles, your CTR and conversion rates get better and when someone searches with a phrase, what comes up will be the title of your Adwords. So it spares you the necessity of having to do individual ads for each of your keywords. All you have to do is to put {keyword: your backup title here} in the title field of the ad. This back-up title is only in case the phrase that is being searched for is too long or the search cannot be displayed by Adwords for whatever strange reason.

Optimize the landing page: This is the page the person who is interested in your ad comes to. So it would be a good thing if you didn’t use the home page as your landing page – the exception would be if the homepage dealt only with the product that you are selling. If, for example, you have posters to sell, there could be a landing page for car posters and another for flower posters. You could segment it even finer and have landing pages for sunflower posters and go on to the other flowers and when it comes to cars, have a BMW5 series poster and so on.

Your creatives should be optimized too: Just a few points on this because this is a whole topic by itself but one of the things that could help you here is to use a keyword-specific URL. Don’t just use numbers and do remember that the URL does not necessarily have to relate to the real click through. You could, for example, do something like this. Imagine that you are selling Nike AirWalk shoes. On your creative, you could set the URL to display this: www.example.com/nike/nike-airwalk. The URL must be relevant or people would feel cheated but in many cases it could be more exciting than your own domain name and that would be an advantage.

Also remember not to go the superlative route like ‘the best’ or ‘the greatest’. Don’t put all your text in capital letters either. If you do this, you could find that Google might disapprove. Anything that is qualified by the superlative must be backed up with facts and figures. If you are selling the world’s slimmest phone, then make the comparison and show that it really is the world’s slimmest.

Make sure your ad copy passes muster. Bad copy turns people off and at the risk of sounding obvious, good copy really is crucial to the site.

Avoid broadmatching: First, let’s look at what exactly broadmatching is. It means including keywords or keyword phrases in your keyword list. This means that your ad will show up when someone searches for that word or phrase. Google picks keywords algorithmically so when it comes to expanded matching, it becomes even harder to figure out when your keywords show. Leave broadmatching to the advertisers who are much more experienced or the very lazy ones who don’t want to spend time targeting their ads. Yes, broadmatching is great at certain times but wait for a little more experience before you use it.

Make use of global negatives: If you don’t want all and sundry to come to your site for free stuff when you are serious about selling your product, all you need to do is to use ‘free’ in your global negatives. You could also use other words like these so you do not get inundated with traffic that is irrelevant. This is especially of use when you are broadmatching.

Test your positions and creatives: Will position make a difference to your profit? Will being first as opposed to being sixth mean a lot more money? It would depend on the industry you are in, on who is bidding on the keywords and on your creatives. So do a test and put your creatives in each position so you know for sure for yourself. Try and figure out where it will work the most effectively, especially from an ROI viewpoint. The ranking of the Adwords is a complicated process but it does follow a CPCxCTR as well. So now you know why two ads with the same CPC could be positioned differently because one has a higher CTR. So test your ads by doing three or four and by setting them to run evenly. You’ll find that Google runs the one that performs the best so you should go with the one that promises the best ROI. Test for longer than just a day if you can.

Do turn off search network and content targeting: If you don’t quite know where to look for these ads, don’t meddle with them but leave them be till you are quite comfortable as far as Google is concerned. CTRs and conversion rates do change a lot with every search property as well as content targeted ads so wait till you know Google a little better before you move on to these.

Return On Investment(ROI) and Track Conversion: Use Google’s conversion tracking codes to track just about everything – clicks, clickthroughs, track impressions. If you have your own tracking software, use that. You have to know how your keywords perform in order to make the best of your campaigns so you can leave out the keywords that don’t work and pump up the ones that do.

Keep your eye on the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Keep an eagle eye on whatever it is you are paying out – whether it is a download, an order, a sale or an enquiry. It is only through this that you know what is happening and can set targets regarding CPA. You also can figure out which channel works best for you. So check and see if your Google Adwords listings are performing or not as are your SiteMatch listings and your offline marketing.

Bidding wars are a no-no: The temptation is great to get into a bidding war with your competitors but resist it and you’ll be glad you did. Pause and think about whether it is really important to be No.1. If it isn’t earth-shatteringly important, let your competitor go ahead and wait patiently. It all depends on your product – if it is better, you’ll get there thanks to better clickthroughs. The thing is that automated bidding software seems to be more in use today than ever before and it’s hard working against software that is determined to keep the competition on top. Patience will get you there while you are still paying the same amount that you did at No.2.

Watch the competition: Very important. Try and figure out what his strategy is and what he could be doing better than you. Are his landing pages doing something great for him and if so is this something you should take note of? Look to see if he is using automated software or if there are any keywords you share with him. The more you know about the competition, the stronger it will make you. Here, knowledge definitely is power.

Stick to a budget: A weekly budget is best. The problem is, if you do not have one, you’ll find that Adwords can be very addictive and you will be spending far more than you have to. Keywords are funny things – one day up, the next down so unless you strap yourself down to a budget you might find yourself putting money down without pausing to sit back and assess whether or not it is wise to put more money in.

Make adgroups: It helps to organize your campaigns. When you put them into adgroups, you will be able to tell later what is working and what isn’t. Is it shoes you are selling? Then do an adgroup for not just each brand but for each model within the brand.

Geotarget your ads: This is so important and it can be done in your campaign settings whenever you do a new campaign. The great thing is you can target not just countries but cities as well and this as you know means a very relevant target audience. When users realize that your ads are so well targeted, there is more likelihood that they will click on them.

Were those helpful? Well, if you are a beginner as far as Adwords is concerned, that should get you started!