Adwords Training – Tips & Tricks Day 3

Today we are going to look in more detail how to get the structure of your Google AdWords right.

Simply explained, an AdWords account is separated into three levels: account, campaign and ad group. Your account deals with your unique email address, password and billing information. Your campaign will have its own budget and targeting options that decide where your ad is displayed. Your Ad Group contains keywords that activate your Ad sets.

What you next need to be aware of is how Google works on the concept of relevancy. You need to write your Ads so that they are providing the most relevant response to somebody’s query on Google. You do this by ensuring that the keywords you nominate to activate your Ads only refer to the one product/service that your Ad has been created for. So while your business might be an electronics shop that specialises in various different electronic and kitchen appliances, if your ad is targeted at people who are on the market for a plasma TV, it would not be a good idea to choose keywords that relate to stereo systems, for example.

There are several statistics you can see in your account that will help you measure the success of your Ad campaigns, namely the Click Through Rate (CTR).
Your CTR is calculated by dividing your number of clicks by the number of your impressions (the amount of times your ad has been displayed yet wasn’t clicked on) and turned into a percentage. In other words, this figure shows all the people who saw your ad and what percentage of them actually found your Ad relevant to their search.

A good CTR is 2% or higher, any lower than that and you may not be providing relevant ads to Google searchers. Having a CTR lower than 2% also means your costs per click will probably be higher than they need to be as your CTR plays a significant part in determining your Quality scores.
When you set up an AdWords Account the main things you do is:

I. Write your advertisement and then,
II. Select key words or phrases that, when entered by someone using Google, will bring up your ad.

A keyword phrase is two or more keywords that a person could use to find a particular product or service online. For example, if you were looking to buy blue suede shoes, the keyword phrase you could use is “Blue Suede Shoes.”

As an advertiser on Google AdWords, you would use keyword phrases to draw people to specific pages on your site. For example, if you sold blue suede shoes, you would use the phrase “Blue Suede Shoes” as one of your nominated keyword phrases.

You would use keyword phrases, as opposed to single keywords, if you were trying to attract a specific audience to a certain product/service, as the keyword phrase is a lot more targeted and specific.

AdWords offers different pricing methods for its ads to choose from when you set up your advertisement. Choose between pay per click (PPC) advertising and cost per thousand (CPM) advertising.

Pay Per Click is a very important mechanism as it allows advertisers and marketers to gather data on where their advertisements are being most effective and generating more clicks.

A CPC (cost per click) bid in your AdWords account is how much you are willing to spend, at the most, for a click on one of your ads. This can be determined at a campaign level or alternatively for individual keywords.

CPM means that each time someone views your ad you pay Google a fee. As searches can generate plenty of views, these amounts are usually expressed in terms of thousands. The M refers to the Latin word, mille, meaning one thousand.

Each campaign in Google AdWords is assigned, by you, a maximum daily budget. This budget will determine how long your ads get displayed online for. For example, if your budget has been set too low and your costs per click are high, you will exhaust your daily budget a lot quicker in a day, thus your ad won’t get displayed again until the following day where the daily budget is again available.

Bidding actually plays a part in determining what position your ad is going to appear on in the search results (your CPC bid multiplied by your quality score determines your average position), so an effective bidding strategy can affect your ROI and your profits.

You can improve your position and your visibility by increasing your maximum CPC bid. However, as there is more than one contributing factor, this may not always be the best option for you.

If you are running through your budget too quickly and not getting a strong Return on Investment, you may want to look at optimising your ad so that the budget lasts longer (an optimised account is going to have a lower CPC, so you won’t use your entire budget up as fast).

Having an appropriate daily budget is going to help you capture more of the available traffic and maximise your ad exposure, translating to a strong ROI.

By now I am hoping you are starting to put some of this into action. Try and make sure you understand the principles in this lesion before moving on to lesion 4 tomorrow.

Until tomorrow.

Cheers,