Hi Just following up from my other post where I mentioned FREE marketing methods, I promised I would put up a post on adwords so here goes....
When first starting out PPC can be a little daunting and most people think that google rewards the highest paying bidder with the best placements, this is not always true check out the example below
Advertiser 1 pays 50p per click and has a 2% click through rate (so from every 100 people that see his ad 2 people click on it) 50p x 2 = £1 so for every 100 impressions he makes google £1
Advertiser 2 pays 25p per click and has a 5% click through rate this means he earns google a whopping £1.25 .
Google is in business to make money and because advertiser 2 has made google more money then he rewards him with a higher ranking.
To get a higher click through rate (CTR) we need to take a look at a number of factors - How relevent our add is to our keyword
- how our keywords are placed in our add
- is our landing page related to our keyword
- is our add selling benefits rather than features
Firstly when creating an add we need to take a look at the keywords we are going to use to base our add upon, I normally find my keywords from wordtracker this tool tells me how many ppeople are typing a particular keyword into the search engines and also how much "natural" competition there is. We then create 4 adds for each keyword , this allows us to test our adds and then continually tweak them for the best results.
To build our ads for the best results we would use our keyword in the headline, once in the body text and also once in the url, don't worry if your domain doesn't have the keyword in it we simply put a question mark after the actual destination url and put our keyword after it as in the image below.
By putting the keyword after the question mark google takes this into account for the relevancy of the add but when sending people to the website it doesn't take the keyword after the ? into account, as you can see from the above image the keyword "Import From China" has been used in the header ,the body text and the url.
When writing ads try to list benfits of the product you are selling rather than the features for example
feature : the teapot has a wooden handle.
Benfit : you wont burn your hand when pouring tea.
Always state what is in it for the customer and not what is in it for yourself.
We would create a minimum of 4 ads similar to the one shown above and then go into the campaign settings and set the ads on an even rotation, this way we will display all of our ads evenly and so we can track the results more effciently, when we find the best converting ad we can then pause the other 3 and create 3 new ads for testing. The initial best performing ad is then duplicated twice so we have 3 ads exactly the same and 3 test ads, by doing this and rotating our ads evenly we show our best performing ad for half of the time and the 3 test ads for the other half of the time.
If we find one of our test ads is performing better than the primary ad then that ad then takes the top spot and is duplicated twice as above.
On the tracking side of things, google generates tracking code for you to put into your website, you can generate different types of tracking code for different pages i.e coversion code which goes on your thank you page or your standard tracking code which goes on all of your webpages.
When moitoring your campaign the ideal figures to aim for are a 5% click through rate (5 out of 100 people who see your ad click on it) and a conversion rate that suits the cost of the product, if your product has £20 profit in it and you are paying 50p per click with a 1% conversion you will be loosing out by £30 per sale. If your product has £100 profit in it then you would be making £50 per sale after goolge costs.
The less profit in a product the higher the conversion rate needs to be so in the above example if we were getting a 3% conversion rate on a £20 product and paying 50p per click then we would be in profit by £10.
Within the google anayltics section you will be able to see which pages your visitors are viewing and where they are leaving your site etc.
RULE NUMBER 1
Track everything!
When sending people to a website via adwords we want to send people to the page selling the actual product they are looking for, you will loose up to 20% of potential customers for every click they have to make on your website, by sending people direct to the buying page for the product they are looking for you will have a greater chance of securing the sale.
By making our landing page i.e. destination URL relevant to the product by using simple SEO google will reduce the cost per click.
I would normally set my cost per click at around 40p for starters and then track and change my budget to suit the rankings, a lot of people think that by ranking 3rd - 6th on goolge will give you better results than ranking first but scientific tests have proven other wise and the best spot is the number one ranking on page one of google.
RULE NUMBER 2
Monitor your adwords promotions daily, check what is converting and what is not, pause any ads that are costing you money and see if you can make any good ads better.
Google ads can be expensive if done wrong, I will spend any amount of money with google as long as it is profitable at one point I was spending £500 per day!
A quick recap then
1 create 4 ads for every keyword in your campaign
2 add tracking code to your website
3 always send people to the relevant landing page
4 track ad performance
5 when we know which ad is better create duplicates and new ads
6 constantly check and adjust your campaign
This is a basic outline of google ads there is more to google than this but following these steps should get you under way and driving traffic to your site without loosing money!
Dave
***Google Secrets***
Linear Mode
November 2009
