GOOGLE ADWORDS

TO SET UP A GREAT GOOGLE ADWORDS CAMPAIGN

For those of you who may be unfamiliar with Google AdWords, these are the small ads that you see lined up along the edges of your screen while reviewing your search results at Google. These are not search results, but paid advertisements. They are shown on Google along with search results, and on myriad partner sites such as AOL, Netscape, Earthlink, Ask.com, IWon and many others. Paying for placement in the top five(see below) also opens up the door for many, many other sites to start showing your ads. Google AdWords also displays ads on specific kinds of devices such as smart phones, has ads that show on YouTube, and can provide ads to publishers all over the web. Many of the ads you see online, in many places, are Google AdWords ads.

The first thing is to do your homework and make sure you know exactly which keywords you are going to bid on. Do your research. This is CRUCIAL.

Another option is to use this form that Google allows you to use before you log in or create an account. It’s good because you can see right there whether a keyword will pull any traffic when you add it to your Google AdWords account.

Type in a keyword phrase that people might use to find your site. You’ll be given a number of times someone searched for that phrase and similar phrases at Overture and Wordtracker on an average day last month, ranked by number. So you can see at a glance which search phrases are the most popular. Sometimes the results are surprising and you’ll get new phrases you hadn’t thought would be popular.

​​Now set up a campaign or go to one of your existing campaigns. It doesn’t matter if the ad in this campaign has been disapproved before–if you apply what you will learn on this page, you should get your ad approved and displayed at Google. (Unless, of course, it is bogus!)

Go to your Ad Group, then to the link for “Edit Keywords and CPC”.

If you’ve tried to do this before, you probably already know that the biggest problem with Google Adwords is getting them to accept and display your ads based on the ad box you create and the keywords you select.

I’ve had several clients give up because they were unable to get Google to display their ads for more than a day or two before they are “slowed” or taken down. They got tired of constantly messing with it and wasting their time; eventually they quit trying.

Contrary to popular belief, the top Google Adwords boxes being displayed do not always cost the most per click. It’s not like elsewhere where the top bidder is always the number one top ad being displayed. Google does it differently.

There are THREE factors that Google cares about, so they can maximize their revenue from the clickthroughs.

Cost per click. How much are you bidding to display on that keyword? We recommend setting your initial bid at or near the minimum. If your ads don’t then display on the first page or two, consider raising your bid to an amount that will cause them to display on the first page or two of results. Google will let you know what position that keyword reachs.

Clickthrough Rate. Remember, when you’ve chosen a cost per click model, Google doesn’t get paid for displaying an AdWords box. They only get paid when someone actually clicks on an ad, so they care about the relevance of the ad to the keyword. That’s the main reason ads get disapproved–the keyword doesn’t relate to the website or the ad box. And they care about your click-through rate. For that keyword, Google will select and display those ads which are getting clicked the most, regardless of the amount of the cost per click (your bid amount). You could be offering to pay twenty bucks per clickthrough but if no one clicks on your ad, then Google makes nothing. An ad that is paying only twenty cents per clickthrough, but is a dynamite ad that people really respond to (by clicking on it!) may be given higher placement at Google for that keyword. So, if an ad is working leave it up and don’t change it no matter what. If an ad isn’t working, check that the keyword lines up with the ad text, which agrees with the landing page. Working on your quality score in this way will improve your cost per click, how effective the ad is, and how much traffic those ads even see.

Your daily budget. How much have you told Google you are willing to spend on a daily basis? All other things being equal, if you have said that you are willing to spend $1000 a day, while others have limited their budgets to $3 per day, your ad may display above theirs. Once you know the campaign basically works, then make your daily budget an outrageously high one, as long as you’re underbidding on clicks. You are basically bluffing about this–you can’t be charged for more than the ad is actually clicked on, no matter how high you set your daily budget. If you’re worried about that, set the daily budget as high as you can stand if it were all used (it won’t be), and monitor it every day (every hour if need be) until you are sure it isn’t actually costing you a fortune just because you set a high budget. It won’t, unless a zillion people click through on it. The worst thing that could happen is you might actually spend it all one day getting traffic to your site.

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