You want traffic? Getting traffic is easy, but getting targeted traffic that will increase our sales is the traffic we want! The most targeted way to get that is by running ads on Google Adwords.
Our CEO, Yariv Dror, has wrapped up 10 years of AdWords advertising experience where he spent over $ 10 million on advertising campaigns in a 10 minutes video.
The video starts with the basics and continues to some very important tips regarding AdWords optimization. It ends with tips on how to automate your campaigns.
Below you can read the script of the video and we have added its timeline to its description for easy browsing.
Setting up an AdWords campaign requires the followings:
1. Choosing the most relevant Advertising Method.
2. Designing the most effective Campaign Structure.
3. Conducting a Keywords Research.
4. Creating the Ads whether text ads or banners.
5. Deciding on the most suitable Landing page for each of the ads.
6. Adding Negative keywords.
7. Defining the Budget of each campaign.
8. Setting up Bids for each ad group.
9. Implementing tracking and reporting codes in order to enable optimization.
Well it might take a bit more than 5 min.. Let’s dig deeper.
Choosing the relevant Advertising Method
Google offers a search network and a display network.
Search ads – will show your ads to people who are actively searching for what you are offering either on Google or on one of its partners that have its search bar.
Display ads – will show your ads to people who are browsing sites with relevancy to your ads; sites that have dedicated some of the their real estate for presenting google ads.
Display is much cheaper, but it is also less engaging and often yields less results, so in this video I will discuss search.
Search campaigns can be static or dynamic, leading to your site, or triggering a phone call to your business, showing text ads or a combination of text and images if you use shopping ads.
Now let’s discuss how to design the most effective campaign Structure
An AdWords account contains:
Campaigns which let you control on your budget, geo-targeting, language, scheduling;
Then you have Ad Groups which let you control on the bids you wish to put on each group of ads.
At the end of the structure you have the ads which can be text, banners or a combination of text and an image. Each ad can redirect to a different page within your site.
A good structure is one that will enable you to optimize and run a/b tests per each of your business important segments and see what works best for your business. It could be different products or categories; different demographics or geographics and different advertising methods that you want to run with.
Keyword Research Requirements
When using the regular static search ads, keywords serve as the trigger for prompting your ads.
You want to balance between the relevancy of the keywords and their price which is determined by their competition.
If you are selling a product that you have named, its name might not be known and searched for; if you are selling a branded product like iphone, that name will cost you.
What you want to do is come up with phrases often called “The Long Tail” which will describe the product properly and lower the cost per click as they will let you avoid competition to some extent.
Make sure not to use too many words in each phrase though, as such phrases might not be searched for too often.
Each keyword can also get a matching type like exact, phrase or broad, and you can also define negative keywords such as “free” in order to sharpen the traffic your ads are displayed to, but that’s a matter of a separate video.
Ads
Let’s talk about your ads.
The typical static text ad has the following limitations:
Headline – up to 25 characters
2 description lines and a Display URL of up to 35 characters each
Normally you will be paying per click on your ads, so what you want to do is balance between getting only targeted potential customers form the one hand, and having a poor click through rate that will increase the cost per click you will need to pay from the other hand. To get the most targeted customers you will want to tie up each ad with the most relevant keywords and landing page for the specific product or service you are offering. You will want to prevent the usage of free offering or anything of that nature which will attract people who are not looking to pay for your offering.
On the other hand you will want to have your ad containing a clear call to action and some numbers, symbols and a capital letter for each word – all meant to increase your click through rate.
Good:
Bad:
Landing pages
Let’s move forward to landing pages
The landing page should be descriptive and enable the user to reach as quick as possible to what he was looking for. If the anything promised at the ad, it should be provided at the landing page or the page after that.
To get a good quality score which is a google parameter that determines your cost per click, you would want to have the most relevant connection between the keyword, the ad and the landing page, so you want to have the ad linking to a landing page that mentions the keyword a couple of times – that is in the right context without pushing it just for google.
Budgets and bids
You need to set budgets for each campaign and bids for each ad group.
Budgets should balance the amount of money you are willing to risk and the number of products or services you are offering and your time to market.
From the one hand you would want to start slowly and ramp it up once you are able to see performance and optimize the campaigns; on the other hand the quicker you need the campaign to work for you, the more offering you wish to promote, the larger budget you will need to risk. As a rule of thumb, I will try to spend the cost of one product you are trying to sell times x2-x3 over the first couple of days. If you can’t get at least that, and optimize from there, I would go back into the initial setup stages.
As for bids, I will provide a way for balancing them shortly, so I would start with anything you feel comfortable with (normally less than the google keyword planner tool suggests), and then increase or decrease according to the method that will be disclosed in a min.
Implementing tracking and reporting codes to enable optimization
One of the most important thing that every campaign has to have is eyes on its performance.
You can implement adwords pixel tracking or Google Analytics code.
If you use Google Analytics, you can link it to your Adwords account or add UTM parameters to each of your ads, but do NOT be like one of the 80% of our clients that don’t track conversion at all!
Getting clicks on AdWords is easy, this is what Google sells. You have to be able to track their performance in order to optimize your campaigns!
Optimization
So, that was setup. Now let’s talk about your daily optimization. I hope you like Excel as much as I do!
Every segment we mentioned in the setup should be monitored and possibly tested.
If you sell in more than one country – which one works well for you and which one should be paused?
Same goes for different categories and products, different ads text or image used and different keywords you set to trigger the ads.
If you have the time, what you want to do is a/b testing for as many segments as you can. For example try different ad text within the same ad group to see which text works better for the same products and keywords.
The ongoing optimization whether done daily or weekly is much more time consuming than the setup, but it is also where you are monitoring your money and making sure that your ROI keeps growing.
Tips for running successful AdWords campaigns by your own
Enough 101, let’s talk business.
The following tips can save 50% of your budget, save A LOT of your time, and turn a losing campaign into a profitable one.
Bid balance
Here is how you find the most effective cost per click bid.
What you want to do is find the balance that lets you spend the budget you have decided to spend (provided of course that the budget is bringing you a positive ROI). Start with any bid. If you didn’t spend your desired daily budget, increase the bid by 10% and wait a day. If you didn’t spend the budget again, increase the bid again. If you have spent the budget, decrease your bid by 5% and check again and the day after that. Keep on doing this as budget and bids are influenced by competition, seasons and other factors, so the right balance today, might not work as good tomorrow.
If you are techie, Google offers scripts you can develop to run this procedure for you.
Dynamic ads
When I was introduced to this feature after many years of working with AdWords, it blew my mind.
This method of running a search campaign on AdWords, let you choose the description lines of your ads, and have Google dynamically decide on who to trigger your ads to, what would be your ad’s headline, and to which page on your site the potential customer will be redirected to.
This is an amazing feature to work with.
What you want to do next, is exclude the search queries that work well for you from the dynamic ads, and add them to a regular static campaign, having Google exploring more keywords for you through the dynamic while you check the bids you are able to achieve when you bid directly on the well performing keywords you extracted from the dynamic ads.
Tips for not doing this by yourself
By this point, you are either thrilled with the new tips (which is great) or frustrated with the amount of work an AdWords account will require. I would like to reach out for those who are a bit frustrated, and say – keep on doing what you love; if what I have said so far didn’t make you thrill about advertising on adwords – outsource it.
There are good agencies that love what they do and do it right. They often charge a $ 1,500 setup fee and ask for a retainer of 3-6 months, but you can get good results. If you want recommendations for such agencies, we will be happy to provide you such.
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