AdWords for Dummies  Smart Business Owners

What have you done for yourself lately?  You have business objectives……You have a website.  Hopefully you even have an ad budget. If you don’t, you need one.

It’s time to put your money to work for you.

Understand now that your dollars are going to get funneled into a structured system, and that their utility will be determined primarily by the skill of the person (or robot) managing the account. What does this system look like?

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Maybe all you have right now is your advertising budget. Let’s say it’s $500. How does that money get used?

It will first get divided by the amount of campaigns in the account. If there are two, each one will have a $250 monthly budget. Then we must calculate an average daily spend; in this scenario, it will be approximately $8 per day.

So there’s $16 per day to send your message out into the world. That’s not very much money for nearly any vertical, so you will have to decide how to maximize their potential. If you are paying per click, and there is an average cost per click of—let’s say $2.00—you may hope to gain a meager 8 clicks per day. We want, no need those 8 clicks to count! We want to convert these visitors by having them perform some action on your site that you care about.

How do we increase the chances of conversion in AdWords before the user even arrives at your site? I will break it down in three essential points.

#1 – Relevance

The organization of your AdWords account is of the utmost importance. Let’s presume for these examples that you are a company selling pasta online. Maybe you sell sauces and noodles. Your “conversion” is an eCommerce transaction – you hope to drive sales through your website. How can you set yourself up for success?

Checklist For Success

  • Create a campaign for noodles and a campaign for sauce
  • Create ad groups in the noodles campaign – types of noodles
  • Create ad groups in the sauce campaign – types of sauce
  • Choose keywords for each ad group with extremely similar search intent and semantic relatedness
  • Write ads that include the idea expressed by the groups of words, have a strong call to action, and tell the audience what they can expect when they show up on your landing page

 

#2 – Quality

In AdWords, quality score is based on an algorithm with nearly a dozen acting variables. In real life terms, this is how Google decides how valuable your intended answer (via an ad) is for people searching the keywords you are bidding on. There are ways to manipulate when you will show up (negative keyword lists and match types) and where you will show up (device types, networks, etc). Quality is also determined by historical performance, which stresses the necessity of constant testing and improvement: don’t set it and forget it when it comes to your AdWords account, and don’t accept that from a vendor. Finally, make sure your ads are going to the absolute best page on your website in terms of relatedness to the ad itself.
It is my belief that the ideal website would create a path to desired conversion from any page, not just a specialized campaign landing page. What I mean is that the content to create the relevance onsite should coexist with the path to conversion naturally!

 

#3 – Targeting

You will see that these tenets have overlapping implications, but in this section I would like to mention the importance of campaign setting selection. Your $500 would be virtually wasted by targeting an entire nation or maybe even Nielsen DMA region. Instead, choose to be a BIG fish in a SMALL pond. There are robust geo-targeting options available in AdWords – by ZIP code, radius, or township. Take advantage of them!

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In addition, perhaps your “desired action” only applies to a certain crowd. While they are often approximations based on data Google has obtained, demographic targeting can help. Furthermore, maybe you want to send a special offer out to users on mobile phones within 5 miles of your brick and mortar shop for a lunch special between 9 AM and 3 PM. You can do that! Remember these available targeting options:

  •       Device
  •       Network
  •       Age
  •       Gender
  •       Location
  •       Language
  •       Time of Day

If you are managing your own AdWords accounts, these tips should help you instantly improve your account. If you are partnered with an agency, they should help you communicate your needs and get the most out of your ad budget! When properly deployed, AdWords can prove one of the most valuable tools in digital marketing for sending extremely qualified, converting traffic right where you want it to go – How does that sound for improving your bottom line?

Meet Launch Digital Marketing

Launch Digital Marketing is a Chicago based digital marketing agency specializing in helping businesses grow their online and web presence.