Google AdWords is the best tool to make themselves known on internet. All company that want develop their business on internet needs visibility. This software permit you to broadcast your ads on the display network of google (Partners included). You don’t need to have a lot of experience in web marketing to create your own account. It’s easy to use for beginners and this intuitive sofware guides you for every steps from creation to optimization of your account.Google AdWords is the best tool for extending you business worldwide. This Blog is dedicated to teach you basic of AdWords. I will help you understand how AdWords works and how to use that it is optimized for your business.
The next sections talk about different topics Following :
How to set up your account
How to set up your first campaign
The difference between a campaign and an ad group
How daily budgets work
How ads are ranked
How to optimise your campaigns
First, go to https://adwords.google.com/ to create your own account !
That’s it ! Your account is created. Now you have explore all tabs to know utility of each one. There is 6 different tabs as you can see : Home, Campaigns, Opportunities, Tools and Analysis, Billing, My account.
The tab “Home” show you the performance of each campaign you have created.
In the section “campaign”, you can create and edit campaigns, ads, keywords, campaign settings.
“Opportunities” is useful to find keyword, bid and budget ideas to improve you campaign performance.
“Tools and analysis” permit you to manage and improve your account with reports, statistics such as Google Analytics.
The “billing” part is dedicated when you have to start your campaign. When you launch your campaign, you need to put money in your account. You can also choose the method of payment.
After that, you should go to the section “My Account” for setting up parameters such as Currency and Time Zone. When you select your currency, be careful because your choice affect also the currency of your bills. For the time zone, select the best 24 hours schedule for you. Normally, the cycle should end at the end of your day. Your daily budget is affected by this cycle. For example if you live in France and you put the English Time Zone, the day will start 1 hour before and the same for the end of the day.
Google AdWords is a professional software, that’s why when you set up your password it’s better to use a strong password.
Now you are able to create your first AdWords Campaign !
Select “create my first campaign”, then choose your ad campaign’s settings. When you choose settings, remember all the time what your customers are expecting about your business. Write your first ad relative to a specific product.For example : if you sell shoes and t-shirt, you have to create to separate ads group. More precisely, for each ads group you can also separate your ads in different type. For example : Sports shoes, Leather shoes, Ladies shoes… After, select keywords for each ads. Think relative to the search of customers (what customers write on the search bar ?) to reach the right people. Keywords must contain 3 terms maximum to be efficient.
Picturing your customers is one of the main things to do for being sure that your ads work. The best tip is to create a mental profile about customers preferences and behavior.
– Words and Phrases : Which words or expressions customers usually are putting into the search bar ?
– Favorite Website : Who are your competitor ? Where your customers go for buying your products if they don’t go on your website ?
– Geographical Location : Choose carefully the location for your business, it depends if you want to do business locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. For example : my business is a bakery, normally i prefer to target locally and regionally. if I’m the best baker in my country, I could expand my business at national and international level.
– Email or Call (phone number): What customers use to contact you ? Put in your ads your phone numbers if it’s the best way to contact you…
– Select how much you are willing to pay in “Bidding and Budget” / Create your ad with number phone, map, email / Choose where you want that your ads to appear : Geographical location, languages, websites
– Click Save and Continue
Create your ads
– Create an ad : Select text and headline to best describe your product or service.
– Put the URL of destination and the Display URL (URL is the link who permit customers to access to your website, in the right page, directly related to your product or service in your ad)
– Keywords : Put a list of 10 to 20 keywords for each ad that you’ve created
– Save and Continue to billing
Now you are on the good way to become a professional of AdWords ! Be patient, You are not too far from your objective = Grow your company and increase your turnover !!
As you can see, the structure of a campaign is very simple.
Campaign : you have to put the product or the service that you provide to customers. The advantage of segmentation of your campaign is to analyze separately performances of each campaign for each “family of product”. This picture show you two types of furniture but we can imagine to add Garden furniture or kitchen furniture.
Ad Group : it’s represents the subcategory of the campaign. You have to accurate more details about products or services. Add the different type of products of the range. the proper term is the width of the range. As you can see for Campaign “Tables” there is 2 products, “Coffee Tables” and “Bedside Tables”. If you have more models of tables, create an other AdGroup.
Ads : Your ads appears on the Google Display Network on the right side and also above organic research. this could be your ads that display on this page, take example of well-known companies to create your ads if you have difficulties. The position of your ads depends of quality score that google give you. It’s a rank between 1 and 10, more your quality score is high, less you will pay for your ads. Look at the lesson about quality score to learn more about it.
You learn more and more… You are just annoying. Next time, it will be you who will give me the lesson… 😛
What is a daily budget ? It’s an amount that you set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you’d like to spend each day. Then you can set an average budget for each AdWords campaign, the system will display you ads as much as possible until your budget is over. Typically, when your budget is reached, Google stops the display of your ads. To control expenses, you can set option in “Ad delivery Option”, you select the display speed of your ads.
Your daily budget may be exceed of 20%, we call that the “Over-delivery”, but occasionally it may be less important. For 1 month, you will always pay 30,4 days that’s means 30,4 times your daily budget, never more.
It’s important to anticipate your daily budget according to your performance. You must also anticipate it by checking your campaign performance, the cost of your campaign. And adjust the daily budget if you think it’s could be relevant for your performances.
In each page of Google search, you can see ads above organic search and on the right side. The ads on the top rank are 3 and they are above the organic search on a background color. The others are on the right side and can be 8 on maximum. So you have 11 rank on each Google page. Being the first position has real advantage because you benefit of more visibility.
People use Google for speed of research and also for the relevance of their query. Google try to provide them the best relevance. More relevant your ads are, more people click on it. Google AdWords have created a measurement for that, called “Quality score”. It means when your quality score is high, you have a better Ad rank and your Cost per Click is decreased significantly.
For better understanding, the Quality Score is an estimation of relevance of your ads, keywords and landing page for a specific query. In fact your Score increase if the person who clicks on your ads finds what he is searching for directly.
You can check your Quality Score by looking within your Keywords tab. There are a couple ways to check your Quality Score, as shown below.
Run a keyword diagnosis:
Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
Select the Keywords tab.
Click the white speech bubble next to any keyword’s status to see details about that keyword’s Quality Score. You’ll be able to see ratings for expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience.
Another way to see your Quality Score is to enable the Qual. score column:
Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
Select the Keywords tab.
Look for the Qual. score column in the statistics table. If you don’t see this column in your table, you can add this column by doing the following:
Click the Columns drop-down in the toolbar above the statistics table.
Select Customize columns.
Select Attributes.
Click Add next to Qual. score.
Click Save.
Each Keywords are ranked in a scale from 1 to 10. Google AdWords recalculates your Quality Score each time you are eligible for an Ad auction. Ad Auction is the competition to appear on a Google page, more you are often choose to appear on Google page, more your Quality Score will be high. When a customer triggers your ads, Google recalculates immediately your Quality Score.
How is it possible improving Quality Score ?
Look at different following data :
– Click-Through (CTR) Rate of your keywords : How often the keyword has triggered a click on your ads ?
– CTR of your Display URL : How often your URL triggers a click?
– Account History : CTR Ads + CTR Keywords
– Quality of your Landing Page : You have to watch the second video on this lesson
Relevance (Useful and original content), Transparent (Separate sponsors and ads, contact information, describes your business), easy to navigate
– The relevance of your selected keywords from your ads
– The relevance of your keywords selected from the research of your customers
– Geographical Performance : What are your performance in the regions you have targeted?
– Ads performance on a site : (If you put Ads on the Display Network = Website affiliated to Google)
– Your Targeted Devices : What are the performance in each devices ? (Laptop/Desktop, Mobile, Tablets)
If you respect the most part of these advises, your Quality Score should approach 10. Your eligibility for ad auction will increase, your Cost per Click (CPC) will decrease. You have also more chance to be on the first Google research page and in the top of the page. To conclude, your Ad position will be better and you will pay less, it’s a GOOOOOD DEAL !
You have finished the basic lessons soon, continue like that !!
Optimizing your account means that you have to organize perfectly your campaigns. There is some tips very useful to improve the quality of your account and then the performance. Look at these following tips below :
1- Create a successful text ads : You have to check if the ad contains the name of the product, the price and also if you do promotions.
2- Put on each ad some “Action Verbs” such as “Sign up now” or “Buy Now” … Thereby, the customer know immediately what he has to do.
3- Include one of your most performing keywords in the ad text, customers will find you easily in that way.
4- Check the destination URL, the page where your customers will land. If you sell “Women sports shoes”, check that destination URL is a page where there is only this type of product.
You can also improve your keywords by checking the performance of each one. the low-performing keywords have to be remove or modify to improve your Quality Score. Don’t use “General terms” to describe your keywords such as Shoes, take specific keywords like “Women Sports Shoes”.
What is the “Return On Investment” (ROI) ? Think about how much did you spent in your campaigns and how much did you earn ? So after that you can determine if you loose money or the contrary. The aim for a business is to earn money so you have to improve your conversion potential. A conversion is what are you expecting of a customer that click on your ads. Maybe for you it’s could be the registration, subscription or buying of something on your website… Use keywords highly relevant will help you target the right customer and then make more conversions. The best way is to increase bids for best keywords which are profitable and the contrary for the others non profitable.
The main thing is to understand the relation of costs. more your quality score is high, less you pay by click and more your Ad Position will improve. The best is to experiment bids on each keywords and then adapting your strategy to the most profitable way of succeeding your conversion goals.
As you can see, a good organization of your account is very important. This should help you to target ads on the right customers and reach more advertising goals. With a good organization you can also create more conversions and improve traffic on your website. For that, manage your campaigns carefully, control your budget and your costs, search specific keywords and don’t forget to check the evolution of keyword performance.
Google AdWords is your friend, it has created tools to permit you to improve your account. Look the section “Opportunities” in your account, this part give you suggestions about keywords, budget and bids. After checking the potential impact of suggestions, you can apply changes directly on those that you seem good for you.
There are an other tool called “Conversion Tracking” where it’s possible to know how many people are actually buying or signs up in your website after landing. Sometimes you have a good traffic but not a good conversion rate. You should create some negative keywords and also should improve your keywords to be more specific. Negative Keyword : You target women because your website is only dedicated for girls. So you can add negative keywords such as “Boy”, “Men”, “Man”… This will prevent wrong clients to go on your site and thus increasing your conversion rate..
If you have any questions, let your comments on this page. It will be a pleasure for me to resolve your problems !! : )
In this lesson, we gonna learn together the basics of budget strategy.
What is the difference between traditional advertising campaign and online campaigns ?
The use of online campaign to promote a good or a service is much better for beginners. Why ? It’s easy for measuring performance and also control expenses. In addition, the time between initial investment and return is shorter. Google AdWords is flexible, you can change at any moment your budget. You must adapt your budget based on performance. More you gain, much you budget must be high.
When your campaign doesn’t work such as you wish, you have to isolate part of your campaign and remove it, if necessary.
When you’ve reach more customers, you are more profitable. That’s why it’s important for you to put more money for advertising. I can advice you to define a scale of budget in order to prevent evolution of traffic on your website. Sometimes, there is more customers that you had expected, you could loose a lot of money if you miss them. If there is less traffic, it’s not important because you don’t pay more.
For Example : You have a daily budget of 100$, you can put a scale between 100$ and 150$. The traffic is very flexible, then be careful because you miss many customers. At the contrary, you mustn’t put 1000$ because you are not protected against traffic sudden shift. Test each time by increasing a little bit to be sure that your settings are not harmful for you.
This strategy is not for every company read the following informations below :
Scale by performance is a good budget strategy for :
– Selling goods or services
– Sales team (generating leads)
– Subscription (signs-up)
Make this strategy only if :
– You are able to do an estimation of your conversion value (difference between the costs of advertising and revenues)
– You know, the time having your profits available to reinvest
– your Cost for serving new customers decreased
It is preferable not to do this strategy if you have cash flow limitations, sales tracking limitations or customers services limitations.
We have the same goal for our online advertising campaigns, its growth. It means that we are searching for profitability. There are 3 stages for an Adwords Campaign : Testing, Growth and Maturity
How to manage this 3 stages ?
1- Testing : After comparing performance data, you can test new keywords, CPC bids or Ad Combination. Don’t forget to compare costs and revenues to remain profitable.
For Example : If one keyword doesn’t work, remove it and create a new one.
2- Growth : When you have reached more customers, increase your Daily Budget, adjust CPC, remove non-performing keywords and ads. Go to “Budget” to know more about that. Google AdWords will give you a recommended budget to help you.
3- Maturity : Check that you are really profitable ! Now your budget is high enough to appear all the time, then don’t miss an eligible impression. You have to check also Costs, Profits and sales. All of these data must have a regular fluctuations based in search volume.
The most important in the bidding strategy is to balance sales volume and profitability. That’s means you need to focus on one objective to be efficient. In general, the conversion rate don’t vary much with Ad Position.
For example : Your ad at the 7th position has generated more conversions than the ad in the top 3. Maybe is better to focus on most profitable ads before others.
Here are the different relationships related to the strategy of bidding :
– If you increase your bids : You will have more conversions but the average Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) will be higher.
– If you decrease your bids : You will have less conversions but the average Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) will be lower.
– If you increase your bids (with a limited Daily Budget) : You will have less conversions and you Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) will be higher.
What is CPA ? It’s an online advertising pricing model. This is the amount you pay for each conversion of a client. Conversions are linked to Purchases, Subscriptions, and to the research of new lead… this is an average, then the CPA can change based on your bids. More you pay for bid, more your CPA is high.
How to calculate your CPA ?
CPA = Ad Campaign Cost / (Number of Impressions * CTR* CR)
CTR = Click-through rate CR = Customers
Example : You pay a campaign CPM (Cost per mille) of 5$. For 3000 impressions, you receive 5% of CTR to the landing page. There is 30% of those 5% who buy something on your website.
Each time a customer bought something, your cost is 0,33$.
As i told you before, the best is to focus on one objective. Goals could be very different and sometimes contradictory for your business. Generally goals are not mutually compatible. It’s important to think about your most important goal, you have to do tradeoffs.
Example of a campaign with these objectives :
– Aim Ad Position 1-3
– Maximize Profit
– Maximize Conversions
– Maximize Clicks
If you think only about the 3 highest ranked, it’s could be not a good solution. Perhaps the 7th position is more profitable.
– Keep a CPA below 10$
The CPC bids necessary to keep CPA below 10$ may be lower than the CPC bids than maximize your profit, clicks or preferred Ad Position.
You can see the conflict between this two different objectives. Choosing one of them is the best way to succeed.
That’s all for this lesson,
But i would like to thank several people, more precisely the first followers of my blog.
THANK YOU VERY MUCH TO : Jaytheanalyst, Tash Tomas, Jenn, Kylie Bannink, Rickywrightseo, Henry Brady and Ed Kirwan.
Don’t hesitate to send me an email at “lamirse@hotmail.fr” if you have any suggestions 😛
AdWords Lessons 