Google AdWords is by far the most popular pay-per-click advertising tool available today. However, it is not right for everyone. For a PPC advertising campaign to be called a success, you have to be able to turn a high number of your clicks into sales.
PPC advertising can be cost-effective. However, you need to manage every part of your campaign properly if you are going to get any return on your investment. Not many people will get every thing right first time. Most will need to develop and perfect their campaign over time.
In this article we provide you with 5 tips to get you started, and help you get the most from your Google AdWords advertising budget.
1) Keyword Selection
Good keyword selection is essential to ensure you attract people who are interested in your products and have the potential to become customers. It can be very easy to get carried away and select the most popular keywords recommended by the Google AdWords keyword tool. However, keywords with the highest number of clicks are not always the best keywords to target.
Remember high volumes of traffic are not your main goal. A successful advertising campaign is based on bringing quality traffic to your website that has the potential to turn into sales. Your ultimate aim is to achieve a good level of sales with a positive return-on-investment (ROI).
To help keep track of the performance of your ad campaigns it is useful to manage your selected keywords in multiple ad groups of related phrases. This will also help you to include ad copy that is specific to each keyword.
2) Where To Target Your Ad's
When starting a new AdWords campaign, generally it is best to target the search network. This means your ads will appear on the Google search engine and its network of partner websites.
Once your campaigns are running at a profit on the search network, you have the option of also advertising on Googles display network. This includes the millions of websites that publish AdSense ads.
Clicks from the display network can normally be attained at a lower cost-per-click (CPC). However, in general visitors do not convert into sales as well as from the search network. There is also a higher chance of fraudulent clicks on your ads.
The Display Network is normally a good option if your main objective is to promote your brand in the hope of obtaining a sale later as opposed to converting sales directly from a click on the ad.
It is also important to define the geographic locations you are targeting from which you hope to produce sales. If you are a business which only delivers within the UK there is no need to advertise your website outside of the UK. Doing so would be a waste of a large proportion of your clicks.
If you are a business that trades locally, then you may want to limit your ads visibility to a city or region. For example, a taxi company in the Oxfordshire region would only want to advertise to users within the areas they pickup from.
If you are targeting a large geographic area, then it can be advantageous to divide the region into logical areas and create individual ad groups or campaigns for each. This way sales can be tracked in each region and you can easily see which are profitable, those that need work, or any that should be dropped.
3) Reviewing your competitors
Decide what makes your company stand out from your competitors then use this in your ads. If your ad can stand out from the rest, it is more likely to be clicked. One way to achieve this is to include a price in your ads. However, you should only use this technique if your price is lower than your competitors.
4) Landing Pages
The Google AdWords algorithm now reviews the quality of your landing pages. It is therefore more important than ever to ensure you send people that click on your ads to a landing page that is relevant to the keyword that triggered your ad.
It is also important to make sure that people are directed to the webpage they expect to see, rather than being taken to the homepage and having to find the right page for themselves.
5) Managing your budget
Start by setting a high daily budget, but target a small number of keywords and monitor your account closely. You do not want AdWords constraining how often your ads are shown due to an insufficient budget. This will reduce your CTR, which could have a devastating effect on your QS as you have not built up any history for your keywords yet.
However, you also want to ensure you are bidding on the right keywords at a cost-effective price without losing too much money. Track your conversions and return-on-investment (ROI). Once you can show a profit, think about increasing your daily budget and adding more keywords.