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It’s very easy to open a Google Adwords account, create a new campaign and start bidding on some keywords. Is it really that simple to promote your website? No, and if you think you can simply get money by bidding on some hot keywords, you are highly likely wasting money on your PPC campaign.
You might argue that you increased the website’s brand awareness on the search engines and gained a decent amount of traffic to the site. But did you get real benefits from these impressions and traffic? If you haven’t, that’s not a successful PPC campaign.
So what is the right way to use Google Adwords PPC to promote your website? Let’s start from scratch.
Keyword targeting
It’s always a difficult thing to know what people are searching for, here are some tips
- Brainstorm some generic keyword terms with your colleagues.
- Ask your friends (who are not experts in your field) what terms will they search to find your service or product.
- Use tools such as Google insights and wordtracker.
- Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool, but don’t rely on it.
- Set up advanced filters in Google Analytics to track what your visitors are exactly searching for
- Don’t forget synonyms, singular and plural, common misspelling...etc
Now you have a list of keywords, it’s the time to refine the.
- Delete those highly competitive one-word terms, especially if you don’t have huge amount of budget to spend. It’s not a mystery that one-term keywords have lower conversion rate comparing to two, three and four word terms. Imaging you are looking for a PPC agency, what will you search? “PPC” or “PPC agency” or even “professional PPC agency in London”?
- Think about whether this keyword is informational or transactional. Informational keywords are the ones that visitors search when they want to gather more information, for example, “pay per click tips”. Transactional keywords are more likely to make conversions, such as, “best pay per click agency in London”. Typical searchers type transactional queries late in the buying cycle, therefore transactional terms are more likely to give you quick wins.
Negative keywords
Negative keywords are crucial for a successful PPC campaign, the reason is simple, it can filter out many unnecessary keywords.
For instance, a London PPC agency is bidding on a phrase-match term “PPC agency”. Then imagine below circumstances
- Someone is looking for a PPC job, so he types in “PPC agency jobs”
- Someone who wants to know a list of bad PPC agencies in London, so he types in “bad PPC agencies in London”
- Someone is looking for a PPC agency in Birmingham, so he types in “PPC agency Birmingham”
- …etc
All these unnecessary keyword terms will trigger your ads, and these visitors are nearly impossible to be converted to your customers.
So think about what types of search queries you don’t want to get your ads triggered, then put them in negatives keywords list. E.g. free, sucks, how, bad…etc
Keywords grouping
How often do you throw dozens of keywords into one ad group? This is bad! The less keywords in an ad group, the more opportunities they can be written in the ad copy.
Take an example, “PPC agency” and “pay per click agency”. They are exactly the same thing right? But when you have both of them in one ad group, how would you write the ad copy? Use either of them or both of them? If you use “PPC”, then “Pay per click” will not be highlighted and it’s not consistent to have two versions of one word in one ad copy.
By having separate ad groups for “PPC agency” and “pay per click agency”, higher click through rate is likely to be achieved because in each ad “PPC” or “pay per click” will be highlighted twice. Also, keywords and ad copy will be more relevant. Therefore, you will reduce cost per click of the keyword because higher click through rate + more relevancy = higher quality score = lower cost per click.
I personally recommend having no more than 15 keywords in one ad group and make sure they are highly relevant.
Keyword matching type
Google adwords provides four matching types
- Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
- Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
- Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
- Negative match: Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term
Can you believe more than half of Adwords advertisers use Broad match? It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, maybe you are using Broad match too!
It’s extremely hard to control what search queries will trigger your ads, and often, these search queries are not even relevant to your targeted keywords. (Google may still feel they are relevant though) The consequence is that your ads been triggered so many times but only got few clicks in, low click through rate is a strong signal to tell Google to lower your quality score, i.e. higher cost per click.
I highly recommend using phrase match and exact match, as they can only be triggered by highly targeted audience.
Ad copy writing
How can you perfectly describe your service or product within total of 95 characters? (Title:25 + Description:35x2) It requires wisdom to write such attractive and descriptive ads, and it’s critical to determine if your ad campaign is successful or not.
Here are some great tips to help you write a compelling ad
- Use numbers, something like “Our customers have at least 25% revenue increased” is a strong signal to convince visitors to click through
- If you have a fixed price, write it in the ad copy, because most of the visitors who cannot afford the price will not click in
- Use trademark, it looks official and trustworthy
- Include most profitable keywords in the title and don’t be afraid to repeat it in description
- Create multiple ad copies with different concept and test them, you never know which ad will work better unless you’ve tested them
- Stand out from the crowd, if all your competitors have similar ad copies, write something very unique and different
- Include “call to action”, such as “buy it now”, but don’t write down your telephone number.
…etc
It takes time and effort to find a better performing ad copy, so please never stop testing.
Quality score
Quality score is a crucial factor to determine how much you will pay for bidding on a keyword. The key to rank high in Google sponsor list with low cost per click is having a decent quality score for that keyword.
Here is a video introducing how Google calculates quality score.
And here is ultimate quality score guide conducted by redflymarketing
Landing page
No matter how great your ad campaign performance is, if your landing page is terrible, you won’t get many conversions.
You don’t have to stick keywords in the landing page or have super long content to convince Google. Google Adwords algorithm is no way near Google organic listing algorithm, landing page optimisation is very important for real conversions but less important for Google to determine your ad quality.
Landing page optimisation is another large topic to talk about, so I will mention some basics here, if you are interested in advanced landing page optimisation, please view conversion rate expert.
- Have clear call-to-action on the page
- Have multiple media to increase attractiveness, such as images and videos
- Have testimonials to convince potential customers
- If you are an e-commerce site, develop a rating system for customers to rate and leave comments, this is crucial for long term success
- Use Google Website Optimiser to conduct A/B split test or multivariate test to improve conversion rate
Campaign refining
Monitor your campaign closely, don’t be afraid of testing and never stop testing.
There are many websites for you to learn pay per click (PPC), if you are interested in doing it yourself, please visit:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/?hl=en
http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/
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