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7 Adwords Tips for Beginners

Are you using Adwords? If not, why not?

Is it because you found it difficult to get started?
Was it too expensive in your market?
Did it take too much time?

What is it holding you back? The majority of my clients use Adwords at least for a few keywords in one of their markets. Several clients use Adwords as their PRIMARY advertising method. This means they’re generating more sales from Adwords than they are from all their free methods…including an affiliate program.

The beauty of Adwords is you’re in control of the traffic you’re sending and you can instantly change direction based on your test results. It’s the perfect test medium.

For example you can get a campaign up and running today on just a few keyword phrases. Within a few hours you’re generating traffic. Within a few days you can see if the visitors are responding to your offer. Want to understand a market before you get involved in it, setup a survey and start generating some visitors through Adwords.

Compare this to “free traffic” such as search engine optimization. It can take weeks to get a good position (on a domain that already has content on it and has been active). And you don’t know if the keyword phrases you’re optimizing for are going to create sales for you.

Instead why not send visitors from Adwords for those keyword terms? Make sure you have their conversion tracking in place on your pages so you know exactly which keyword phrases produce sales.

Then turn around and use keyword phrases you ALREADY KNOW will produce sales to optimize for the search engines. This is a major issue. How many times have you heard people comment that their visitors from the search engines aren’t buying? I’ve heard it dozens of times.

Is it because people who use search engines aren’t buyers? No. Obviously not. It’s simply because the visitors who are finding YOU through the search engines aren’t the right buyers for your site. If you turned SEO on it’s head by first using Adwords to find the right phrases, now you can optimize your site for the phrases which do convert.

The same rule can be applied to content you create on your site. What kind of content will attract buyers to your site? Remember we’re not just after “general traffic.” We want the buyers. Again you run multiple keyword phrases through Adwords to find out which ones produce the buyers. Then concentrate your articles, press releases, and Youtube videos on those items.

If you’re worried about the time it takes on Adwords, then you can always consider handing off the Adwords work to someone else once you’ve gotten the basics down and your campaigns running well.

For example, Glenn Livingston runs a PPC management service. If you qualify for an account with him, I’d highly recommend you hire him asap. I’ve seen the reports from some of his clients and he is accomplishing some major results (increased buying traffic while reducing expenses).

Yet, he doesn’t want everyone. In fact he told me he is specifically looking to help those who are currently spending $5,000 or more per month on PPC. At that price level, he thoroughly confident he can give a strong return on investment quickly for his clients.

And having known him for a couple of years, his primary goal is only working with clients he can honestly help (which is why I feel totally open to recommending him).

If you’re at that level of PPC spend, contact him today. You’ll increase buying traffic, reduce expenses, and have the work done for you by someone else.

In addition, if you work with online entrepreneurs, you may want to consider becoming an affiliate with Glenn as well. I personally find it difficult to find partners who I know care as much about my clients as I do, and Glenn is one of those that fit the bill.

If you’re a business consultant/coach, you likely have clients who are spending that much on PPC (and much of it is wasted as they’re not experts in it). Or if you’re a copywriter, providing additional avenues for advertising can help boost your client’s results and your royalties. If you offer information products to this market as well, you’ll find many of your customers want a done for you service to help them save time while making more money.

You can find out more about his affiliate program here…

But of course, many people simply don’t qualify for Glenn’s service. If you’re just starting out with Adwords, here are 7 quick tips to get you started on the right foot today. Several of these tips I learned directly from Glenn as he has taught me a lot about PPC.

1. Study about PPC

Adwords is a very competitive market which is why many people don’t want to compete there. And there are dozens of products out there promoting how you can get “free Adwords ads” or start making money overnight. You’re much better starting off with good core information.

Two really good books to pick up are:
Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords by Perry Marshall and Bryan Tood
Adwords for Dummies by Howie Jacobson

Both of these books will give you a good, solid foundation to begin using Adwords.

2. Separate Google, Search Networks, and Content Network.

On your very first tests, run your advertising on Google’s network only. This will help you get better information and feedback for what is working there. Then expand out to the other forms available to you.

Setup a separate campaign to run your content ads in. Adwords is currently the largest online advertising network through Adsense. For many people I work with, they’re generate significantly more traffic and sales through the content network than the main Google network. In addition, a couple of them use the content network almost exclusively as they find it more affordable for their market.

If you’re not breaking out your content ads from your Google search campaigns, you’re throwing away money. Your visitors will respond to slightly different ads so make sure you’re testing different kinds of ads on these two versions (remember Google search visitors are looking for the subject while many of your content network visitors have to be stopped in their tracks as they’re reading content on that subject).

In addition Google partners with other search networks. You can advertise on these separately as well (even though Google “requires” you to bid on Google search along with the search partners). To run the search partners separately run another campaign. Put the same keyword phrases in it that you’re already use on a Google search only campaign. Set this new campaign to “Google search” and the “search partners.” Then big slightly lower (even one penny) than you do in your other campaign. Your original campaign will run on Google while this one gets the search partners.

3. Break up keyword phrases into small groups.

Don’t put up large ad groups. Break up your keyword phrases into very small targeted groups. And make sure you’re using the different match types such as “exact match” and “phrase match.”

If you find one phrase is generating a lot of traffic in a group, you should consider “peel and sticking” it over in it’s own group. Let’s say you finding that “cell phone buy” has a large number of buyers and you want to improve your results on that phrase. Pull it out of it’s original group and put it in a group all by itself so you can create a unique landing page for it along with testing ads on that phrase only.

When you do this, don’t forget to add “cell phone buy” as a negative keyword in the original campaign so it isn’t pulling up that phrase also. Anytime you “peel and stick” a strong keyword from a campaign to by itself, it should be added as a negative keyword phrase on the old campaign for best results.

I think what you’re understanding as you go through these tips how profiting on Google is all about “refinement.” You consistently improve your campaigns through better keyword phrases, better matching, targeted landing pages, better ads, etc.

4. Use separate landing pages.

You don’t have one landing page for ALL your keyword phrases, do you? This may work in some markets, but you’re going to find you’re not producing the maximum results you could from better targeting all the way through your marketing.

Google has become much more picky on their landing pages the last few years. They need to have some basic navigation (which I often add at the end of the page). They need to link to good quality content (often this is best by putting up some content pages on the same domain you make links to at the bottom of the page). They also need to be related to the search term you’re advertising on.

Go back to your landing pages and make slight modifications to it based on the keyword terms you’re advertising on. For example you can change the title of the page, the keyword phrase in the headline, and a term or two on the page very easily.

If you survey a market before you enter you, you’ll even find that keyword phrases often produce visitors who are looking for different priorities. If you’ve done your research you can even target the landing page more specifically to what they’re looking for (having different headlines and intros based on their desires at that time). The best way to produce the highest conversion is to meet your visitors where they’re at in their thinking (and they tell you this by what they’re searching for).

5. Review your reports

One of the top tabs on your Adwords management pages is the “Reports” tab. Are you using it? If you’re not, you’re wasting a LOT of money. Regularly go in and create reports of your campaigns. Let’s use an example for a “content network” campaign because there is a ton of refinement you can do on these campaigns through your reports.

A “Placement/Keyword” report that you run on a content network campaign can show you exactly where your visitors, clicks, and conversions are coming from. How does this help you? It means you can target your advertising better. Let’s say you look at this report and you see websites (such as Myspace.com) that have a large number of impressions, but very few clickthroughs and almost no conversions. You can then go back into your campaign and block those pages.

I mentioned Myspace.com because one of my campaigns was taking place a lot in Myspace.com recently. It had low clickthroughs and 0% conversion on the page.

You might find other sites which have an outrageous clickthrough rate and conversion rate. You can then check to see if these sites are available for a placement based campaign targeting them with even larger ads on that site only.

6. Test Multiple Domain Names and URLs.

Test different URLs and domain names on your campaigns. If you already own several domain names on the topic, point them to the same page and run split tested ads to see which one creates a higher clickthrough rate (and onsite conversion). You’d be surprised but I have doubled clickthrough rate on an ad by changing the URL being used.

Don’t have multiple domains and want to test it? You can test two ways here. You can show more of the display URL than just the domain name (test a few different pages on that URL). You can also test different headlines in your Adwords ads as potential URLs (if a specific headline wins by a large margin, but that same phrase as a domain name to use).

7. It takes time to run a successful campaign.

After going through these basics, do you understand why I’ve said before that it takes time to get campaigns up and running successfully? And why many people don’t succeed when they first start off with Adwords? Even when you know what you’re doing and have experience with Adwords, you find that it takes a lot of refinement and improvement to your campaigns to get them producing a maximum return on your investment.

What about those who are succeeding in spite of themselves on Google, because they’re not doing the above? Those are often the ones who can have an immediate improvement by turning their campaigns over to a professional manager who will do the above, plus a whole lot more.

Written by Terry · Filed Under All 

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Comments

4 Responses to “7 Adwords Tips for Beginners”

  1. Alex on November 26th, 2008 7:37 am

    I believe number 3 is the most important part of a successful Adwords campaign.
    Also you didn’t mention the ad copy testing which is also important :)

  2. Danijel on November 29th, 2008 2:28 pm

    What kind of adwords campaign’s do you refer for us to join?
    And is there any copyright issues?

  3. Terry on December 1st, 2008 8:48 am

    Danijel: I’m not sure what you’re asking. I’m sure there could be copyright issues if you copy someone else’s landing page or Adwords ad exactly.

  4. Andrei on December 10th, 2008 3:02 am

    I guess number 5 is important to me that is to review my performance report.That actually can guide you on a making a successful campaign eventually.My advice is in your Adwords campaign try many keywords as possible and check which one is the most converting and which one fails.Stick with the converting ones…

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