Web Design Essex

In part two of this guide to using Google Adwords PPC advertising, we're looking at what goes into an Adwords campaign. In later parts we'll look in detail at keyword research, ad writing & more.

The scope of Adwords is always expanding as they develop new features, but instead of going through all the options available, we'll just look at what we know will work, right now - a well structured pay-per-click advertising campaign.

So What Goes Into An Adwords Campaign?

Daily Budget
The first thing we must do is choose how much we wish to spend per day on PPC advertising. This daily budget is the maximum value we will spend, and our adverts will stop displaying once this maximum is reached. We can obviously set this as high as budget will allow, though when we first experiment with a new campaign it can be sensible to 'start small'.

Adgroups
Every campaign you set up is divided into Adgroups, which are a selection of keyphrases that trigger identical adverts. By using these Adgroups intelligently, we can increase the relevance of our ads, resulting in higher positions, and cheaper clicks.

For example:

John's Games Ltd, our wooden toy retailer for part one, will sell a range of products. There is no point displaying an advert for Wooden Horses, when a searcher is looking for a 'wooden train set', so we group our keywords into related sets.

There is much more we can do with Adgroups & keywords to further increase our relevance & clickthrough rates, so we'll return to this topic later in the guide.

Landing Pages
When we set up your Adgroups, the adverts we create will take our potential customer to a certain page we've set up. Using the right landing page can be vitally important in converting those clicks into sales. If John, from the exmaple above, wants his Wooden Horses to sell well using the PPC traffic, he's much better off pointing those ads to the relevant section of his website, or perhaps a specific product that is well priced & relevant.

Keyword Matching
As we've already seen, keyword grouping is important, but also of great importance is Adwords 'keyword matching' facility. For example, if we bid on 'wooden horse' using exact matching, our ads would only for that exact search phrase, whereas using phrase matching means our advertising would show for any search contanting that phrase - e.g. 'wooden horse toy'.

Broad matching will return the advert for search terms containing your words, even when there are different words in between, or the words differ in order. For example, broad matching for 'wooden horse' would return results for 'wooden toy horse', 'wooden rocking horse', and so on. When using this option, Adwords will also generate words it thinks are relevant, and use them for our ads.

Writing Ads
Once we've chosen our keywords, and put them into Adgroups, it's time to try writing some ads. The tough part is balancing the desire to catch the attention of the searcher, and the desire to ensure that searcher actually wants to buy our product or service. If John, our toy retailer, writes an advert with the headline 'Dirt Cheap Wooden Toys', he's likely to get a lot of clicks - but if his wooden toys are actually reasonably expensive, he's unlikely to get many sales.

We'll look at good advert writing in more detail later in this guide.

Bids
The last piece of the puzzle is deciding our bids. If we already generate traffic from other sources, we'll have a rough idea of our conversion rate, however with no history you may struggle to work out what you can afford per click. In this situation trial & error is the order of the day, and with adequate tracking we can quickly determine the value of a click.

Click value also determines where your ad will appear, so it is good to experiement with different click prices to see what difference each position makes on traffic received, and whether it's worth paying the extra. It's also always sensible to keep in mind that when our daily budget is spent, our ads are gone for that day.

Your bids can be adjusted per Adgroup, or by specific keyword. In general, it's best to use a mixture of the two.

That's it for this part of the guide, in the next part we'll talk about keyword research, and writing killer PPC ads - which is a different beast to traditional advert copywriting!

---

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

Comment	smaller | bigger
Name
Email
Website
Write the displayed characters
Subscribe via email (Registered users only)
	Add Comment