Win with Google AdWords - Part 1

Part 1

Most businesses want a cost-effective way to bring in more customers. The challenge is to find prospects who are thinking about your products at the exact time that you reach them.

With the advent of Google AdWords, it is now possible to target prospects at the very moment they are thinking about buying your products or services. If someone does a Google search on digital cameras, they only see ads for digital cameras. If someone does a search on organically grown coffee beans, they only see ads for organically grown coffee. Google AdWords enables you to implement precisely targeted advertising.

With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide your business with a steady stream of revenue.

What is Google AdWords?
Open up a Web browser and go to the Google website. Type in the search term coffee and click search. Essentially, two types of search results come up: on the left and below are the organic search results that nobody has sponsored. On the right side of your browser window and sometimes above the organic results are the Sponsored Links. The Sponsored Links are paid advertisements. Sponsored links are always identified as such by the heading Sponsored Links.

As participants in this automated auction, each of these advertisers is bidding for the keyword coffee. They only pay if someone is interested enough to click on the advertisement; if nobody clicks on the ad, the cost is zero. The higher the advertiser bids on a keyword, the higher in the rankings the ad appears and the more likely web searchers will see it. Ranking means visibility, though you do not have to be at the top of the rankings or bid the highest amount for prospects to see your ad and click on it. Your goal is to get the lowest Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and the highest quality clicks (sales and leads) for your budget.

Find your Niche
Sometimes with popular keywords (e.g., coffee) there are many companies competing. On the other hand, popular keywords get millions of searches so there might be enough clicks to go around. The only way to find out if a particular keyword will work for you is to try it. The problem is that many other advertisers are bidding for the popular keywords so your CPC is likely to be high. You are more likely to get a low CPC with more obscure, highly targeted keywords. It will take some thought to come up with the right keywords.

Our coffee roaster would probably want to try the keyword coffee, and watch it like a hawk as it could result in many low quality clicks (not many conversions to leads or sales). If a keyword does not produce high quality clicks after a reasonable trial period (a couple weeks), then remove it; it may even be obvious sooner that a particular keyword is costing money but not producing results.

Perhaps our coffee roaster sells shade-grown coffee that protects Central American songbird habitat. While far less people are searching for shade grown coffee than just coffee, it is likely to yield a lower CPC and higher quality clicks.

Getting Started
The first thing you need to get started with AdWords is a goal. Is your goal to make direct sales via e-commerce on your website? Is your goal to capture sales leads that you can follow-up with and make the sale? Alternatively, is your goal a combination of both of these outcomes? Once you have determined a goal you need a website that helps you achieve that goal.

Your website should be eye-catching and well organized, and include landing pages for your products or services. To see some examples of landing pages, do a search for your services, and look at what other companies in your market are doing. The landing page can be your main website if your website tightly focuses on one product or service you are advertising (e.g., this permission-based email marketing website). Otherwise, the landing page should be a page within your larger website that focuses on the specific product or service you are advertising.

If you want sales leads, then your site should include a call to action to persuade people to request more information. The way they submit a lead is to click on a link to a lead capture form. You need a form that at a minimum sends you—or the appropriate sales staff—an email but ideally should also create a lead for you in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system such as SalesForce or SugarCRM.
Whether you are selling directly from your website or capturing leads, your website should always have obvious ways to contact you using whatever method the prospect feels most comfortable using: a contact form, email, or telephone. Some company websites make it hard to figure out how to contact them for more information.

It is important to have a number of people – both inside and outside of your company – test your website for usability and ease of use. Prospects should never have to wonder how to buy from you or how to contact you to ask a question about your products or services.

Sign-up for Google AdWords
Once you have a goal, website, and landing page, you are ready to sign up for Google Adwords Learn by doing. It is easier to write the advertisement and select keywords using the tools that Google provides during the sign up process. In addition, some Web hosting providers have collaborated with Google, and can offer you a free AdWords coupon to get you started.

If you plan to spend at least $30/day on AdWords, Google offers a JumpStart program to help you get started using AdWords. Google JumpStart specialists will help you create a campaign. The cost of the program is $299 but Google will apply that as a credit toward the cost of your initial clicks. Not having used JumpStart myself, I cannot vouch for its quality though Google generally offers high quality services.

Campaigns and Ad Groups
The Campaign level is where you set your daily budget, language targeting, location targeting, ad distribution preferences, and the start and end dates for your campaigns (if applicable).

The Ad Group level is where enter your keywords and the advertisements themselves. Each Ad Group has one or more ads. Write at least two ads for each ad group so you can try different approaches and compare the results.

In my experience, it has been beneficial to create multiple campaigns so I can experiment with different parameters and compare the results. Campaigns that work well I keep; campaigns that do not work well, I delete.

Targeting
Choose the language you want to target, and then the countries or territories. This requires some thought. Can you offer your product or service globally, in just the United States, or in just your city or region? You can target your campaign to the world or to specific countries, regions, states, or cities.

For even more precise targeting, you can even target your campaign to a certain number of miles from your business or even an area bounded by coordinates.

Google Analytics
In the fictional advertisement examples I gave, you may have noticed the codes in the destination URL’s: “coff1” and “coff2”. These are tracking codes that facilitate the tracking of a wealth of information by Google Analytics.

Google Analytics, which Google integrated with AdWords, is a very powerful service for tracking the success of both your organic and paid search results for your website. It will help you better understand your website visitors experience in detail. In addition, you can learn what keywords bring in the best prospects, and which of your campaigns are delivering the best return on investment. You can use Google Analytics to track marketing campaigns other than AdWords as well.

Google Analytics is too big a topic to cover much here but I will devote a future article entirely to this powerful marketing tracking service.

This article is continued in Part 2 here

by Neil Anuskiewicz - www.ezpublishing.com

About the Author
Neil Anuskiewicz is the Marketing Manager for EZ Publishing. The firm specializes in helping businesses harness the power of the Internet for marketing and to automate business processes.

Neil has been in the Internet technology industry for 10 years. He has a passion for learning, and reads two business books each month. He also enjoys writing useful articles for small business people.
Please email questions or comments to Neil at articles@ezpublishing.com.