The basic building blocks of every Google AdWords campaign are ad groups and keywords – but do you know how to plan, set-up, and optimize these key components of your online advertising strategy?
In an age where every business needs a streamlined, consumer-facing online platform and a mobile presence, where advertising has gone digital and search engine marketing (SEM) is all the rage, you know you need to keep up. If you are looking to learn how to manage a Google AdWords campaign for your business, a good starting place is to understand keywords and ad groups, and how to use them in measuring your online marketing efforts.
Getting Started
Google AdWords operates on the basis of PPC advertising, which stands for pay-per-click advertising and is sometimes referred to as cost-per-click advertising. It refers to a model where the advertiser and the publisher (usually a website or blog owner, or in this case, Google) agree beforehand how much each click is worth, then the advertiser pays the publisher that amount each time a consumer clicks the ad. That way, unlike traditional advertising which requires payment for an entire campaign with no real conversion data, PPC advertising allows you to pay only for people who are directly expressing interest in your ad.
We suggest you start with a simple Search Network campaign, which means that your ads will show up in the ad spaces on search result pages across Google’s products (like Google Search, Maps and Shopping). When you feel more comfortable, you can consider video or display advertising – which utilizes images and videos instead of simple ad copy used in search ads.
Ad Group Setup
When establishing how to manage a Google AdWords campaign, it may be helpful to read tutorials on how to set up ad groups. For our purposes, you just need to know that ad groups separate different types of ads and keywords based on category. You set these categories, so you can divide your ads up however you want, depending on your service offering. If you’re a retailer, you can divide your ad groups by product department. If you’re a small business owner, you can divide your ad groups by the types of services you provide. As a real estate agent, for example, you might divide your ad groups by the cities or neighborhoods where you have listings, or by the type of properties you have for sale.
Keep in mind that how you decide to structure your ad groups does not effect your overall campaign, except that it helps you run it easier and allows you to set different budgets to different areas of your campaign. So do what works for you: more competitive keywords will require more of your budget to appear and rank, while adding money to an ad group when you have a surplus could be beneficial to your sales revenue.
Keyword Research
Once you’ve decided on your ad groups, it’s time to do some keyword research. A great asset during this process is Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner. This tool allows you to enter your specific list of products and services and receive suggestions of similar phrases consumers are searching for, which you can then add directly into your ad groups. You will also see information on search relevance, frequency, competition and price, all of which will help you determine which keywords are affordable and useful in your campaign.
Measuring Profitability
Next, you can do some data analysis to see if your keywords will be profitable for you. Take the time to figure out if you will see affordable conversions using this keyword, or simply pour money into your Google account without seeing business results. You can determine this with a simple equation:
Max CPC (cost per click) = (profit per customer) x (1 – profit margin) x (website conversion rate)
If you aren’t sure how much each customer makes you, the profit margin (in percentage form) you are aiming for, or your website’s general conversion rate, spend some time calculating these figures. That way, you can measure the success of your advertising efforts by watching how these numbers change over time.
Editing Your Campaigns
Once you have determined your keyword list and how much you can spend on them, you can launch your ads and continue to tweak your campaign over time. Bid management features help you keep your ad ranked in the first three ad positions, where it will affect the most conversions. Negative keyword lists allow you to zero in on audience members that actually want to hear from you, and are therefore are most likely to result in a conversion. Plus, if you sell out of product or notice than an ad group is not producing results, you can pause and edit your campaign and its targeting settings at any time.
Unique Selling Proposition
Lastly, you will want to figure out your unique selling proposition, or what makes you different from your competition, and settle on some compelling advertising strategies. This will inform the actual messaging that you will base your ads on. Google limits the amount of characters you can use, so focus on making well-converting ads by writing an interesting headline, short and eye-catching calls-to-action, and an easy-to-read URL.
Learning how to manage a Google AdWords campaign offers endless room for experimentation, and it is okay to need help getting started. Building a bidding strategy, starting a remarketing campaign, and measuring your cost-per-conversion are intimidating features of Google AdWords if you are new to the game. If you want expert guidance on getting your business into advertising online, contact Scale to see how we can help your business today.
*Photo Courtesy Of: Google
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