Every business, large and small, needs to know how to self promote online. Here is the officesuites Guide to Google AdWords.
Ad Ranking: It’s Not Just About the Money
The amount of your bid makes up only 33% of how Google decides to rank your ad. The other 66% is based on your quality score which is mix of various criteria including the relevance of your ad page compared to your landing page, the user’s experience once they get to your site and your site speed and page loading times.
When preparing your ad, put yourself in the shoes of the user and ask whether you are likely so stay on the site once you’ve been enticed to click on the ad. A high bounce rate will count against your ad ranking as will a slow loading page.
Getting The Keywords Right
Assume you are promoting Nike Shoes with a pay per click campaign on AdWords. There are three types of Keyword Matching you can use.
Exact Match:
Placing a square bracket around the phrase will result in your ad being served only when the exact search term is entered. For example, by choosing [Nike Shows] as your keyword, you ad won’t appear against Ladies Nike Shoes but it will appear when the exact search term Nike Shows is entered.
Phrase Match:
Placing the keywords in parenthesis “Nike Shoes” will result in the ad appearing provided the keywords entered are somewhere within the search phrase. For example, the Ad won’t appear against the keywords Nike Sports Wear but will appear against Nike dancing Shows and Nike running shoes because in the latter two cases, both keywords are present in the search phrase.
Broad Match:
By not using any brackets or parenthesis, the ad will appear when any form of search term, including synonyms, is entered. For example, by choosing [Nike Shoes] as your keyword, any phrase used by someone searching with the word Nike in it could serve up the ad, for example, Nike sporting Goods or even Running Shoes
What Works?
Injecting a little humour tends to almost always get you preferred over the competition. Don’t overdo it and remember to have it in keeping with the product or service that you are promoting Your Ad text should also include the key words you expect will be entered in a search. Keep testing to see what works.
Display Advertising, Extensions & Remarketing
Once you’re comfortable with the basics you could try to play around with the other AdWords tools. The Display network is effectively a banner advertising platform where you choose who to target (e.g. profile of user, keywords they commonly use or choosing third party websites that they visit) and Google will serve the display ad to your target audience in the margin of their browser as they browse the web.
Ad extensions are a great way to enhance your text ad as they extend your ad to include other elements such as your telephone number, location or a link to another part of your site.
You can also set up your AdWords campaign to remarket to users who have previously visited your site. Remarketing tends to have high conversion rates.
Make sure you Privacy policy discloses that you are using this software and start initially with a small budget but enough to get sufficient data for you to see results and optimise for success.
Google AdWords Recourses
Google Webmaster Tools: Detailed reports about your pages visibility on Google.
Google Trends: Explore Search topics that are popular on google.
Google Adwords Blog: Google official page for tips and information on AdWords
