-
How to Launch a Successful Campaign using Google Adwords
Paying excessively for clicks, not tracking your conversions at all, not using negative keywords to aide in controlling your automatic placements and advertising in underdeveloped countries are all standard introductory mistakes in AdWords. Recently, I came across some blog material that was regarded [by readers] for airing this information and comments trickled in about the post’s usefulness. Since a back-to-basics refresher course can keep your marketing efforts on track we will talk basics in Adwords.
Adwords is a popular pay-per-click (abbrv. PPC) web advertising application. When your website needs a boost in visitors (hopefully because your niche is flooded, you are running a special or you are trying to gain a new market and not due to lack of SEO) it is a tool you can use for driving traffic to your website.
When you sign up for AdWords you are projected [by google] to learn how Adwords works, how to manage costs, how to write a successful ad campaign and how to choose effective keywords. While this workload may seem daunting it is standard to most methods when creating and tracking a web presence.
Your initial set-up of an AdWords account offers tips for optimization. Optimization [per google related to AdWords] means improving the quality and performance of your account without raising costs in order to get desired results. Here Google implores us to identify advertising goals, organize our account for maximum effectiveness, choose relevant keywords and placements, create a more targeted ad, optimize our website conversions, track our performance and test while modifying our campaign to get results. That is a fairly multi-facaded process.
Tracking and Organizing:
We have our Adwords account and we’ve read the myriad of information Google provided to guide us to setting up our first campaign. The dread is flooding in that every effort will be wasteful if we don’t organize and track. Time to focus.
These first two steps are very related to each other. You organize your campaign by: identifying your target market and goals then create ads based on that information (often several ads in order to track different targets and goals). You track your campaign by: analyzing any traffic coming in through your campaign to your website and watching the conversion rate (the amount of visitors who bought, the amount of visitors who took a survey, the amount of visitors signing up for a newsletter, etc.). A good tool for tracking is Google Analytics and this is a free service of Google. You are given a code to place on your landing page in order to capture this data.
Targeting and Modifying Campaigns:
So how do we do we get clicks? This is where we take our money and put it where our mouth is. Wanting more clicks is far from getting them. Above we mention goals and creating separate campaigns for each goal. This allows us to monitor our progress and present the subsequent data more easily. i.e. The desire to have more female consumers buy a certain product vs. more male consumers to also buy a certain product. This is one aspect to targeting your campaign that also allows you to track.
Now it’s time to set up your keywords and negative keywords to define the target. Your keywords should not include any duplicates and your negative keywords should be very considerate of your target. Include any keywords that are specialty descriptions of the product/goal. If you sell audio editing software you might want to exclude people searching for audio producing software. Once you feel that you have defined the target well enough be sure and double check your work. Again, keep out doubles. You cannot modify a campaign you have launched without effecting your rank and cost so be sure and get it right!
When monitoring and modifying your campaigns it’s important to know not all traffic will be recorded the same way. Since your analytics relies on cookies to gather the information you will not see data from consumers with cookies disabled, buying outside of the session or at a much later date. This is not a huge percentage but should still be accounted for when analyzing your data during the monitoring process.
Controlling Campaign Cost:
While there are hundreds of mistakes you can make online paying for something you don’t need is the worst. This article is meant to guide you in creating a successful campaign but until you have sat down and worked out the figures. Launching a campaign for a low cost product and paying for clicks could end up costing you money in the long run. Be mindful of your ROI point and never let your marketing budget exceed your means.
