Google Adwords - A Fast Start Guide

As you know, Adwords is a Pay-per-click service of Google and it can be instrumental in sending you a good lot of highly targeted traffic. However, I found that several people do not take advantage of this powerful traffic source because they feel hesitant about being able to set up and manage an Adwords campaign. These tips will help you get started and self-manage an economic and sustainable campaign.

So let's start without any further ado -

1. You have to begin with effective keyword research. Adwords offer a very good list of keywords if you provide it with a seed word (the broad initial term that it can build upon). So if you are in the sunglasses industry, enter sunglasses in the keyword suggestion tool and you can get a list of hundreds of terms based around sunglasses. Choose the ones that apply to you and you are well on the way to a fast start.

2. You can set up one campaign with one Ad group initially but to really shine, you have to have multiple ad groups and even multiple campaigns.

3. This may sound discouraging but an Adwords campaign needs to be attended to. If you want hands free long-term traffic solution, look elsewhere or you may start losing money soon even if you have set up a winning campaign initially.

4. You must always have at least 2 ads in every ad group. These ads may be having slightly different ad copy or a different landing page (with only a few elements changed). This will allow you to identify what’s working better and you can then kill the poor-performing ad and replace it with a new challenger to the better ad. This testing will improve your results over time and soon you can make a good first-guess when writing a new ad.

5. Google offers an ad-serving optimization option as default with every campaign. This essentially means that your better ad will be shown more often and will skew your test results. This is for the lazy advertiser and you cannot run successful tests with this on. Turn it off.

6. You should set a higher cost-per-click figure initially to build a good history and get some good clicks. If you get poor click-through rate initially, you will end up paying higher for a longer time.

7. The landing page is very vital to an Adwords campaign. What’s the point of getting lots of traffic if you cannot convert this to orders or sign-ups or anything else that you are looking for. You should be optimizing your landing page constantly.

8. Try to have lots of convincing copy on the landing page with minimal graphics that are highly relevant to your message. This helps the page to load faster and provides for minimum distractions to the sales process.

9. You must never send everyone to your home page. Try to create different and relevant landing pages for sets of keywords so that their expectations from the ad get fulfilled on the landing page. Don’t expect them to locate the required information from your crowded home page.

10. Use negative keywords liberally. So if you don’t want to encourage freebie seekers to click on your ads, enter ‘-free’ in the list of keywords. Similarly, if you are selling authentic Oakley sunglasses and are advertising on the term ‘oakley’, then you must exclude all replica Oakley seekers by entering ‘-replica’, ‘-lookalike’ and similar terms in the list of keywords.

11. Continually expand your keyword list by referring to your logs and identifying the popular terms that people are using to find you.

12. In your ad groups, whenever you see a keyword getting good number of display impressions, you should take this keyword out and put it in another ad-group of its own. This new ad-group can have a very tightly focused ad copy to appeal to this section of visitors. You might also consider creating a specific landing page for this topic to improve the conversion rate even more.

13. In the same way, if the click-through on some keywords is low, move these keywords to another ad-group and change the copy to see if you can get more clicks.

14. Use the conversion tracking function provided free by Google to identify terms that generate sales or signups. Some keywords generate lots of traffic but do not produce sales. Others generate lower traffic but produce sales at a higher rate. Google is also offering a Website Optimizer service to enable advertisers to test multiple variables and find the best combination.

15. I strongly recommend you to have an opt-in system for your visitors by offering a free report or additional information. If you don’t, anybody who does not buy in the first visit is lost forever. However if they have opted in, you get further chances to sell to him/her through the follow-ups.

Well, these tips should enable you to start an Adwords campaign quickly and easily and enable you to get a positive ROI on your investment of time and money.

Best wishes!
S.R.Patnaik