An Introduction to Google AdWords

If you don't reach page 1 of Google - your product or service is not going to get sold to internet searchers. It's as simple as that.

Google allows you to target 10 million people within 10 minutes of setting up a campaign. How much more impressive a form of advertising can there be?

The sponsored listings are a simple, fast way of appearing on page 1 instantly. Okay - so you might have to pay a lot to appear there initially. The other way of appearing on page 1 takes time, and lots of it. Search Engine Optimisation - otherwise known as SEO - is your alternative method and will not be covered during this course. Suffice to say it is definitely worth taking a look at, whether you wish to consider recruiting an expert or learning it yourself. Further resources are listed at the back of the book.

The non-sponsored links are known as organic results.

Understand your customer

To write good adverts, and create good campaigns - you need to be able to get into the mind of your customer. How do they think? How will they word their search terms? Why not ask friends and colleagues - if you were looking for x what would you type into a search engine?

Building a campaign from scratch

Starter edition is a simplified version of Google Adwords for beginners. It is only useful for those who cannot attend a course or complete online tutorials - for those who have just one product or service that they wish to advertise. The targeting is basic, which means you can only advertise to a single country or city. The reports are also basic which means you cannot really see what is and isn't working. You will be asked to set a monthly budget which means you won't have any control over which days or what times your advert will be seen. You also have no control over your keywords - whether to increase or decrease bidding amounts. By default you will also have the content network turned on - which means your adverts will be showing on lots of websites throughout the Internet but you have no control over which ones!

Anyone can create one of these basic starter accounts - then they think they know what they're doing and then go ahead and lose an awful lot of money. I would really not recommend starting with a Starter version. If you are willing to learn Adwords, and you are willing to invest the time and money learning how to use it, then use the Standard edition.

The right way to create your campaign

• Set up a single campaign for each website (you may decide to split your campaigns into two - one for national or international visitors and one for local visitors)
• Create an Ad Group for each single product or service you sell (you may decide to split down further depending on your keyword research)
• Write at least 2 carefully targeted adverts for your Ad Group
• Choose the keywords for your Ad Group
• Enter your bid for the Ad Group
• Carefully identify any negative keywords you wish to include
• Install Analytics code and Hittail code to each page of your website
• Run the advert for a few hours
• Check Hittail to see if you are attracting the right sort of visitors
• Add in negative keywords as you discover them
• Check your Adgroup continually to check your position - consider increasing or decreasing your bid if necessary
• Over the space of a week keep checking hittail to see if different times or days attract different types of visitors (you can judge this from the conversion rate, your own market research when clients call in, plus the type of keywords they are typing in)
• Consider setting up Ad Scheduling
• Continually check which if your 2 adverts for each Ad
• Group is performing better. Eventually delete the worse performing one and create a new one - keep refining!
• Check your Click Through Rate repeatedly. Depending on your market it should always be above 0.5%. Keep trying to improve it.
• Check your conversions and cost per conversion
• Never leave your campaign to run itself for more than a couple of weeks - always keep checking it!