Hopefuly you’ve gone through the preliminary steps before opening your Google Adwords account.
Now let’s take a glimpse on the necesary adjustments that must be made once starting the actual account.
Log in, take the easy steps requested, write an ad, insert a keyword list with it, like explained in the previous post and choose a bid price. Complete setting up your ad by entering the necesary infos about the billing method and confirm this by email.
When setting your bid price, Google’s Traffic Estimator will deliver informations about how much traffic to expect, how much it will cost and how fast your campaign will develop. Set up your daily budget.
The bigger the budget the better – the testing fase will deliver results much faster. If you’ll get 1000 clicks a day you’ll need to act fast in adjusting the campaign in order to save money and direct it to productive use. On the other hand, if those 1000 clicks poor in in a 30-day period, your first testing results will show up in a couple of days.
Now, you’ll want to continuously improve your results. You do that by A/B split-testing. In the campaign manager you’ll find a “Creat New Ad” option. Click on it and creat a new ad, slightly different from it’s counterpart, the first ad. Some suggestions about the differences between the two include: use capitalization in other parts of the ad, use similar or the same words as with those included in the list keyword, use different verbs, use different concepts and approaches with the offer you’re advertising.
By having two distinct ads with a campaign, Google will split the traffic between the two and after getting a minimum of 30 clicks for each ad, check out the two CTR or click-thru-rate’s. The ad with the lower CTR will be deleted and replaced with a new one.
Your best performing ad is called the “control”. Basically you want to constantly beat your control in order to maximize earnings with PPC advertising. Every time you improve your ad you’ll get more traffic with little cost per click. For the future, your entire focus will be in beating your “control”. Sometimes you’ll succeed, sometimes you won’t. Important is to keep split testing.
Finally, the peel and stick process. Once the result start coming see how your keywords or key phrases are performing. You’ll notice that some of them are performing well and really well (1% and above CTR), where some really bad (0.1-0.8% CTR). Some cost 3 cents, some go up to 3$ or more. Some position your ad on the top 3, others on the next page. The idea here is to get all those that are unusual – most and least expensive, best or lowest CTR – peel (delete) them and stick them in new campaigns and start working at improving their results.
Don’t forget to also work on your landing pages to ensure high conversion rates for the traffic you generate to them.
Two things you want to keep in mind with Google Adwords: Maximum Clich-Thru-Rate, Minimum Bid Prices and these must go hand in hand!
