So, you’ve signed up for your AdWords account, and now all you have to do is build your first campaign. Now what?

It’s understandable if you’ve got a bit of writer’s block. After all, you’re putting your own money into this, and you don’t want to waste it. But fight that panic, take a deep breath and read on for a few tips…

• How’s your website? Have a long, hard look and answer yourself honestly. If it’s just one page of spiel and a phone number, you might need to think about improving it before you start bringing visitors to it with paid clicks. If people just hit the back button and go elsewhere, you’re making no profit and still paying for the click.

• Take a look at what you’re offering. What are your biggest sellers? What products are under-selling, but would make you more profit with the right push? If you’re providing a service, what are your business’ unique selling points that make you a must?

• How many ad groups do you need? Make sure you’re not advertising shoes in the same ad group as socks, and tailor your ads to your searchers.

• How many keywords, and on what type of match? Be specific – but also realistic. It’s unlikely that people looking for lawn mowers will search for ‘Flymo Turbo Compact 330 Grass Collecting Electric Hover Lawn Mower’… unless, like I just did, they copy it from Amazon into Google to search for comparison prices. If you get stuck for ideas, use the keyword tool.

• How much traffic does Google estimate you’ll get? Take a look at the traffic estimator, and type in the word ‘loans’. Scary, huh? How about the word ‘free’? Now, aren’t you glad you can set a limit of how much to spend per day? If you have keywords that cost more per day/per click than you can afford, narrow them down a bit… or a lot.

• Negative keywords – don’t forget to set them! Unless you’re not all that bothered about making money, make sure you make ‘free’ one of them.

• Write your ads – see this blog for a few tips.

• Do you want to advertise on the content network? For a first campaign, I’d suggest starting off just on Google and its search partners. Think about the content network after you’ve got a feel for the basics.

• What’s your daily budget? This should be within the realms of what you can afford, but enough that you’ll get a decent amount of traffic to your site per day. If the clicks within your industry are expensive, for example £2 each, your daily budget will need to be at least £4 – and even that will only get you two clicks before Google stops your ads running for the day!

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it should help you to get the basics right. Good luck!

Following on from last week’s Part I, here’s the rest of the AdWords Glossary! Let’s continue straight on to…

DAILY BUDGET

What is it?

Your daily budget is the maximum amount per day you’re willing to spend on clicks. Remember, £1 per day is £28-£31 per month, so it all adds up! Be absolutely sure you understand how much you’ll be paying per month before you commit to a daily budget.

What should I aim for?

Again, it depends on the nature of your business, and how expensive your cost per click is. If you’re selling cross stitch patterns, you could make a success story out of less than £5 per day. For locksmiths in the London area, £5 will get you two clicks – and that’s if you’re lucky!

Make sure you know your market, and experiment with different budgets if your initial one is too high or too low. Believe it or not, some campaigns I’ve managed in the past have struggled to get enough clicks to spend their entire daily budget. In these cases, a rethink in strategy has been needed.

IMPRESSIONS

What are they?

Impressions are ad views – whenever a search result page shows your ad, one impression is registered. On standard cost per click (CPC) campaigns, you do not pay for impressions, only for clicks.

How many do I want?

Less than you might think! The trick is to filter your impressions through to potential customers, not just to any random searcher. Be specific with your keywords and use exact/phrase matching rather than broad, and don’t forget to add negative keywords (see the below entry for details).

KEYWORDS

What are they?

Keywords are your search terms – for example, if you’re selling double glazing, you might bid on ‘double glazing’, ‘double glazed windows’ and ‘double glazing company’ as keywords.

How many should I use?

The sky’s the limit! Or, more specifically, 2000 per ad group is the limit. Most campaigns won’t need anywhere near that many, though; the emphasis should be on quality rather than quantity. Regularly look over your keywords to see whether they’re working for you, and pause them if they’re not. It’s better to have a few effective keywords than thousands that do nothing for your business.

LANDING PAGE

What is it?

A landing page is the page a customer will be taken to when clicking on your ad. To choose a landing page, copy it into the ‘destination URL’ field of an ad. It’s that simple!

LIMITED BY BUDGET

What does it mean?

If you have a small budget in a competitive market, you’ll become used to seeing this alert. Google likes to tell you how many clicks you’re missing by not spending enough on advertising – they express this as a percentage, and seeing that you’re missing 90% of the impressions you could be getting can cause concern!

Should I be worried?

Generally speaking, no! It goes without saying that the more money you spend on your advertising with Google, the more money Google gets. But unless you’ve got a very low daily budget and a high cost per click, which means you can only afford a couple of clicks before you’re spent up for the day, then I wouldn’t worry.  The estimates Google gives you of how much per day you should be paying are often not too realistic, and as long as you’ve got a decent volume of traffic getting to your website, without paying too much for your clicks, you’re doing something right.

NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

What are they?

These are words or search terms that you really don’t want your ads showing up for.

How do I use them?

Think about the keywords you’ve used. Do any of them have more than one meaning, or apply to more than one business area? Say you run a gourmet coffee company, and only sell filter coffee and coffee beans. You’d want to set ‘instant’ as a negative, and also ‘table’, to stop people seeing your ad when they’re searching for instant coffee and coffee tables.

Be careful, though – you don’t want to add a negative that will stop potential customers from seeing your ads! Having ‘images’, ‘photographs’ and ‘pictures’ is usually a good bet to filter out people looking for pictures of what you sell on Google Images. However, if you’re a photographer this is a very bad idea. Think hard before you choose a negative!

QUALITY SCORES

What are they?

Quality scores are Google’s way of ensuring that the ads that get top positions on a search page are relevant to what the user has searched for. The way these are calculated is quite complicated, but the two major contributing factors are a keyword’s click-through rate (CTR) and the relevance of the landing page of your ad.

Run that by me again?

No problem! Your landing page needs to be relevant to your ad, and the keywords used to trigger that ad. The better the click-through rate of your ad and its keywords, the more credibility this gives the ad itself, and that means its position will be higher. Your ad is also judged on whether or not your keywords are actually on the landing page the ad leads to.

“Wait a minute!” I hear you cry. “I thought that I get better positions by bidding higher?”

Yup, that’s definitely part of it. But a keyword with a quality score of 10 will only need a small bid to boost its position, whereas a keyword with a quality score of 3 will need a much larger bid to do the same thing. Having better quality scores saves you money – simple!

POSITION

What is it?

Search for something on Google and look at the results page. You’ll find a shaded box at the top of the list, and the first ad is in position 1. The ones below that, if there are any, will be in positions 2 and 3. After the shaded box, the ads jump to the right-hand sidebar, continuing down the page. Sometimes there will be no shaded box, and in that instance, the top ad in the sidebar will be in position 1.

What positions should I aim for?

For maximum visibility, positions 1-3 are your best bet. But surprisingly, statistics show that position 2 is a better position to be in than the top spot! A main motivation for users of Google AdWords is to get first-page visibility, whereas your natural ranking might be on the fourth or fifth page, so make the most of it if your budget allows.

TIME ON SITE

What is it?

Exactly what it sounds like: it’s the average time users spend on your site, as measured by Google Analytics. If your Analytics is installed correctly, your site as a whole has an average time on site, and each of your AdWords campaigns will have their own average time on site to compare it to. You can even go as far as to see how long people are spending on your site after clicking an ad for a specific keyword.

How should I use it?

It will help you pinpoint your traffic’s quality. You might have a keyword that has had lots of clicks, but if the average time on site for that keyword is five seconds, no one is staying around for much longer than that. What can you really do on a site within five seconds? Not much! You should pause the keyword and channel your clicks elsewhere.

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So there you have it – a glossary of the major AdWords terms. Did I miss anything huge? Let me know, and I’ll see about adding it.

Click-through rates, cost per conversion, quality scores… These are all familiar terms to me, and to the people sitting around me in Add People’s Pay per Click department. But what do they all mean? Sometimes it can be difficult to keep all the Google AdWords terminology straight in your head, so here’s a glossary you can refer to in times of befuddlement:

AD GROUPS

What are they?

Not to state the obvious, but an ad group is a group of ads – all based around a theme.

Why should I use them?

If you group your keywords into common themes, and write different ads for each theme, your customers will see more relevant ads. This will stop someone from Googling the term ‘stereo system’ and seeing a generic ad about ‘electrical equipment’. If they see a focused, relevant ad, people are much more likely to visit your site.

Here’s another thing: don’t group in your stereo keywords with your TV keywords, or your stereo ad might show up when someone searches for TVs. What would be the point in that?

ANALYTICS

What is it?

Google’s in-depth web traffic analysis program.

Why should I have it?

Google Analytics, if installed correctly, lets you see which pages people are visiting on your site, how long they’re staying, and where they’re hitting the back button. Not only that, but there are dozens of reports you can run to compare various statistics against each other. Here at Add People, we consider Analytics to be a vital tool in the managing of a client’s campaign, and once you’ve viewed your site’s statistics, so will you!

BIDS

What are they?

A bid is the maximum amount of money you’re willing to pay for a click. You can set bids at the ad group level, or at the individual keyword level. For example, you might be more willing to pay for high positions on keywords to do with power drills than you are for keywords to do with nails, because your power drills make you more money.

What should I bid?

The amount you’re bidding isn’t the only factor in determining your position on Google, but it’s definitely a major one! If your positions are hovering around the double-figures mark, you’re being outbid by quite a few people, and you’ll need to pay more to appear further up the page.

BOUNCE RATE

What is it?

The bounce rate is a Google Analytics statistic that tells you how many people are clicking your ad, looking at the page it takes them to and then clicking the back button without taking a look at other pages on your site, ‘bouncing’ back to their Google search result page to look elsewhere.

What should I aim for?

A 100% bounce rate is very bad. A 0% bounce rate is practically impossible to achieve (unless you’ve only had one or two clicks to your site), but in theory would be excellent! Overall, we at Add People aim for a lower bounce rate for the AdWords campaign than the website’s average (which includes natural traffic as well as paid clicks). If the site’s average bounce rate is above 50%, it might be worth investing in a new website, or revising your e-commerce order process to make it more accessible.

Generally speaking, aim for less than 50% for your AdWords campaign’s bounce rate. If you can convince over half of your visitors not to click straight back to Google, that’s definitely something positive.

CLICK-THROUGH RATE (CTR)

What is it?

Your click-through rate tells you what percentage of ad views (also known as ‘impressions’) leads to clicks. You might have 100 impressions resulting from a certain keyword being searched for on Google, and two people actually clicking through to your site. This would give you a 2% click-through rate.

What should I aim for?

If a keyword has a high number of impressions and a very low number of clicks, it’s probably not working for you. If this is a problem that affects most of your keywords, you might want to look at rewriting your ads, or making your keywords less generic.

Personally, if a keyword has generated over 100 ad impressions and less than a 1% click-through rate, I pause it and give other keywords chance to spend. Unless it’s showing solid evidence of conversions in the conversion tracker, that is. Compared to conversion stats, the click-through rate isn’t that important – keywords with a low click-through rate and thousands of impressions can be very successful converters!

CONVERSIONS

What are they?

‘Conversion’ is a fancy way of saying that you’ve either made a sale or generated a lead that might become a sale. If you have an e-commerce site that customers can buy directly from, then a conversion is a sale. If you provide a complex service that you need to directly give to the customer – for example, a building renovator – then your conversion is that a customer has provided you with details to call them back regarding the job. It’s not a sale, but it’s a potential sale.

What should I aim for?

As many conversions as your business can handle! Conversions are the way you’ll make your money, and everything you do should be a step toward making a conversion and getting some cash coming in. Watch your campaigns closely to ensure you’re not spending more on your keywords than you’re getting back in conversions.

CONVERSION TRACKER

What is it?

Possibly the best tool Google AdWords has to offer! If installed correctly, the conversion tracker can keep count of which keywords lead to sales, how much you’re spending on AdWords per conversion, and the percentage of clicks that lead to conversions. For this to be accurate, you need to install it on the ‘thank you’ page of your website that follows a successful purchase, or submission of a contact form.

Why should I have it?

It’s a quick and easy way to see whether or not you’re making a profit, breaking even or making a loss. After all, what’s the point in throwing money at a campaign and only getting half the amount back in profits? Not all websites support conversion tracking, but we strongly recommend owning a website that does.

CONVERSION RATE

What is it?

The conversion rate is a percentage, which tells you how many of clicks through to your site are becoming conversions, or sales/leads.

What should I aim for?

This varies from customer to customer, but without exception, you want this percentage to be as high as possible, to minimise the amount of profit lost by clicks that don’t convert. The more expensive the goods you’re selling, the less vital a high conversion rate is – if you’re selling something at £100, you can afford more clicks before making a loss than if you’re selling something at £5.

COST PER CLICK (CPC)

What is it?

The average cost you pay per click of your ads, for a certain keyword, ad group or across a whole campaign. The lower the cost per click, the higher your profits if you convert – but that has a flip-side. If you have a very low cost per click, chances are you’ll also have a low position on Google’s ad bar. That means your competitors have the advantage, and you might get overlooked.

What should I aim for?

Without knowing the nature of your business, it’s impossible for me to guess! Google’s traffic estimator tool is your best bet here. Use phrase and exact matched keywords, and well-chosen negatives, to reduce the likelihood of you getting matched to irrelevant search terms and to keep costs low.

COST PER CONVERSION

What is it?

It’s the amount of money you’ve paid, on average, per every converting click you get. For example, say you’ve spent £50 so far over the course of your AdWords campaign. You’ve had 5 conversions, all at various times. Therefore, your cost per conversion averages out at £10.

What should I aim for?

A lower cost per conversion than the product you sell. If you’re spending £10 per conversion on advertising, your product should sell at more than £10 – significantly more, if you’re hoping to make a profit through AdWords! If it’s only a £5 product, then it’s costing you twice as much to advertise than you’re making back in sales – and that’s going to put you in the red pretty quickly. Keep your costs lower than your profits, and you’ll be fine.

Part II of this glossary can be found here!

So, you have a Google AdWords account. You’ve created your first advertising campaign, put in your keywords and negatives, and you just have to write your ads.

Now what?

Google only gives you two lines, at 35 characters per line, plus a 25-character headline. That’s 95 characters… not much! The sentence you’re reading right now is made up of 77 characters, by itself. Yep, spaces between words count.

With such limited space, you can’t write an essay. You can hardly even write two full sentences, so pick your words carefully, and follow this advice.

• DO use a call to action; it’s a great way to grab the potential customer’s subconscious. If your ad says ‘buy now’, ‘call today’, ‘email us’, ‘visit our site’ or something similar, people are more likely to follow the instruction. An ad simply describing your product has no draw for its readers – in 95 characters, you won’t be able to make it interesting enough. Just as a quick warning, though: Google doesn’t allow you to use the word ‘click’, so ‘click here’ won’t work. Don’t ask us why Google won’t allow it. They just don’t…

• DON’T use text-speak or misspell any words. That might be okay for texting your friends, tweeting on Twitter or chatting on instant messenger, but here, it will generate a negative impression. Remember, there’ll be other ads on the same page – and if they’re easier to read, they’ll get the clicks instead of you.

• DO make use of the humble ampersand. That’s the & symbol, if you didn’t know. It’ll save you a whole two characters in your ad – the word ‘and’ is three characters, and the ampersand only takes up one. That might not seem like a lot, but if you’re trying to fit a six-character word into a four-character space, it makes life easier!

• DON’T be surprised if certain ads containing brand names get disapproved by Google. Some companies don’t allow their trademarks to be used in ads. You can still put them in your keywords… you just might have to be a little bit less specific in your ad text. Some examples of trademarks that Google doesn’t allow are: iPod, iPad, iPhone, Land Rover, Photoshop, Epson, Burberry, Ralph Lauren… and there are many more. Don’t worry, though – there are a lot of brands that are allowed. Try yours and see!

• DO capitalise each word of your ad. It’ll be more eye-catching that way.

• DO write more than one ad per ad group. We recommend using three, all written in different styles. If you have one cheesy ad, one dry and factual one, and one descriptive one, you can gauge which style is likely to draw the most clicks, and rewrite your ads accordingly. See what works for your product or service.

• DO go short and snappy. Describe what you’re selling using evocative words – ‘stunning’ and ‘stylish’ work well for fashion; ‘mouth-watering’ and ‘delicious’ are good for food; and ‘discreet’ and ‘efficient’ hit the right spot for private investigators, for example. Incorporate words like this into snappy ad format – for example, “Relax With A Cup Of Organic Earl Grey Tea – Buy Online At Our Site!” Here, the evocative words would be ‘relax’ and ‘organic’, which imply that the tea is good for you and also relaxing. Who wouldn’t want that after a stressful day? Click!

• DO make sure that when people click on your ad, the page they land on is relevant to the ad’s wording. There’s no point in advertising alarm clocks when potential customers will click the ad and end up on a page for grandfather clocks. If you want to advertise both alarm clocks and grandfather clocks, create a different ad group for your grandfather clock keywords, and make sure your ads direct clicks to the right place.

• DO use Dynamic Keyword Insertion – DKI for short. If you format your ad headers {KeyWord:Insert Product-Relevant Header Here}, when someone views your ads they’ll see their search term in bold at the top of your ad. This increases the likelihood that they’ll click, since it makes your ad more relevant to them.

Trial and error is the key to a successful AdWords campaign. See which of these tactics work the best for you, and adapt your ads accordingly. Good luck!