Where do you start?
Google Adwords can be a bit of a beast. It can also swallow your money before you even realise, if you don’t have the detail in your campaigns set up correctly. There are so many nuances to Google Adwords and it is vital you ensure everything is set up to the best of its ability, so you can make the most of your budget. So if you are new to Google Adwords, then think and plan carefully.
Some agencies will claim to run your Adwords campaigns. They say they will monitor the performance and ensure you are at the top of your game. However many, especially some of the large national companies have the same strategies that are applied to each project and the reporting you receive on a regular basis will be of little use for your marketing. Your spend means nothing to them; you give them what your daily budget is and they will spend it!
How we approach each new project
At Sokada, we work on each project totally separately. We carry out the keyword research and start the campaign tightly, ensuring there are no obvious issues. We will then gradually broaden our searches to give our customers the most of the clicks through to their website. We add extensions to the adverts, giving prospective customers the ability to click through to various areas. We also check the actual search terms that have been made – initially on a daily basis, to keep an eye on the exact searches made. We ensure your ads are only showing in the geographic areas and times required and the adverts are relevant, easy to read and are all spelled correctly! You would be surprised how many ads have bad spelling in them or are factually incorrect!
And we start each campaign with as many negative keywords as possible. These are absolutely VITAL and much thought needs to go into this to ensure you hit the ground running with correct and relevant keyword terms.
How much to spend on Adwords?
You must expect to spend a bit of money on your Adwords campaign. If you have very little budget, then you will probably not see many conversions on your website. Set your daily budget and when that runs out, your ads will disappear until the next designated day.
Make sure you decide first which hours of the day you are going to show your ads as well as which days of the week. A lot of money can be wasted unnecessarily by showing your adverts 24/7. If budget is tight, then try and limit your ads to the time of day when people are most likely to be searching for your products or services.
Want to know your conversions?
Conversions are vital with an Adwords Campaign. You want to see some return on your investment. If you have an online shop, then this is quite an easy conversion to set up. However, if you have an information or brochure website, then you need to think about what you would class as a conversion. Would it be the amount of time someone spends looking at your website or perhaps the number of pages they have visited within your site. Could it be once they have visited a specific page, or perhaps contacted you. It is totally up to you what a conversion will mean for your business; you can even assign a monetary value to each goal, giving you an effective cost per conversion figure.
One of the easiest ways to do this is to import your goal conversions from your Google Analytics account – so make sure this is set up first and then link the accounts.
Your Click Through Rate (CTR)
Based on the percentage of people clicking through to your website where you advert has shown up (Impressions) is normally less than 10%, then you must allow for some wasted money on this. The average click-through rate on AdWords paid search ads is about 2%. Therefore, anything over 2% will be considered an above average CTR.
A low Click Through Rate (CTR) can mean your ad isn’t compelling enough to get people to your landing page. Or it could be based on a low Quality Score. Quality score is the value Google puts to the specific keyword phrase compared to the text within the specific website landing page – is it applicable? Use keywords within your ad group that really match well with the page you are directing your advert to. Having a low CTR can negatively impact your Quality Score, which makes your campaign less cost-effective.
So…how do you want to play this?
We could talk about Google Adwords all day – if you are new to Google Adwords, there is so much information to be told and to be honest, it can prove a little scary if you have never dipped your toe into this exciting world. Many of our customers have had a go themselves, thinking “how hard can it be?”. But be aware, you can lose your money quicker than on a roulette table if you don’t set up your campaign properly from the outset. So why not let us set up your Google Adwords account and manage it for you. We will send you regular reports, showing your spend, the search terms people have made (very important) as well as any other information, vital for your business. We have many regular customers who trust us to do the best job possible with their money…
Adwords can be updated very easily and the changes can be seen online fairly quickly, unlike organic marketing, which can take days or sometimes weeks. So it is ideal if you want to get your services or products out there, for the world to see. Just please be careful if you have a go yourself…
And then we have Google Shopping….but that’ll be another blog post 😉