Nine reasons why you should consider Google Adword campaigns!

We often get emails asking about Google Adwords. Some emails are from people who have never used Google Adwords and are afraid to get started. Some are from people who have spent a lot of money on Google Adwords and never made a sale.

So here is the first in a series of posts about getting the best out of Google Adwords!

Google Adwords is the paid search engine advertisement program offered by Google. These advertisement listings appear above and to the side of the regular search results in Google.

Google Ad-words is a Pay-per-click program where you are charged only when a visitor clicks on your listing. You also get to decide the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click. Google charges a $5 activation fee but there are no monthly minimum charges. Google also gets to decide the minimum amount you will be charged for a click depending on your web page contents and the keyword phrase. Most times this is a few cents but it could also be $5 or $10 per click based on the quality of your landing page. We will discuss this in another post. This post is mainly meant to discuss the advantages!

The major advantages of Google Adwords are:

• Immediate activation. Google Ads go live almost immediately after it is created.

• Low startup cost: Google charges just $5.00 to activate your campaign. There are no minimum monthly fees and you are billed only after you get the clicks. Even the smallest business can afford to advertise on Google.

• Set Your Budget: You can set daily budgets for all your campaigns. Google will manage the advertisement placing automatically through out the day.

• Optimized Cost Per Click: Even though you have to specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click, your actual price per click is just one cent more than your closest competitor.

• Relevant Ads = Better Ranking at No Extra Cost: The positions are determined by a combination of cost per click (CPC) and click through rates (CTR). Just because some one is willing to set a very high CPC, it will not ensure that their advertisement is shown at the top most position. If you make a relevant advertisement you can attain the top position without setting a very high CPC. If an ad is irrelevant to a web visitor, she won't click on it and if not many people are clicking on it, it will move down the page. Ads that are clicked more will rise to the top, at no extra cost to you.

• Large Content Partner Network: You can elect to have your advertisements shown on Google (as part of search results) or on a large number of partner sites (called content network).

• Powerful Tools: Google offers a number of useful of tools to forecast your budget and traffic, select target keywords, select campaign negative content network sites, diagnose advertisements and track conversions. The Google keyword tool suggests other phrases, popular synonyms, etc. based on actual searches. This results in better advertisement targeting and high click-throughs. We recommend using Keyword Strategy Studio for finding and managing the keywords. You can use the Adword campaign to fine tune your lists.

• Geographical Targeting: Your advertisements can be targeted to users in a specific country or only to speakers of a specific language. Supports 200+ countries and 14 languages.

• Easy Campaign Management: You can create multiple ads per campaign. Google will track individual ad performance and you can weed out the advertisements that are not performing well. You can also create multiple Ad Groups, set a maximum price for an individual keyword or a group of keywords, and so on.

So if Google Adwords are so great, why do some people miserably fail at it?

There are a number of possible reasons but the most important is not being able to meet the visitor's expectations after she or he clicked on the Google Adword link and landed at the web page. We will discuss this in another post.

A Six Step Action Plan For Massively Improving Your Pay Per Click Campaign Returns!

Have you segmented your existing PPC campaigns into smaller niches?

Here is a simple action plan for improving the Return On Investment (ROI) in your PPC advertisement campaigns.

1. Select a smaller niche target group for your product.

For example if you provide web page design services, select a smaller niche within your customer base. For example, Web design services for travel agents or Web design services for Realtors.

2. Create landing and support pages.

Create new landing pages and other support pages suitable for the new niche. Do a keyword and competition analysis on the customer's niche using Keyword Strategy Studio. Use it to study the common problems faced by your prospective customers. Explain how your service will provide solutions to these problems.

3. Find keywords

Find suitable keywords targeting the new niche. Keyword Strategy Studio will be very handy for this. Since you have expanded the base to include a new niche you will be able to find a larger number of long-tail keywords.

4. Create new advertisement texts

Create new advertisement texts for your PPC campaign. Remember that you are now targeting a new customer base. Use the information you learnt from the competition analysis of the new niche while creating the new advertisement texts.

Your prospective customers will be always be attracted to your service because your offer is unique to his requirements and stand out from the generic crowd of service providers.

5. Run the PPC campaigns

Start the new campaigns as a new ad-group. Test and tweak till you get a good ROI.

6. Repeat for more smaller niche target groups.

You can now start creating new ad-groups based on different customer niches, geographical locations (e.g.: Web design for New York Companies)

The New Google Adwords URL Policy

Google will be enforcing their updated URL policy from April 1, 2008. Probably not an April Fools Joke because it was posted at the Inside Adwords Blog long ago!

The rule is very simple...

Your display URL and the Adwords landing page URL should have the same domain name!

You can continue to use an intermediate tracking URL before redirecting to the final landing page. However the final landing page should use the same domain as your display URL.

If your final Adwords landing page is

http://www.softnik.com/whatever/....

The Display URL should use softnik.com

Sub-domains are allowed. So you can use...

http://help.softnik.com/whatever/.... as the landing page and support.softnik.com as the display URL.

The key thing to remember is the main domain name. As long as both match, you are fine.

Filtering Large Keyword Lists Using Keyword Strategy Studio

While studying our own log files I often extract the search terms used by visitors to our sites. These lists normally contain a large number of keywords. I then use Keyword Strategy Studio to categorize these keywords based on the terms present in each phrase.

Here is a small example - a sample list extracted from this blog's log, that contain the terms "PHP" and "redirect". Notice that some are misspellings!

multiple domain names php
multiple domain redirection php
multiple redirect url in contact form script
php multiple redirect
php multiple redirect how
php multiple url redirection
php redirect
php redirect multiple domains
php redirect script domain name
rederict php script
redirect multiple sites php
redirect script php based on keyword
redirect.txt
redirecting multible domains php
redirecting to multiple domains
simple blog php script
simple php redirect

(I used this just as an example. We don't really have any PHP related products. The above is the consequence of a blog post that offered a simple PHP script for redirecting to multiple domains)

Keyword Strategy Studio is very handy when it comes to peeling away the required keyword phrases from large lists.

Simply add your full list to one of the "My keyword Lists" in Keyword Builder. Then use the "Filter" button and select "Containing Terms Anywhere". Type in all the terms into the box that pops up (one entry per line) and click OK. For the above, I typed in

PHP
redirect

This will highlight all the keywords that contain the words PHP or redirect. Now use one of the options under "Export" to transfer the highlighted keywords to a file or to another list. You can use the "Filter" to do other things like finding keywords that contain terms only at the start or end, phrases that contain more than a specified number of words etc.

The main advantage here is that you can pull out all keyword phrases that contain "any" of the terms you specify. You could be trying to find all phrases that contain any of 50 different terms. All you have to do is paste all the 50 terms into the box and click OK. The entire thing gets done in just one step!

The main keyword list can come from anywhere and not really from your own logs. Keyword Strategy Studio can handle very large lists containing tens of thousands of keyword phrases and the filtering is extremely fast.

If you are familiar with Google Adwords you will quickly see that the Filter option is very useful for creating precisely targeted Ad-groups.

Improve Your Pay Per Click Campaign Performance With This Quick Action Plan

Here is a quick tip to improve the performance of some of your Pay Per Click / Google Adword Campaigns.

Pick all the long tail keywords that have actually brought visitors to your site and are relevant to any of your ad-groups. Now group them based on the purpose behind the search and pick the group that has most number of keywords.

Now study each of these keywords. Can you find the intent behind the search? Start thinking like the person who made that search, Go to the web page on your site where the visitor would have landed after clicking on your advertisement text.

• Does your web page answer the question posed by the search query?
• Is there any thing that might distract him or her?
• Is the call to action present and relevant to her probable thought process?

Make a copy of your landing page. Modify the content to make it fully relevant to the person who did the search for that long-tail keyword phrase. Simply answer his or her questions and make the call to action. Avoid other distractions.

Save the modified page as a new landing page. Use the keywords in the group along with the new landing page in a new ad-group in Google. Use phrase matching for the keywords if required.

Monitor the performance and tweak over the next few weeks.

Take the next keyword set and do the same!

Please note that this method is mostly suitable for groups of long-tail keywords because the actual purpose behind the searches are obvious.

Google Adwords Quality Score Improvements

Google has incorporated some enhancements to the way the quality scores are displayed in Adwords accounts. While this was announced a while ago, the changes have taken effect (for all advertisers) very recently.

So, what are the changes?

1. The quality scores are now dynamically updated

Every time a search is made, the quality score is evaluated. The quality score is evaluated based on the quality of the landing page and click through rate (CTR). The Google Adwords blog states that the landing page quality is evaluated less frequently even though the over all quality score is evaluated at the time of the search.

2. "Minimum bids" are now replaced with "first page bid estimates"

The first page bid estimate is the approximate CPC bid required so that your advertisement shows up in the first page of Google search results. This is displayed as "Estimated bid to show on the first page".

If you are already bidding more than the first page bid estimate, the value will be displayed only on the Keyword Analysis page. This is accessible from Details and recommendations link (see the screen shot).

3. All keywords are active

This is more of a cosmetic change. There will not be any "inactive for search" status for your keywords. This doesn't mean that there will be impressions for all keywords.

Read more about the changes at the official Google Adwords blog - Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days

Google Keyword Matching Options

Ever since the Google Keyword Tool started showing the search volume counts, people have become confused about the keyword match modes shown within the tool and actual phrase searches in Google. The problem is mainly because Google Keyword Tool displays exact match terms within a pair of [square brackets].

Remember that the Google keyword Tool is primarily meant for Google advertisers. The square brackets are used in Adword settings to specify that an ad-text be shown only when the exact phrase is typed in as a search query.

To do a phrase search in Google you should use quotes!

Because of seeing square brackets for exact search, people assume that they should use [] to do an exact phrase search in Google!

This is not so! You should use quotes to do exact searches and not square brackets.

You can easily verify this...

[domain name software] - 7,080,000 results in Google US (as on 12 Oct 2008)

"domain name software" - 48,200 results in Google US (as on 12 Oct 2008)

It is obvious that Google treats [domain name software] and domain name software almost the same!

Differences between various Google Match Modes

Google Adwords uses four different match modes. These are already explained well in the official Google documentation about match modes. But we still get a lot of emails asking about this.

Broad match

If your keyword is luxury car rental, the ad-text will show for any of the following searches...

• luxury
• car
• rental
• car rental
• rental car
• cheap car rental
• luxury car rental
• car rental luxury
• luxury hotels
• used car

It is obvious that broad match will trigger the maximum number of advertisements and that you have to be very careful with it. If your business is luxury car rental, you do not want to trigger advertisements for terms like cheap car rental and used cars!

Phrase Match

Phrase match gives you a little more control because the words now have to appear in the same order. For example, if your keyword is "car rental" (within quotes), the following searches will trigger the ad...

• Europe car rental
• car rental Atlanta
• luxury car rental
• cheap car rental

But it will not trigger ads for

• rental car
• rental luxury cars
• car Atlanta rental
• car cheap rental
• car rent

Exact Match

Exact match means exactly that... if your keyword is [luxury car rental] (within square brackets), the ads will trigger when some one searches for luxury car rental and nothing else. The ads will not show if some one searches for luxury car rental Atlanta!

Negative Match

Use negative match to fix the broad match problem mentioned above. If you add -cheap as a keyword, Google will not trigger ads if the word cheap is present anywhere in the search query. If you use a lot of broad match terms, the negative keywords are very very important. In such cases, not using negative keywords in your Google Adword campaign will most likely result in huge costs and no benefits!

Tip: Make Sure That All Your Google Keyword Research is Never Lost!

Good Keywords v3 beta is now available and the first tool we have included is a little but powerful utility to manage the CSV files created by the Google keyword tool. Use it to import the CSV files into a local database. Then use the built-in query box to list any keywords you need!

The database created by Good keywords v3 is permanently available to you. You can even open it using the database tool of Open-Office or Microsoft Office!

You can download the current beta version from the Good Keywords home page

A simple screen shot video demo is also available.