Google adwords tips

Before you start, you can read industry specific information which is provided by google for free: http://adwords.google.com/support/?h1=en_us
The aim of this information is for you to learn how to get a good adword placing whilst paying less than what your competitor does. Another objective is to get your ads standing out from the rest and making the ads more enticing to the viewer.
The key to a good google ad campaign is to have finely tuned ads with very specific keywords. There are techniques that will get you more click throughs and also more sales.

When you advertise with google you have the potential to put your ad in front of people all around the world, or you can choose specific countries, or specific cities, and even specific suburbs. When you are setting up your google campaign, there are three main categories that you can choose from in terms of

The advantage of content is that more people see your ad which means there is a higher chance of someone clicking on your ad. Google gives you the ability to separate the bids of the content ads and the search results ads. This means you can pay less for the content ads if you like. The disadvantage of content ads is that you don’t get to know what keyword they had in mind when they clicked on your ad.

Quality Score

Google gives a quality score to each ad that is displayed. This score is effected by the keyword click-though rate, the history of how the ad has performed, how well the keyword is applicable to the ad, the content and the layout of the landing page, and a number of other factors. This means if you want your ad to appear when someone types in ‘sunglasses’ then you want your ad to: (i) contain this keyword sunglasses, and (ii) to link through to a page relating to sunglasses. You also want a good click through rate which is a way of measuring how many clicks your ad has had. If your ad has displayed 10 times and has been clicked on 5 times then this is a good result and your click through rate is 50%. If the your ad has displayed 1000 times and has been clicked on 5 times then this not a good result and your click through rate would be 0.5%. If you have a number of words which have good click through rates (CTR) but one of them does not have a good click through rate, then it is better to delete the underperforming word as they are bringing the total % down.

The Historical Keyword Performance is another factor that effects your quality score. This is how well your ad has performed over time which means you are better off having a compelling ad from the start.

Relevance of the Keywords to the ad is based on the use of the keywords within the ad and the placement of the keywords. For example if an ad uses sunglasses only once and at the very end then it would seem that the ad does not have much to do with sunglasses. However, if the ad used the keyword sunglasses a few times and started off with the word sunglasses within the title of the ad, then the ad is very relevant to the word sunglasses.

The content and layout of the landing page is also very important in the quality of your ad. Google visits the landing page before the ad goes live so google knows the content of the landing page. For example if your ad was advertising sunglasses, but when the end user clicked on the ad he/she is taken to a page about ear plugs, then the landing page is not relevant to the word sunglasses. Another example is when an ad for sunglasses links through to a page about sunglasses, but all the page contains is the product with a picture and price but with no description is almost as bad as the first example. It is much better to have a thorough description which contains lots of keywords. Other factors help which relate to how well your page has been SEOed or has been made search engine friendly. This means that the page has been modified or put together with search engines in mind. It is important that the landing page clearly communicates to google that it is relevant to the advertisement that is linking to it.

This section will be expanding on in coming weeks