Zen is about balance. A successful AdWords campaign is complex and involves a number of potentially competing considerations. Understanding the Zen of AdWords means learning to balance these considerations.
Before you can begin to refine an AdWords campaign, you must understand the goal of the campaign. Since AdWords is more compatible with formal ways to define success and failure than conventional (pre-CPC) advertising, it is desirable to reduce the criteria for a successful campaign to a standard metric. For example, the campaign is successful on an individual basis if a visitor clicks on my site landing page. But it’s better to work for conversions, which are really the point of most CPC ads.
Therefore, a campaign is successful if a visitor buys my product online (or by picking up the phone to place an order after visiting my site).
In addition, you will need to determine the range of aggregate actions that constitute success. If 100,000 people buy my book, it is a success. But if only 10 people buy the same book, it is a failure. With your success metric in hand, it’s time to consider the steps to AdWords success that need to be balanced.
A good way to look at things is to remember the five-step process you want your potential customers to take:
Your potential customer searches for something—for example, “digital photography”
Your ad appears above or to the right of the search results (a slight variation is that your ad might also appear next to content on a website as a result of the AdSense program)
The customer reads your ad and clicks on it
The customer visits your site
The customer buys something, preferably online, but a purchase by phone isn’t bad either
The desired end result of this process is the conversion.
Once you’ve dissected the process into those five steps, you need to consider the five actions you should take to encourage the desired result. Balancing these five steps constitutes the Zen of AdWords.
The basis for your ad that the potential customer will see step 1 is the keywords you choose. This means that picking the right keywords is critical to a successful AdWords campaign. You need to pick the words that people who are receptive to buying your product will be searching for. How can you find these words? The AdWords Keyword Tool, explained in Chapter 11, gives you good ideas of popular words and phrases you can consider.
More generally, you should consider the question, “What are people searching for on the Web?”
In addition to the Keyword Tool, there are many sites on the Web (both free and paid) that can help you generate keywords. While I’m not endorsing any specific resource in this arena, some of these sites are undoubtedly helpful. However, you should also strongly rely on your own expertise regarding trade practices and keywords in the specific market niches of the product area you are working with.
One simple thing to think about regarding keywords is that you should try different modifiers and stems, e.g., “photo accessories” as well as “photo supplies.” If you are promoting a local business, you should definitely include that in your keyword phrases—for example, “Berkeley, California, chiropractor.”
Remember that you are trying to reach customers who are on their way to making a purchasing decision. From this viewpoint, you want people interested in specific items rather than those playing the field with research-oriented terms. As an example, “camera review” indicates someone who is in the early stages of thinking about a purchase, whereas a specific product search (“Nikon D300”) may indicate someone who is ready to buy.
Another example: a search for “sports cars” probably indicates someone who is doing research, while a search for a specific car model may come from someone who is closer to actually buying.
There’s a reason that terms that indicate research are cheaper to bid for on AdWords than specific product terms. That said, some businesses want to purchase both the less expensive research terms and the more specific (and closer-to-buying) product terms. In the car example, buying a car can involve a long and drawn-out period of research (after all, it is a major purchase). So it may make sense to advertise at a variety of points along the timeline involved, although the specifics of this depend upon your campaign goals, marketing budgets, and so on.
As a matter of budget, it also may make sense to target the #2 or #3 advertising spot rather than the top spot in search results ads. Your ad will get seen just as often, and the approach will possibly save you quite a bit of money.
You should also be careful to use keyword terms that will limit clicks to people who are actually appropriate for your business. If you sell wholesale supplies, make sure to include modifiers like “bulk”—you don’t want to pay for clicks by people who search for (and want to buy) single items, and will likely go elsewhere once they see you are a wholesaler.
After you’ve determined your keywords, the next step is getting the ads that correspond to those keywords seen, and figuring out if your ads work.
You won’t be able to know if your ads work until they are seen. You need data to work from. So start out by bidding high enough that your ads will show up first or second. You can lower your bids to more comfortable levels after a few days, but in the beginning you need plenty of impressions.
If you are running massive AdWords campaigns that involve many keywords, there are third-party automated tools that can help with the management chores that this involves. (Once again, I am not endorsing any specific commercial solution.)
Consider that search patterns are different at different times of day, and this may have a major impact on your AdWords campaign, depending on the product you are selling. For example, people search for different things when they are at the office and when they are at home. Depending on your product, you may want to factor this in and pay more for keywords when your target audience is active.
A similar concept is to vary your ads seasonally. Some ads are more appropriate for winter than summer (or vice versa), and some ads are essentially intended for a specific holiday season. Google Insights for Search can help you understand seasonality and how it relates to your business.
In addition, ads related to a product launch should be timed to intensify around the launch itself. They might start a few weeks before the ad, with visitors asked to add their names to an email list. Then, plan to campaign extremely heavily just as the product is launched.
With some good keywords in place, and high enough bidding so that your ads are being shown, the next trick is to make sure that your ad copy is working—and getting qualified visitors to click through your ad. (See Chapter 2 for some ideas about what works in advertising campaigns, and Chapter 10 for suggestions for crafting ad copy for AdWords.)
Make sure to include your keywords in the ad—this works to increase conversions, since Google bolds the keyword text in the ad copy, which helps make your ad stand out.
Your best bet is to have at least three or four ad variations running. Each of these variations should have a different title. Google will rotate your ads to show the best performer.
Ad copy is a great place for differentiation. Use your ad to show why and how you are a little bit different from your competition.
Just as you should use your keyword selection to prequalify visitors, your ad copy should prequalify them as well. You really don’t want to pay for clicks for anyone who isn’t really interested. If you are giving away a free whitepaper but you require registration, indicate that fact (“Register for free whitepaper”) so that no one who is going to balk at the registration requirement clicks.
Make sure the landing page that the visitor clicks through is effective. This isn’t a matter of fancy graphics. Rather, it is an issue of form-follows-function design. You want it to be easy for the visitors that you have worked so hard to land to find what they came for. Be sure to provide About and Contact pages that are easy to find.
It’s a good idea to have a separate landing page for each major group of AdWords ads. Specific landing pages designed for conversion tend to work better than a more generic website home page.
If your landing page looks bad, or is hard to navigate, your entire expensive and elaborate AdWords campaign is for nothing. In this day and age of information glut, you don’t have long to keep someone’s attention—a couple of seconds at most. So don’t blow the opportunity.
More generally, your entire site should be designed to help enable the results you want. It should be easy to find products on your site, the purchasing experience should be smooth, and you are better off not trying to offer your visitors fishy add-ons in addition to the product they came to find.
The overall conversion rate across AdWords and the Web, depending on a number of issues and definitions, is roughly between 1 and 2 percent. Are your numbers in line with this statistic? You won’t know until you track conversions (see Chapter 13 for information about the conversion tracking tools that Google AdWords provides and to learn more about Google Analytics).
Successful AdWords campaigns have a kind of balance that you recognize when you see. Each of the five aspects of an AdWords campaign affects the other aspects.
The right keywords won’t work if the price is wrong, or if the ad copy isn’t any good, or if your web presence doesn’t convert. Great ad copy won’t do a thing if you’ve picked the wrong keywords. All five aspects of your Zen AdWords campaign must be in place, working harmoniously, and contained within a feedback loop. To stay in balance, you need to know what work—and what doesn’t.