Jeff Vanlaningham

I wanted to take some time to write about something I do for my job.  Google Ad Words.  Now as you will quickly learn, I am far from an expert, but I have been running a large account for over a year now and there are some basic strategies that I wanted to share that might help you beginners.  For the purpose of this article, I am going to assume the reader knows the basics.  If not a great start up tutorial can be found here

What type of Keywords to bid on:

For starters, you have three basic keyword searches that you can use.  A broad match, a phrase match and an exact match.  Say you bid on the keyword  “leather jacket” .  If you go with a broad match, anything that Google thinks is relevant will show up.  So while you are bidding on leather jacket, you could be showing under bath robe or apron.  Broad match gives you a ton of impressions but a poor CTR (more on that later) and a lot of garbage clicks in my opinion.  When I first started out, I had every keyword in our account on broad match.  It is almost impossible to get a good gauge on what your account and your consumers are really doing since you don’t actually know what the keyword they clicked on.  Whenever you go to set up an Ad words account or a new ad group, the default setting is broad match.  Ultimately, the one who benefits the most from this is Google themselves as more clicks mean more revenue for them.  Please don’t think I am knocking Google, I have the utmost respect for them as a company.  But they need to make money just like the rest of us and are going to set up this program to be beneficial to them first.  So what I did next was go from one extreme to another and switched all our keywords to an exact match.  You do this by actually adding brackets like [this] around the keyword.  This tells Google that you are only bidding on that exact match term.  This has its advantages.  You eliminate a ton of garbage clicks.  Your CTR (Click through Rate) will go up, which can help with what you are actually charged per click.  However, you are also missing a lot of potential clicks.  Let’s say you are bidding on Leather Jacket with an exact match.  Here are some terms you could be missing out on:  Black Leather Jacket, Cool Looking Leather Jacket, buy leather jacket.  You get the point.  When I switched everything over to exact match, there were some benefits but ultimately our traffic went down.  So what to do?  Enter Phrase match.  Phrase match is activated when you put quotations like “this” around a word.  Now let’s search the term “leather jacket”.  All the examples I gave earlier would be trigged because the phrase Leather Jacket is part of the search.  But it must have that phrase in it to be triggered.  Hence eliminating Google taking liberty with your keyword and showing whatever they think is relevant.   My current setup is about 95% phrase match with some broad and exact matches sprinkled in.  If you would like to know more about when to use those, just drop me a line and I would be happy to discuss that with you. 

What are some good measuring sticks of success?

I have had a lot of different answers to this question and am just going to share my basic experience on what I go after.  I am going to assume you are selling on your site and tracking conversions. 

So let’s take a basic account and look for some metrics.  Campaign A sells widgets.  Its daily budget is $50 a day.  In this campaign we have 25 ad groups that average 20 keywords each.  (Try not to let your keywords exceed 30 per ad group as this starts to confuse the Google machine)

At the end of two weeks this is how your stats look:

Campaign Name              Budget                 Clicks    Imp        CTR        Avg CPC   Cost   Conv Rate           Convs

Campaign A                        $50/day                243         16307    1.49%    $.29        $70.61   .41%                      1

Some people will tell you that a 1% Click through Rate is good (in fact, Google themselves told me this) I don’t buy it.  If you are only reaching 1% of the searches, that is unacceptable.  I want my campaigns to have at least a 3% CTR.  That’s low end and I have many that are well above 10% on the CTR.  So what to do about that.  Well there are several things that you can check for:

·         Is there one really broad keyword that is affecting my overall performance. 

·         Am I bidding high enough on certain keywords.  Looking at this example, I would be quick to look at that as .29 cents is great but you may need to push it up to gain better visibility

·         Do my ads make me want to click them?  Do a search of some terms and compare how your ads look to your competitors. What is good about theirs that yours is missing?  Fix it , Re-write it and always, always have at least two or three ads running so A/B test.

·         Do I have the content network turned on?  If so, turn it off and start a new campaign for just the content network on its own.  Never run them together.

How about a conversion rate of .41%, is that good?  Well it depends on your site, but the quick answer is NO, that is not good.  You should have at least a 1% conversion rate.  What to do about that.  Well lets assume your website is laid out well and you are priced competitively.  You cant fix web errors with Ad words.  Assuming that is all good, then check these things:

·         What page am I bringing them in to.  Consumers don’t want to have to work to find what they want.  If they searched Widget, bring them in to the widget page not your home page

·         Is my term I am bidding on pertinent to what the consumer wants.  IF I typed in Red, electric widget, then bring me in to that page that sells Red, electric widgets.  Or a term like free widgets.  Perhaps I should not be bidding on this term since its likely this person is not looking to buy.

So lets say we optimize this campaign and look at some of these factors.  Here is how I would want it to look in a few weeks:

Campaign Name              Budget                 Clicks    Imp        CTR        Avg CPC   Cost   Conv Rate           Convs

Campaign A                        $50/day                208         3902       5.33%    $.30        $61.41   1.44%                    3

So that’s some basic Ad words 101.  Some other random thoughts that you might want to look into:

·         You can adjust your bidding by times of day or days of week

·         You can turn your bidding off during hours that don’t perform well and set when it comes back on

·         Look into Keyword Substitution Ads for better CTR

·         Be wary of programs that claim they can monitor your competition. 

·         Use Vanity Display URLs in your ads..I.E  www.mysite.com/widget

Ok, enough of this, I would love to hear any best practices that you have had.  If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Jeff V

Tags: ad words, google, marketing