Last week I walked a Dallas business owner through the process of setting up some Adwords ads to advertise his company’s services. Having set up many other Adwords campaigns I realized that I’ve learned to take a lot of things for granted. As I was preparing to walk him through setting up his campaign and his ad groups, here is the list of questions that came to mind.
- What keywords do you plan to target?
- What is your advertising budget?
- Who are your competitors?
- What are the demographics of your customers?
- What time of the day should your ads display?
- What day of the week should your ads display?
- Do you have an optimized landing page?
- What do you want people to do when they visit your landing page?
- Does your landing page do any lead capture?
- How do you plan to measure effectiveness of your ad?
- How will you track conversions?
- Do you have a list of negative keywords?
- Do you have a list of negative qualifiers?
- Do you have a plan for formatting your ads?
- Do you plan to split test your ads?
Of course, each of these questions has a lot more behind them, so before we could actually get down to setting up the ads we had to spend time covering what each of these questions meant.
What keywords do you plan to target? Knowing what keywords to target is extremely important. Keep in mind that trying to target the wrong keywords will cost you money.
What is your advertising budget? Your advertising budget won’t necessarily determine the success or failure of your campaign, but there are some important things to consider when choosing an advertising budget. For one thing, depending on how many clicks you get and how much money you allocate, Google will try to spread your ad views out over the course of each day. If you set your budget too low, then your ads may not show as often as you want. Another thing to consider is that throwing money at Google won’t equal success. You still have to do the work to test and optimize your ads and track their effectiveness before you consider supplying more funds.
Who are your competitors? It’s important for any business to know who their competitors are, but in terms of advertising, you also need to know what ads they are running, what keywords they are targeting, and what message they are providing. Just because they are spending money on an ad doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing. Take the time to look at what they’re doing and see if there are ways that you could be doing things better.
What are the demographics of your customers? Knowing who you are advertising to is very important. Selling diapers to a 20 year old single male is going to be a lot harder than selling the same product to a married mother of newborn twins. Look at genders, age, and geographic location of your target audience. What motivates them and what conversation is going on inside their head already?
What time of the day should your ads display? As mentioned earlier, Google tries to show your ads evenly throughout each day, so if you can set your ads to show only during certain times of day, then you can increase the changes that the right group of people will see your ads. If your customers are only online between 6pm and 10pm, then only show your ads during those times.
What day of the week should your ads display? The same concept applies for days of the week. If you customers are only looking for your products or services from Monday to Friday, then don’t waste your time showing them on the weekend. If they only think about your topic on Wednesday mornings from 9am to 10am, then schedule your ads to show on that day and time.
Do you have an optimized landing page? This is one of the big mistakes that most Adwords advertisers make. They set up the ads, spend their money on clicks, and fail to have a landing page that is designed to capitalize on the traffic they are buying. Most of the time they just choose a page on their website that they think is good enough and they send the traffic there. What they should be doing is building a custom landing page that is tailored to be related to their ad so that they get the best results.
What do you want people to do when they visit your landing page? Having an optimized landing page should mean that you can answer the question, “What do we want them to do when they get to the landing page”. If you can answer this question, then you will be moving closer to making your advertising work for you. Maybe the customer is suppose to buy something. Maybe they are suppose to give you their email address. Maybe they are suppose to click through to another website. Whatever the action, the page should be designed to encourage the behavior once they get there.
Does your landing page do any lead capture? If you landing page does nothing else, it should be working for you as a lead capture tool. You are paying to get targeted visitors to your website. You should at least provide them with an opportunity to join your mailing list so you can communicate with them beyond the initial click. You’re already paying for the traffic, you might as well maximize its potential.
How do you plan to measure effectiveness of your ad? This question is a bit subjective because your business might measure effectiveness as the number of products purchased, or the number of new memberships, or the number or new newsletter signups. The metric you use to determine if an ad is working or not is up to you. The real point is to know how you will measure that effectiveness before you start advertising.
How will you track conversions? Tracking conversion goes right along with measuring effectiveness. The real point is how will you know when an action is tied to a paid visitor? Google provides code you can use to track specific events that are tied to your Adwords traffic. It’s a good idea to understand how the code works and then use it to know for sure that your ads are working.
Do you have a list of negative keywords? It’s true that you want to target the keywords you customers are using to search for your products or services. But, you also need to consider using keywords that exclude unwanted visitors. Making sure you don’t get the wrong traffic is just as important as making sure you get the right traffic. It will save you money, both in terms of bad clicks and the cost of those clicks.
Do you have a list of negative qualifiers? Negative qualifiers work the same way negative keywords work, except you are trying to further segment who clicks on your ad by using terms in your ad that may attract or repel certain types of visitors. For example, if your ad talks about a “$1 Trial”, then you will get a different response than if your ad said “Free Trial”. You can use geography, gender, age, shipping, cost, size, color, you name it to attract or repel ad clicks.
Do you have a plan for formatting your ads? Ad formatting is often overlooked when ads are placed. There are several elements to text ad. There is the headline, the ad body, and the display url. Your headline should include the keyword you’re targeting, if possible. The body should offer something the searcher is trying to move toward or move away from. You should try to address the conversation that is already going on in the persons head. Your display URL should be camel cased so that the first letter of each word is capitalized (ie., OpenSourceMarketer.com). Camel casing your URL makes it easier for people to read. There is more to composing your ad, but these items are the low hanging fruit.
Do you plan to split test your ads? Testing your ads is extremely important. At a minimum you should be running two ads at the same time to see which one does better. Each ad should be exactly the same except for one element, like the headline. By changing only one thing, you will be able to see which ads does better and know why that might be. Once you have a better performing ad you can stop the low performer, copy the high performer, and make another change to try to further improve your ad. This type of incremental testing is essential to running an effective campaign.
So after we spent about an hour going over these concepts, and he spent several more hours thinking about the information I gave him, we were ready to actually place the ads. Setting up Adwords ads is fairly easy, if you have all of these questions answered before you start. Having your ad text ready and knowing which keyword you want to use saves you a lot of time.
Next, I’ll be working with the business owner to help him come up with a list of keywords that he can target with different ads to bring more traffic to his website. That part takes a good bit of analysis both on my part and his. I’ll come up with a list of keywords that have high search volume and low competition, and he will have to determine which of those keywords are relevant to his business.
It really is as much of an art as a science.
Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
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