In this mini-series, I will be talking about running a Google AdWords campaign. I will cover quite a bit of detail about keyword research, writing ad text, creating landing pages, maintaining your campaign, and reporting and metrics.

Your landing page is a crucial part of getting customers to take action after clicking on one of your AdWords ads. There’s a good chance that they didn’t read too much of your ad, so a lot of your persuasion needs to take place on your landing page. And you didn’t really have much space to get your message across in a ridiculously short text ad, did you?

Why a landing page?

In the early days of AdWords advertising, a lot of companies were advertising for specific products and then pointing the ad to their company home page. This leads to poor results.

If a searcher clicks on an ad for Product X, then they expect to land on a web page that talks about Product X. Hey, you’re paying money for this specific segment of traffic, so you better give them what they want!

What a good landing page looks like

Well, the optimal landing page for your campaign is probably going to look different for almost every type of situation that you encounter. And unfortunately, you don’t know what a good landing page is until you try something.

The best thing that you can do is start with something simple. Create a landing page that offers only one action, be it selling one product or signing up for one thing like a newsletter. Don’t try distracting the user with too many different options. It should be clear to them what your page is about upon first glance.

Sometimes your product or service page will be good enough to be a landing page. Sometimes you’ll need to create separate landing pages for each ad group that you find keywords for. Sometimes a single landing page for your campaign will work just fine.

The point is that you’re probably not going to do so well right out the gate.

13 tips for writing the ultimate landing page

Copyblogger has a great article about writing the ultimate landing page. To sum it up, here are the 13 tips (they had bonus tips) that they listed:

1. Make sure your headline refers directly to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click.
2. Provide a clear call to action.
3. Write in the second person – You and Your.
4. Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase.
5. You can write long copy as long as it’s tight.
6. Be crystal clear in your goals.
7. Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets.
8. In line with #7, people read beginnings and ends before they read middles.
9. Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines
10. Write to the screen.
11. Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page.
12. Don’t ask for what you don’t need.
13. Assume nothing. Test everything.

It all comes down to tying the experience back to the ad that referred the visitor. This is why you may need to create separate landing pages for each of your ad groups in your campaign. You may need to tell a separate story for each of your groups of related keywords.

For example, if you were advertising on cheap toilets, then you probably wouldn’t want to offer up your most expensive toilet. For expensive toilets, create a different landing page that offers one of your higher-priced items.

Experiments and A/B or multivariate testing

If this is your first shot at paid search, the best thing that you can do is to create a couple different versions of your landing page. This is referred to as an A/B test. Then all you need to do is create 2 identical Ad Texts in AdWords, except point the Destination URL for each to your 2 different landing pages. Let it run for about a week and see which landing page is yielding better results.

There are just so many things that you can experiment with that you just need to jump in. Try testing the effects of these elements:

• Presence or absence of navigation
• Offering a special deal (if sales are your goal)
• Adding sub-offers for those who may not be interested in your primary offer
• Positioning of graphics and buttons
• Length/detail of copy
• Different headlines

The main point is to only test one variable at a time. If you want to see if having navigation on the page affects results, create 2 landing pages:

1. One with navigation
2. One without navigation

If you try changing too many different things at once in a simple A/B test, you won’t know which page elements in particular caused a change in performance.

Tools like Google Website Optimizer can also help you test many variables at once. If you’re testing more than 1 variable, then it’s called multivariate testing.

Keep in mind that the more variables that you want to test, the longer that you’ll need to run the test in order to get more meaningful data.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, adwords, campaign, google, internet marketing, landing page, landing pages, marketing, ppc, Search Marketing, Writing

In this mini-series, I will be talking about running a Google AdWords campaign. I will cover quite a bit of detail about keyword research, writing ad text, creating landing pages, maintaining your campaign, and reporting and metrics.

Another crucial element of your Google AdWords campaign is the ad itself. You only have so many characters available to express yourself, set the searcher’s expectations on your offerings, and get the searcher enticed to click.

The strategy

In my post about AdWords keyword research, I instructed you to break your keywords into different groups. There are a couple reasons for doing this:

1. If you can align your ads and landing pages to the different “themes” of keywords, then your message will resonate better with searchers.
2. AdWords has a relevance-scoring system called Quality Score. If your keywords are well-aligned with your ads and landing pages, then Google will charge you less per click and rank your ad higher.

I felt the need to split the 2 seemingly similar reasons out because I think that we still need to consider the first point. Focusing just on Google’s Quality Score can sometimes lead you down the wrong path.

Now we can craft our ad texts with our keyword groups.

Writing the ad text

Writing an ad for Google is kind of like writing a Haiku. There isn’t a whole lot of space to get your message across. Here’s what you have to work with:

So what do you want to do with this limited space?

First, add in as many words from the “keyword theme” as possible. When people see their search words bolded on the page, there is a higher likelihood that their eye to be drawn to the ad. This is especially important for the headline.

Next, try to add some actionable text in the ad as well. If you’re offering a white paper, saying “Free White Paper.” If you are offering a sales promotion, say, “Save 33% Today!” If neither of those are the case, then put in your unique value proposition. You get the idea.

Tip: Stand out from the competition

If you’re in a competitive niche, beware of writing ads that look the same as everyone else’s. The eye is trained to focus on elements of the page that are different, so if your ad looks the same as all the others, it will likely be ignored.

Take this example from a search that I ran for email marketing:

What’s the difference between all of these ads? Why should I click on one versus another? There’s little here that would compel me to make my choice one way or the other.

Sometimes it’s great to use the target phrase as the headline. Just make sure that it’s not everyone else’s strategy!

How to STAND OUT

Like I said, the best way to stand out is to be different. Although your ads are text-based, there are a few tools in your arsenal besides just using the searchers’ terms:

• Numerals draw the eye. Display a special price, a performance metric (“80% faster”), a discount rate, or whatever you can think of. Put it in your headline and/or ad text. Use the numeral characters. Don’t spell the numeric words out!
• Capitalize the first letter of each word. I’ve run multivariate tests using Capitalized Words versus non-capitalized words and got better click-through rates with the capitalized ads. Feel free to try running 2 different versions yourself to see which works better.
• Use a friendly display URL. If your website’s domain name is perfectpcrepairs.com, spell it in the ad as PerfectPcRepairs.com. It’s readable and more memorable.
• Use of special characters. Google doesn’t let you use too many special characters, but you can usually get away with adding in something like a chevron (») or double greater-than’s (>>). This is especially great if your product or service involves movement.

Test several ads

As I alluded to above, you should try out different ads and see what works best. What gets the most clicks? Which drives the most conversions? Based on your goals, pick the top performer. Then try tweaking it even more.

Then be sure to monitor performance and the competition after a while. Things are constantly changing in this landscape, so you need to be on your toes.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.

Technorati Tags: ad, ad text, ad texts, ads, Advertising, adwords, google, google adwords, internet marketing, marketing, ppc, search advertising, Search Marketing, sem, Writing

From MarketingSherpa: Four Strategies to Bend Rules on Landing Pages and Double Conversion Rates

I wish they would have cited me in the places where it was me talking, but I’ll take it. Our team is very proud of this.

The lesson: There are times to follow best practices, and there are times to bend the rules a little. And when you have conclusive data to back it up, you get industry coverage.

Technorati Tags: design, landing page, landing pages, marketing, marketingsherpa, Search Marketing, testing

A crucial part of running an AdWords campaign is selecting relevant and profitable keywords. The wrong keywords can suck away your budget faster than you can say, “No, Google!” leaving you with absolutely nothing in return.

Finding keywords for use in AdWords

There are plenty of places to look for keywords to advertise on. I’ll outline a few ideas.

Option #1: Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google offers a free keyword tool to help you figure out what searchers are entering into the search box. The tool will give you a ballpark on how popular a given term is and how many other advertisers are bidding on that term.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to use it.

1. First, enter a few ideas on terms that you’d like to advertise on.
   
2. The tool will whirl and bang and return you a sleuth of useful data:
   Notice columns for Advertiser Competition and Search Volume. These columns will give you an idea about how competitive a term is and how many searchers out there are typing the term in. The more competitive the term, the higher you’ll need to bid to get good placement.
3. Just above the list of terms is a drop-down menu called Match Type. This is where you choose what kind of keyword match that you would like. See the section on Entering Keywords into the System below to get a better understanding of what these match types mean.
4. You can then click the Add button for each keyword that you’re interested in. This will add the keyword to a list on the right side of the screen. I like to call this my “keyword shopping cart.” You’re just building a list at this point.
   
5. After adding the keywords to the list, you can either instruct AdWords to build a new campaign with these selections, or you can export the list to a number of file formats like a text file or spreadsheet.
6. Blam! Wash, rinse, and repeat. Then you’re done with this tool.

A note about the AdWords Keyword Tool. At first, you may admire Google for sharing so much data with you. But beware. There’s always a hidden motivation behind free data and services. There’s a great possibility that these keywords make Google the most money, but they don’t necessarily have your best interests in mind.

Option #2: Keyword Discovery

Another tool that I enjoy using for keyword research is Trellian’s Keyword Discovery. There’s something comforting about going to a 3rd party to get keyword data. The only downside is that it’s not free, but there is a free trial if you want to see if the tool works for your business.

Here’s how to get some good keyword data for our marble toilets campaign.

1. After signing in, click the Projects link in the top navigation.
   
2. This is where you’ll create a “keyword shopping cart” to store any keywords that you may find for your AdWords campaign. Add a new project and give it a name.
3. Next, click the Research link in the top navigation.
   
4. You’ll now be at a screen with a search box. Go ahead and enter a keyword idea into the search box. Next, in the Database drop-down, choose Historical Global. With an AdWords campaign, we want as many keywords as possible and don’t care as much about quality of keyword data. Also, choose 100 for Results per page.
   
5. When you run the search, you’ll get back data that Keyword Discovery has containing the words that you entered into the search box.
   
   Select keywords that you’re interested in and click the Add button at the bottom of the list. If there’s more than 1 page, be sure to see what’s on the other pages. Ignore the number of searches in the Searches column. It’s irrelevant for this activity.
6. Be sure to run the search several times for different combinations of words, as well as their plural and singular forms. This tool is quite a bit more strict than Google’s keyword research tool.
7. When you’ve added a sufficient number of keywords to your list, click the Projects link in the top navigation again.
8. Click your project name.
9. A sample list of the keywords that you selected will appear to the right. At the bottom of the list is a series of icons. If you click the little icon that looks like 2 documents (which says Export Keywords when you hover over it), you can export your keywords to a number of formats, including Excel.

There you have it for Keyword Discovery. Like the Google tool, Keyword Discovery isn’t perfect. But sometimes it can give you really great ideas. The database tends not to be too reliable if you’re researching a current or timely topic, but sometimes its sheer gold.

Option #3: Analytics data

Try looking through your web analytics data for keyword ideas.

If you don’t have web analytics set up, there are a lot of free options like Google Analytics and Microsoft adCenter Analytics.

Option #4: Your noggin

Don’t be afraid to use your imagination to come up with keyword ideas. Just because the keyword doesn’t appear in a database doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea!

Also see what keywords your competitors are using. Try out a thesaurus. Meditate. Whatever it takes.

Remember, if a keyword isn’t popular, it doesn’t cost you anything. You only pay when someone runs the search and clicks your ad. Unpopular keyword ideas don’t cost you a dime most of the time.

Organizing your keywords

After composing a list of keywords, try to split them into themes that share common words. Later when we create ads and landing pages, this step will pay off big time.

Let’s say that I have this list of keywords for my campaign:

• marble toilets
• smooth granite toilet
• stone toilets
• stone toilet
• marble toilet
• granite toilets
• granite toilet
• smooth marble toilets
• smooth toilet marble
• smooth marble toilet

I could potentially sort my list into these themes:

• Stone Toilets
• Marble Toilets
• Granite Toilets

For those of you who prefer Excel, try creating tabs for each theme and pasting the keywords into the appropriate tabs. If you end up with some stragglers that don’t fit in, consider trashing them.

When it comes to creating my campaign, I’ll be able to tell stories for each of these themes. The more that we can make the searcher feel like we have what they’re looking for, the better.

Entering keywords into the system

This is where you need to be careful. When you enter your keywords into AdWords, you have different matching options:

Broad Match

Example: marble toilets

By just entering the keyword in, you’re telling Google to match your phrase (marble toilets) as well as any additional words before or after the phrase.

On top of that, you’re telling Google, “Hey, man! Go ahead and match any other searches that you think are related to “marble toilets” as well.”You need to be careful about this. Don’t be surprised if Google starts matching phrases like “glass toilets” and “bathroom cabinets” as well. Anything they can do to show your ad more often and collect your cash.

Phrase Match

Example: “marble toilets”

When you enter the keyword surrounded with quotation marks, you’re telling Google to match your phrase (marble toilets) and any additional words before or after the phrase. In this case, Google won’t match you to any other related searches, so you lose a little bit of reach.

Exact Match

Example: [marble toilets]

Entering the keyword in [square brackets] tells Google, “Whoa buddy! Match this phrase. These words, in this exact order. And no funny stuff! Don’t match any other phrases.” While this option gives you the most control, you do lose a lot of reach. After all, you can’t guess every single phrase that anyone’s ever going to type in.

If you’re on a tight budget or want to start small, I recommend entering in a few exact match phrases and seeing what happens after a day or 2.

Final keyword research tips

Google AdWords is an auction service. This means that you’ll be bidding against competitors for prime space. You’ll also be battling competitors to be more relevant for the searches. (Google wants its ads to feel like search results as much as possible so that users still find what they’re looking for.)

How do you win at this game? You’ll be setting a daily or monthly budget. Once you run out of money for the day, Google stops showing your ads.

With that in mind, you’ll want to find keywords that don’t cost much per click. There are still opportunities out there that aren’t being exploited by any of your competitors. When no one’s bidding on a keyword, you can get away with pay cents per click.

If you only target competitive keywords, you’ll either lose to the noise of your competitors or blow through your budget quickly.

What sucks is that you don’t really know until you try. But a little creativity can go a long way. Don’t be afraid to get specific with keywords like [white swirl marble toilets]. Don’t be afraid to try misspellings. These searches may not yield boatloads of traffic, but they are cheap. And you have what the user is looking for when they do run the search.

This is part of a mini-series

Read the rest of Mini-series: How to run an AdWords campaign.

Technorati Tags: adwords, google, paid search, ppc, search advertising, Search Marketing, sponsored links

Chances are, your advertisement isn’t going to run smoothly when you start it up. I’m going to help you reduce your chances of wasting money. Believe me, Google is definitely ready to collect it.

Here are the steps that I will describe and illustrate:

1. Keyword research
2. Writing ad text
3. Creating landing pages
4. Maintaining your campaign
5. Reporting and metrics

How generic would this be if I didn’t have something to advertise? So, to make things interesting, I will be creating a fake campaign for marble toilets. And I’m going to DOMINATE. Just you watch.

Technorati Tags: adwords, google, google adwords, internet, internet marketing, marketing, ppc, search, Search Marketing

I’m not going to cover the exact mechanics of running an AdWords campaign in this post, but I am going to tell you what you should expect.

Top priority: gathering intelligence

The first thing to expect from Google AdWords is that you can’t predict what’s going to happen until you’ve let your campaign run a little bit. I’ve set up dozens of campaigns and found that some perform wonderfully out of the gate, but some will perform so miserably that it almost seems impossible to get a return on your investment.

Sometimes you enter a space with no competition and get great prices on clicks. Sometimes you enter a space so competitive that it’s very costly to even get in the first 8 spots.

It can take anywhere from a month to 3 months to get enough data to know how to improve your campaign. I like to think of this data as an investment. If you analyze your first 1-3 months’ worth of data correctly, you gain some valuable intelligence for improving your results.

AdWords is not a short-term activity

Like your website, AdWords campaigns need to be optimized. It is not a “set it and forget it” affair. Just letting destiny take its course is going to cost your business a lot of money with nothing to show for it.

Like I said, any intelligence that you gain for the purpose of optimizing your campaign is an investment. Why is that? Once you’ve reached a certain level of optimization, you can just let the campaign run. All of the work that you do to figure out which keywords and ads drive the best business can just run on its own for a while.

With AdWords, there’s always a changing landscape of competition, so you do need to keep an eye on things. But it certainly does feel good to let things run for a while, knowing that you’re getting a much better ROI than your competitors.

Most search marketers don’t know what they’re doing

I know that this makes things tough on you as a business owner. Who can you trust? As a search marketer myself, I’ve tried scratching the surface in conversations with other professionals in my industry. I’ve discovered some awesome techniques for improving AdWords lately, and none of my colleagues seem that interested in putting in the elbow grease to run these techniques and save their companies some serious cash.

Unless you’re set on becoming an expert search marketer yourself, you’re going to have some major trouble. My rule of thumb: if you’re not paying someone who questions Google’s intentions, you’re probably paying someone who’s only interested in collecting your money. If you’re paying someone who is confident that the campaign is going to run peachy out of the gate, then they obviously don’t have much experience.

Technorati Tags: adwords, beginner, google, google adwords, internet marketing, pay per click, ppc, search, Search Marketing, web

Hilarious video brought to us by the folks at Bring the love back.

Consumers are looking for a relationship with your business. They want for you to do well because they have a vested interest in you. Just be sure to listen when they’re offering advice.

Technorati Tags: Advertising, bring back the love, consumer, funny, marketing, transparency, video, web 2.0