There are many useful tools within the Google Adwords platform that can help you to optimize your Adwords campaigns, especially if you track your conversion rates. However, Adwords is not much help in analysing what happens to the visitors who do not convert. For that, Google Analytics can shine a much needed spotlight on your visitor behaviour.
Link your Adwords and Analytics accounts
In order for Google Analytics to give you information about your Adwords traffic, you need to link the two accounts. Once your Adwords account has been listed as a source for your Analytics account, Google can add an invisible tag to all traffic sent from Adwords allowing it to be monitored and analysed by Google Analytics.
Analyse your campaigns
Once the two accounts are linked, you can analyse the behaviour of your visitors based on the specific Adwords campaign that sent the traffic to your site. By looking at the behaviour of specific campaigns, you can determine if your website is delivering the products or services people expected from your ads. Do you have a high overall bounce rate? Perhaps your website does not clearly show people the product or service shown in your ad, so they leave and go elsewhere. Placing the featured product or service prominently on the landing page may help your conversions. Are most of your bounce rates good, however a few campaigns have unusually high bounce rates? In those cases, examine the times at which the ads are served, and the regional limitations for your ads. You may be able to fine tune your ad appearances to better target your market.
Analyse your keywords
By reviewing your metrics for each keyword, you will be able to tell not only which keywords are sending the most traffic to your site, but how that traffic is performing. High traffic with low engagement is not as good as lower traffic with higher engagement. Breaking out your Google Analytics information by the keyword that generated the traffic will help you to spot which keywords are accurately targeting your potential customers, and which may be too broad or picking up unanticipated matches. You can adjust your negative keywords to screen out these unwanted visitors to lower your costs and improve your overall return on advertising investment.
Analyse your landing pages
Your various offers should be directing traffic to specific landing pages fine-tuned for each offer. By analysing the performance of the landing pages, you can address issues of fine tuning. Perhaps it is not clear to the visitor how the product or service featured on the landing page addresses the promise of the ad. Or perhaps there is a problem with the coding of the landing page, so that it is not displaying correctly or taking too long to load. By analysing performance by landing page, you can determine if an issue is site-wide, or specific to a particular offer.
Since you pay for every click on a Google Adwords campaign, having a poorly thought out campaign can quickly run into quite a bit of expense for very little return. On the other hand, a well thought out campaign that is tightly focused on a strategy for success can produce an excellent return for the money spent. The key is using the best strategy for your needs.
Define one goal per campaign
You may want to accomplish many things – increase leads, generate sales calls, sell more products, or register more customers for your mailing list. Each goal should have its own campaign. Track the results of that campaign against your expenditures to determine your conversion rate and your costs per conversion.
Research, research, research
You should do three types of research. First, research the most popular keywords for your particular niche. Once you’ve identified these keywords, find out what other ads are targeted to these keywords to discover the type of ad copy that is working, as well as the landing pages these ads lead to. Finish up with research of product review websites and forums to hear what your prospective customers are saying about these products.
Be irresistible
You’ve discovered what your customers want, what they like and dislike about your competitors, and what words and phrases attract their attention. Craft an irresistible ad coupled with a landing page that makes an unbeatable offer. Make sure that your offer is better than the competitors in all the ways that matter to your prospective customers.
Divide and conquer
Do not attempt to have your ad be all things to all people. Create different ads for display traffic and search traffic. Create different ads and landing pages for mobile users and desktop users. Create different ads based on geographic location, or any other meaningful differentiation tracked by Google.
Match ad and sales funnel
Each stage in your sales funnel should have a different ad. People who are seeking information will respond to a different ad than people who have already made up their mind and are ready to buy. By including keywords tied to the buying stage, such as “review” or “purchase”, you’ll be able to target the right stage with your ad.
Start small and grow
Use exact match keywords to focus your Adwords campaign on your chosen keywords. By tracking your conversion rates and costs per conversion, you can determine which of those keywords are working the best for you. At that point, begin adding variations of those keywords, for example including the names of nearby towns as well as the major city. Drop any keywords that are performing below average.
I came across this fantastic infographic on Hubspot’s blog yesterday which I just had to share with you.
The following image explains exactly how Google makes its money through its Pay Per Click advertising – and how much each industry contributes to Google’s massive $100 million a day advertising revenue.
As an internet marketer you are likely to be using Google Adwords to market and promote your business online, so the infographic below is going to make some very interesting reading for you.
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a potent weapon in the advertising arsenal of any business owner or internet marketing, but it is crucial to your bottom line that you really understand how to use it effectively.
While you can simply sign up for a Google AdWords account and start throwing money at it, you’ll make your advertising campaign much more cost effective, much more effective, and much more sustainable if you integrate your PPC campaign with the advertising efforts that you already have underway. Read on to learn how you can do just that.
Before you can get started with PPC optimisation, let me discuss briefly what PPC exactly is, and what it is not. PPC advertising is advertising whereby you pay a fee, typically somewhere in the range of a pound but often considerably more, dependent on the popularity of the keyword in question, each time someone visits your site by clicking on your advertisement. Google AdWords is the leading provider of PPC, but all major search engines offer a similar service.
So long as you understand the basics of how it works, PPC can be an effective way to quickly drive a large amount of traffic to your site. However, it is not the most sustainable business model, as you have to pay a set amount for each customer sent to your site. Obviously, it’s much more cost-effective to draw these customer through unpaid search results (SEO) and social media marketing.
With this in mind, one of the most effective marketing tactics today is to use PPC advertising to help build your brand. So when you’re just starting out , or you’ve just released a new product, you ramp up your PPC advertising considerably. This drives traffic to your site, and creates buzz on the social networks. This, in turn will drive more people to your site.
Over time, the high quality content that you’ll continue to add to your site, combined with the social media attention and the additional traffic that continued PPC advertising will cause your user base to reach a critical mass, a tipping point, if you will, and drive it into self-sustainability. Once you reach this point, you can start the phase out the paid advertising in order to usher in a more sustainable advertising model.
Nothing breeds success like success, as they say. Use PPC advertising to get success in the first place, and then once your site gets noticed, let it roll on its own from there.
Some internet marketers would take one look at this title and declare me insane. “Making money with Google Adwords – give me a break, it’s not 2005 anymore,” they might scoff. And they would have a point. It is much more difficult to generate revenue from Adwords marketing than it once was. However, it is by no means impossible. There is a lot more competition, but most of the competition has no idea what its doing. As with anything else, generating sales through Adwords is simply a matter of really understanding the format, thinking creatively, and outmanoeuvring the competition.
AdWords 101
Most of you probably already have a pretty good grasp of what AdWords does and how it works, but we’ll have a quick refresher course here anyway.
AdWords is the premier advertising service offered by Google, and it generates the majority of Google’s yearly revenue. It was the original super-targeted advertising service, and allows you to create advertisements which pop up when someone searches on Google for the keyword which you’ve bid on. Its an invaluable service, and many internet companies use it as their primary source of new customers.
The AdWords War
The problem is, since AdWords is so easy to use and can potentially generate such great returns on investment, it is no longer solely the domain of small business owners and independent marketers. Large corporations have gotten involved, and have sent their marketing departments, with their nearly unlimited budgets, to scoop up the prime real estate.
Since keyword prices are set by competitive bidding, dealing with a large corporate marketing department in the mix can quickly put you out of the running.
So, rather than trying to take them head-on, the key to success is making a strategic pivot and seeking out better real estate.
Find Your Advantage
The easiest place for you to find your advantage in the AdWords world is to realize how much flexibility your business really has. Keyword selection is the obvious place to start. Look at alternative keywords that you could advertise for. You can probably drive your advertising costs down by focusing on less expensive keywords, and then improving your conversion rates in order to make up for the lost visitors.
The key to driving up your conversion rates is creating a landing page that works. Consider – you’ve already got a potential customer on your site, so you know that they’re at least marginally interested in your product. Moreover, you’ve already paid the cost of getting them there, so you need to sell them the product at that point.
Go back at look at your landing page, the first page that the customer sees when they visit your site. Does it elicit a strong, visceral, emotional reaction? Does it create a need for your product? If not, what can you do to make it stronger? If you want to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive AdWords environment, your landing page needs to convert as much as possible.
The main take-away here is just to consider your customers, and consider how you are advertising to them. And remember that with any pay-per-click advertising, the price of the advert isn’t nearly as important as your return on investment.
When you’re advertising with Google Adwords, you need to pay extremely close attention to your competition. It is possible that you could start advertising on this popular advertising medium and be shocked at the expense of the costs per click.
So here are a couple ways you can determine what you’re up against before you launch your first campaign. This will give you a huge advantage and enable you to adjust your strategy if the clicks are too high.
1) Type in your main keyword into Google.
Simple enough right? What you need to do is count the number of competitors you have for that keyword. It could range between 6 and 66.
You see, in order to be on the first page of Google, you need to be within the top 1 to 8 or 11 best ads on the page.
Regarding what is considered “best”–Google will take into account your bid price, clickthrough rate, and quality score. So it’s not neccessarily the highest bid that wins out when it comes to Google Adwords.
2) Go to www.spyfu.com and estimate what everyone is bidding on your site.
This is a really neat technique you can use to see what everyone else is paying per click for your target keyword.
This website will also let you know who is bidding on these keywords.
Keep in mind this is only an estimate. You will not know for certain until you start bidding on your own campaigns.
If you find that the click costs are too high, you will need to use less competitive keywords. You can do this by going to www.wordtracker.com and choosing keywords that are targeted for your niche–but are lower in compeition.
You can also change your offer, add a couple of upsells, and tweak your copy so you get more conversions. You see, Google Adwords is all about constantly testing and tweaking–but once you find the right combination you’re golden!
In my last post, we went over 5 Google Adwords ad-writing tips that could boost your conversions. They are what any person who is fluent in Adwords should be familiar with.
Now we are going to cover 5 more tips that could boost your profits with Google Adwords. So let’s get started!
1) Are you taking full advantage of the space Google gives you in each line?
In general, the more you tell, the more you sell. You do not want to shortchange yourself by not filling in the entire space Google gives you to sell the click. So make sure you utilize all the space Google gives you.
2) Are you listing the benefits first?
Many times people will put the features of a product first. This is not the way to do it. You need to put the benefits first as people want to know what the product is going to DO for them. There are exceptions to this rule, but there aren’t many.
3) Is your display URL relevant to what your searchers are looking for?
Your display URL is also a piece of copy. If you have an obscure URL, it’s not going to connect with the audience. Try sending your traffic to a domain like, “www.datingsecrets.com” so that people will know what they are clicking on when they see your ad.
4) Are you testing capital vs. lowercase letters to see what gets the best clickthrough rate?
This is important. Sometimes having capital letters can boost conversions–and sometimes they cannot. You never know until you test what is going to convert the highest.
5) Are you playing to your hunches?
Sometimes when you’re in the shower and playing with the kids, you could be thinking of new ad copy for your Adwords to test. Always be thinking of new ideas during your idle time–it could mean boosting your clickthrough rate for your Adwords ads.
So make sure you implement these Adwords ad-writing secrets into your marketing arsenal. You could conquer Google Adwords and bring more income to your business!
Google Adwords can be intimidating to some people. But like anything else in marketing, you can easily master it if you know certain tricks to working with this critical pay-per-click search engine.
Here are 5 things you need to keep in mind with creating your Google Adwords ads:
1) Are you entering into the conversation going on in your customer’s head?
Frequently when people write Adwords ads, they do not spend a lot of time analyzing where their customer is coming from when they enter their search term. For example, some keywords are obvious “buying” keywords and others are just general “searching” keywords.
Generally, the more specific the keyword, the greater the chances that visitor is going to buy from you. And the ad copy needs to match.
2) Are you bidding on longer phrases, e.g. “how do I stop chewing on my fingernails?”
Frequently, the keywords you should be using might not appear in your favorite keyword tool. Long-tail keywords are those you’ll need to think of when you’re brainstorming what your target market would type into a search engine.
3) Are you trying to “beat your control” by rotating at least 2 ads?
This is critical to constantly ratcheting your conversions higher and higher. You never want to only run 1 ad, as the advertisement that’s going to double your conversions could be on the top of your mind.
4) Are you reading your ads out loud to yourself to see if they have a good flow?
A good ad is conversational and should not sound “awkward” when you read it out loud. Fine tune any advertisement that doesn’t read right when you read it to someone out loud.
5) Are you always keeping a close eye on what your competitiors are doing?
You need to be constantly monitoring your competition, as they could bid higher than you, or change their ad–thus jumping higher than you on the page. All of this can happen in the matter of minutes and you need to be abreast of your competition at all times if you’re going to survive the PPC game.
Those were 5 tips you need to be implementing in your Google Adwords campaigns. Tomorrow I am going to reveal 5 more so stay tuned!
Google Adwords can be a great way to get traffic to your site. Unfortunately, most marketers really mess up by not following common Google Adwords best practices and strategies.
Here are 5 Google Adwords mistakes most people can make that can cost you a lot of money.
1) Putting too many keywords into an adgroup.
This can really skyrocket your click costs because there is no way you can place 100 keywords into an adgroup and be specific enough. If you have more then 10 keywords in your adgroup, you need to break them up into smaller adgroups so you can target your Google Adwords better based on what your potential customers type into the search query.
2) Not testing different ads.
This is a horrible mistake because you can easily boost your ad conversion by split testing your ads. You cannot know what ad is going to convert higher unless you test them. Google Adwords makes it easy to do this, and even the large direct mail companies out there test their ads all the time. Shouldn’t you?
3) Doing poor keyword research.
Google Adwords is getting pricey these days, and doing poor keyword research can really ruin your campaign. Go through all your keywords and ask yourself, “Would my potential customer type this into a search engine?”
This is critical because if you are not getting enough clicks on your ads, Google will lower your ad position since they only want to serve relevant ads to its users. So you cannot skimp on keyword research as they are the lifeblood of your business.
4) Being in the #1 position of the page.
Many people think that being #1 is the best place to be on the Google search results. However, 95% of the time, this will be more expensive to you, and most of the people who click on these ads are usually “tire kickers”.
The optimum position is between position 4-6–in the middle of the page. By the time they get to your ad, they will have already clicked on the ones above you and your click will be cheaper–and perhaps a better customer.
5) Not driving traffic to a relevant landing page.
Google uses a quality score to determine if the keywords you are using are relevant to the landing page you are driving your traffic. You need to have the same keywords on your landing page as you’re using with your Google Adwords campaign.
Remember, Google wants to bring the most relevant results to its users, and if your landing page isn’t coherent with the keywords you are using, they will lower your quality score. And that means your click costs will go up.
So when creating your next Adwords campaign, don’t make these 5 mistakes. You’ll save a lot of money.
Google Adwords is one of the best ways to get traffic to your site. The traffic that comes from Google Adwords can be very valuable, since these people clicked on an ad to get to your site.
There are a lot of ways to increase the number of people who click on your ads. This blog post lists 3 you can start testing right away in order to boost traffic to your site and make you more money.
1) End the headline with a question mark.
For example if you have a headline called “Business Proposal Template”, you can easily modify that to say, “Business Proposal Template?” This induces curiosity in the visitor since it embeds a question in their mind and they want to see if it is answered.
This also makes your ad stand out more since a very small amount of people will actually use a question mark in the headline of their ad.
2) Use the “secrets most people will NEVER know” line in your ad.
If you were a golfer and you came across a headline that said, “Discover Golfing Secrets Most Golfers Will NEVER Know”, wouldn’t you want to find out?
This has been tested time and time again to outpull most ads, mainly because it plays on the fact that you’re about ready to get an advantage over other golfers. That you’re going to have several secrets that you only know.
That’s why the word “secret” is used time and time again in marketing. Secrets are irresistible because it plays on the fact that someone knows information that you don’t. And we as humans are always curious to learn “secrets” so we can be a part of the “club” that knows the secrets.
So use some variation of this line in the body of your Adwords ad. It could boost your clicks big time.
3) Have an intriguing domain name.
Google allows you 3 lines of text for Adwords, but nothing stops you from creating a better domain that urges people to click on your ad. The display URL is another line of copy you can utilize with effectiveness.
So what URL is more apt to be clicked on: www.acme.com or www.LoseFatRightNow.com?
The only thing is your display URL and destination URL has to be the same. So if you’re sending traffic to a seperate landing page, try to come up with a good domain name that’ll attract more clicks.
So next time you create your next Adwords campaign, test these tweaks out. This could definitely help you conquer Google Adwords.
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There are many useful tools within the Google Adwords platform that can help you to optimize your Adwords campaigns, especially if you track your conversion rates. However, Adwords is not much help in analysing what happens to the visitors who do not convert. For that, Google Analytics can shine a much needed spotlight on your visitor behaviour.
