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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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Chapter Two
Google AdWords Basics
By Ben Hart
The lynchpin of pay-per-click advertising is keyword research and selection. More than 80% of all transactions online begin with a keyword search.
You have heard me say that “content is king” on the Internet.
If your content is great, you will be successful on the Internet.
But if “content is king,” than your keyword selection strategy is queen.
That’s because when people search for what they want on the Internet, they type in keywords and phrases that best describe what they are looking for.
Keywords represent categories and markets. They describe the needs and wants of billions of people conducting searches on search engines.
Your job as a marketer is to anticipate what keywords and phrases your target market is typing into search engines in order to find what you are selling.
If you do this correctly – that is if you selected the right keywords and phrases that your future buyers are typing into search engines – you can then literally put yourself in the path of a charging stampede of people who are desperate to buy what you are selling.
Doesn’t that sound pretty good?
Kind of eliminates the need for salesmanship, doesn’t it?
So your success in the pay-per-click arena starts with your skill at selecting the right keywords and phrases that match what your target market is typing into search engines.
In a way, it’s a lot like you are a contestant on “Family Feud.”
Do you remember that game show? Maybe it’s still on I don’t know.
What’s the object of that game show?
It’s to guess what others are thinking. It’s to guess the answers to poll questions that people are asked.
That in a nutshell is how you select keywords that are tied to ads on Google for your product or service.
The good news is, you really don’t have to guess what your keywords and phrases should be.
Wonderful tools have been developed (many of them free) that will help you zero in on exactly what keywords and phrases you should pick for your Google PPC ads.
More about these tools in a minute.
As I mentioned, my 20 year reputation was built in direct mail marketing.
I’ve only been doing Internet marketing in any serious way for about two years.
But the more I get into Internet marketing, the more I find that the skills I learned in old-fashioned direct mail, snail mail marketing, are transferable to online marketing.
I’m pretty relieved about that.
Really the basic principles are almost exactly the same.
For example, for your direct mail campaign to work, you need to be mailing your letters to the right people -- the right target audience.
80% of direct marketing is all about who you are marketing to. Are you selling to the right people?
Remember, a great direct mail letter to the wrong list will fail. Whereas a poorly written letter to the right list can be successful.
It’s all about the list in direct mail marketing. Same with the Internet.
For your internet marketing campaign to work, you must bring the right people to your website and landing pages.
Your website is the equivalent of your sales letter in direct mail marketing.
Your little text ad on Google is like the envelope for your postal direct mail campaign.
Job #1 in direct mail is to get people to open your envelope to see what’s inside.
Job #1 of your Google PPC ad is to get people to click on your ad to see what’s on your website.
Now . . . just getting a lot of clicks on your Google ad and getting at lot of traffic for your website won’t do you much good. In fact, that would be a good way to go broke fast.
The analogy in direct mail is that you don’t want to mail your direct mail letter to everyone in the phone book.
You want to mail to people with a proven track-record of buying products or services very similar to what you are selling.
Same idea on the Internet.
If you are selling exercise equipment, you want to bring buyers of exercise equipment and fitness buffs to your website.
The biggest difference between Internet marketing and direct mail marketing is that direct mail marketing is more like hunting and internet marketing is more like fishing. With direct mail, you know where your likely buyers are. They are on lists that you rent and they reside at physical addresses.
You then mail packages into people’s homes or offices and you bring customers in the door that way. You can almost drag customers in the door with direct mail and telemarketing.
Internet marketing is more passive. What you need to do here is put bait on your hook and let the customers find you.
Let your customers swim to you. And the way they find you is by typing keywords and phrases into search engines.
The keywords and phrases are short descriptions of what the searcher is interested in. So if the searcher wants golf clubs, she might type “golf clubs” into the search engine.
More likely, she will type a a particular model or type of golf club in the search engine – say “Callaway driver” or “Ping putter.”
That’s how a searcher will do her shopping. Search results will then come up on the screen of exactly what the shopper is looking for. Search results will include both articles on the subject and websites that sell the item. She can then begin her study of the subject.
A big reason I love pay-per-click advertising is that I don’t pay for anything vague -- such as impressions. I only pay when people actually click on my ad. The reason this is good is because I only pay when someone actually expresses interest in what I’m selling.
And my ad only appears in the search results list when someone types in the keywords and phrases I’ve decided to connect with my ad.
You can actually pay by impression on Google, but don’t do that. You want to pay only by click because a click represents an actual visitor to your site. A click represents active interest by that person in what you are saying or what you are offering.
Just having your ad seen is meaningless. Hundreds of millions of people see a Super Bowl ad. Unless you are Coca Cola building a brand, that’s not the way you want to go – not if you need to make every marketing dollar count.
In the PPC arena, only pay for clicks, not impressions. Pay for people who are specifically looking for what you are selling and who then make an active and conscious decision to click on your ad and visit your site.
The other dynamic I love about this kind of marketing is that it’s not what I call “Interruption” marketing.
I did not coin that term. I learned it from marketing guru Seth Godin.
Just about all other forms of advertising are Interruption advertising.
When you are watching your TV show and an ad comes on, you are being interrupted by the ad. The reason you are sitting there watching the TV is because you want to watch the program.
But then an unwanted ad pops up that interrupts what you want to be doing.
Same with radio advertising.
One reason people are now more willing to pay for radio (i.e. Sirius) is that they are willing to actually pay money not to be interrupted by ads. Same principle with HBO and the movie channels.
People are willing to subscribe to those services in order not to have their movie interrupted by an ad.
Pop-up ads on the internet are more examples of the kind of interruption advertising that people hate. But search engine marketing is different.
With search engine marketing (whether it’s PPC or organic), the only way people find you is if they are looking for you, or if they are looking for what you have to offer.
That’s why I like it so much. I’m not interrupting anyone. My ads only appear to those who are actively looking for what I am offering.
In this respect, it’s a lot like the old-fashioned “Yellow Pages.” You go to the Yellow Pages when you are looking for something specific. Search Engines on the Internet are like the Yellow Pages on mega-steroids.
I now generate about 70% of my targeted traffic and online business with pay-per-click advertising. And I generate about 70% of that with Google AdWords.
Okay, so let’s get into the nitty-gritty now of how to make Google AdWords work for you – not just as a market research tool, as I described earlier, but as an extraordinarily powerful lead collection and selling tool.
Here are the four basic elements you need to start your pay-per-click ad campaign on Google:
1) You need an ad. Google will walk you through the steps on how to create that. Go here to set-up your account: http://adwords.google.com
2) You need a landing page. A landing page is the fist page on your site your visitor sees. This is where you take those who click on your Google ad. A landing page can either be designed to capture leads with a sign up form, or it can be a sales letter designed to go straight for the sale. Or it can be a hybrid landing page trying to do both.
3) You will almost certainly need to offer your visitors something free on your landing page in exchange for their name and email address – which they give you be filling out the sign-up form on your landing page.
4) You will need to select keywords and phrases for your ad . . . so that when people looking for what you are selling type in these keywords, your ad comes up in the Google list for the search.
What you do is bid on the keywords and phrases you have selected to connect with your ad. You set the maximum bid you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad.
As a general rule, the higher your bid, the higher your ad will appear in the search results that come up.
It’s actually more complicated than that. If your ad is getting lots of clicks, your ad can appear higher than another ad that is bidding more for the same keywords.
Or you could be bidding more than anyone else on keywords you’ve selected. But if no one clicks on your ads, you’re ad will end up at the bottom of the rankings – perhaps even deactivated by Google. That’s called getting “Google slapped.”
Whatever ads are making the most money for Google are the ads that appear highest in the listings.
It’s actually even a little more complicated that that because Google wants to make sure it’s delivering content the searcher is looking for. So Google also does an analysis of your site. If your site stinks or does not appear to be a good fit for the keywords you’ve selected, Google will also drop your ad’s ranking or deactivate your ad.
More on this key point later. Let’s not focus on that yet.
I’m not going to do a step-by-step presentation on the mechanics of how to use Google Adwords.
That would be incredibly boring -- and not all that useful to you.
Google does a fine job of walking you through the mechanics with visual prompts that are easy to follow. Google does a good job of describing to you all of Google’s capabilities. You need to study and learn them on the Google AdWords site. Again, here’s where you go to get started: http://adwords.google.com
I’m going to focus here on your marketing strategy.
My focus here is how to use Google AdWords to bring the right traffic to your website so that you make money – I hope a lot of money. Because that’s not something Google will explain.
In fact, what Google (in many instances) will do is tell you to do almost the exact opposite of what you should be doing.
The reason Google will do that is not because Google is stupid. Quite the opposite. Google is brilliant – perhaps the most brilliant company on the planet.
But the way Google makes money is when someone clicks on your ad. What Google wants is for you to buy lots of clicks – the more expensive the clicks the better for Google -- because each click means more money for Google.
If you follow Google’s advice, what will happen is that you can quickly max out your credit cards and you’ll likely have very little to show for all the money you’ve spent.
When you set up your ad campaign in Google, your first step should be to turn off or disable many of Google’s default settings.
You don’t want Google to decide how your money is spent. Nor do you want Google to make your marketing decisions.
You want to be in complete control of your money and marketing strategy yourself.
What Google wants you to do is to buy a lot of clicks and a lot of expensive clicks.
You don’t want that. You want to buy only highly targeted clicks.
Every click costs you money.
You want to weed out all potential clickers who really have no interest in what you are offering. You don’t want the tire kickers, as they say in the car selling business.
You want the clicker who’s serious about buying what you are offering.
So how do you weed out the tire kickers – all those empty clicks that are just costing you money?
Well, Step #1 is to turn off most of Google’s default settings – which are all aimed at generating the highest number of clicks on your ads.
To show you how expensive Google’s default setting can be, a client of mine, Bill, decided to launch a Google AdWords campaign on his own after hearing about how great this tool is from me.
Bill set up his campaign and then left on vacation. He did this without consulting me. Bill took the “set-it-and-forget-it” approach to Google.
Wrong approach.
He bid too much per click and selected keywords that are too broad. He wanted to ramp up fast and be on Page One of Google’ search results list for the keywords he selected.
He also left all Google’s default settings in place.
When he came back to the office five days later, he had more than $10,000 in Google charges on his American Express card.
And he had nothing to show for all this money he spent, because he did not set up his PPC marketing system correctly.
One big mistake he made was to funnel his clickers to the home page of his general website.
Another mistake was not to have a sign-up form on his home page that visitors could fill out to get on his email list. Nor did he have a valuable free offer as incentive for people to fill out his sign-up form.
This is not the right way to conduct a Google AdWords campaign.
But sadly, this is how most people do it – especially beginners. And then they are quickly blown out of the game by their first credit card statement.
Yikes, there goes the house. There goes my car.
So don’t start that way. Start the smart safe way.
Start by turning off and disabling Google’s default settings.
Google has three levels of search – that is, three basic levels where your ads can run.
The first level is for your ads to run on Google and Google alone.
The second level for your ads is the Google Search Network.
Remember, Google powers other search engines, including AOL, Netscape, Ask, Hot Bot, Earthlink and others. So your ads can run on these search engines as well.
The third category is Google’s Content Network which runs what are called Google AdSense ads.
These ads run on websites that are enrolled in Google’s AdSense program.
As you go through the Internet, you run into these little AdSense text ads all over the place – on news sites, on blogs, on ezines, etc.
Owners of these sites are paid a commission by Google whenever someone clicks on an AdWords ad that’s running on their site. In other words, the owners of these sites are being paid to generate traffic and clicks for Google AdWords customers.
Your least targeted traffic comes from Google’s Content Network.
The Content Network is enormous. You will even find AdSense ads embedded in emails from Gmail users (Gmail stands for Google Mail).
AdSense ads are everywhere on the Internet – including on some huge sites such as The New York Times, About.com and Wikipedia.com.
Most of the big news and information sites are enrolled in Google’s AdSense program so they can get paid everytime someone clicks an AdWords ad that’s running on their site. This is a big part of how news sites, information sites and portals make money.
So you will see a lot of traffic coming in from the Content Network if you have not opted-out of the Content Network.
This can be good and it can be bad. It depends on what you are selling.
But if you are just starting, turn off the Content Network in your “Edit Campaign Settings” section.
Remember, Google has that turned on as the default setting. That’s how you get the huge bill on your American Express Card. Turn that off before you launch your first ad.
There, I might have just saved some of you $10,000 with that piece of advice alone.
Also turn off the Search Network setting.
You just want you ads to run on Google for now.
That’s plenty big enough. Once your ad campaign is working well and making money, then you can turn that setting on so your ads also run on AOL, Ask, Hot Bot, Netscape, Earthlink and the many other search engines powered by Google.
But turn that off for now until you know you have a winning ad campaign.
Google also gives you a choice of how to match keyword search terms.
I’ll just give you Google’s description of your three choices. Your options are:
Broad Match
- This is the default option. If your ad group contained the keyword tennis
shoes, your ad would be eligible to appear when a user's search query
contained tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with
other terms. Your ads could also show for singular/plural forms, synonyms, and
other relevant variations. For example,
you ad might show on tennis shoe or tennis sneakers. Run a
Search Query Performance Report to see
what keyword variations trigger your ad. Start by selecting “exact match.” Then branch out to “phrase match” later.
Only move to “broad match” once you have a winning ad and really know what you are doing.
Under “broad match,” Google uses its own criteria in deciding when to show your ads. You have no idea what that criteria is. You just let Google decide to show your ad whenever Google wants to.
And yes, that is the default setting . . . unless you actively click the option that says “exact match” only. Again, that’s in your “Campaign Settings” section.
Other than the actual keywords you select and the maximum bids you set for each keyword phrase, the “Campaign Settings” section is the most important section in the Google Adwords system.
Study the Campaign Settings section carefully.
When given a choice between broad and narrow, always start with the narrowest option. Just one little option clicked or not clicked in the Campaign Settings section can mean the difference between a $100 bill on your credit card and a $10,000 bill on your credit card.
By keeping your settings narrow, not only will you be cutting your cost geometrically, you will also be getting much more targeted traffic (which is what you want).
You’ll be weeding out 90% of the non-serious tire kickers and people who really are not looking for what you are offering.
So this is really critical advice I have just given you.
People have disasters on Google AdWords by leaving all Google’s default settings turned on and selecting keywords that are too broad. I love Google, but Google does not make it at all obvious how to turn off these key default settings. It requires knowing where they are.
Even at 10 cents a click, you can run up a huge bill fast if your ads start off right away running on all Google search engine partners and on Google’s AdSense Content Network.
Now, don’t get me wrong.
I love the Content Network. My ads are running all over the Content Network – which is why my monthly Google AdWords bill is running now at about $25,000 and going up every month.
You would not see so many AdSense ads all over the Internet if they were not working.
But you need to know that having your ads run on the AdSense Content Network will bring in much less targeted traffic than people who found you on Google by selecting the exact keywords you have chosen that best describe what your searcher is looking for.
People who click your ad on an AdSense site just happened to bump into your ad while they were looking for something else – perhaps while reading an article on the New York Times site. Their interest was the article, not your ad.
So clickers on your Content Network ads are not nearly as qualified visitors to your site.
The Content Network is great for the right kind of product or service – those that appeal to a more general audience.
You will find a much lower “click-through-rate” for your ads on the Content Network – also a lower “conversion rate” for those who do click on your Content Network ads. My “click-through-rate” from the Content Network is about one-tenth my rate (or less) than what I get from my ads on search engines. And my conversion rate for visitors from the Content Nework is about half what I get from people actually using a search engine and clicking on my ad when it comes up in the list of what they are searching for.
But the Content Network is still enormously profitable for me.
Just don’t start there. Start just on Google. When you have success on Google and Google alone, then broaden out slowly.
First Google only. Then Search Network. Then maybe Content Network – depending on the kind of product or service you are selling.
There are also three ways you can set bids for your keywords.
1) You can set a maximum bid you are willing to pay-per-click.
2) You can select your “Preferred Position” (or ranking) on Google’s listings.
3) You can use Google’s Budget Optimizer program.
I recommend selecting the maximum bid you are willing to pay-per-click for each keyword. The other two options (Preferred Position and Budget Optimizer) essentially give Google control over your money and puts Google in charge of your marketing strategy.
I certainly don’t want that.
For example, the goal of Google’s Budget Optimizer is to maximize your traffic from the keywords you’ve selected. That’s not necessarily good because some of your keywords and phrases will not be productive in terms of leading to sales.
You want to zero in on the keywords and phrases that are leading to sales – not necessarily the keywords that generate the most clicks.
As you go along, you will find that the 80/20 rule applies also to your keywords.
That is, 80 percent of your traffic will come from 20% of your keywords. 80% of your conversions and sales will also come from 20% (or less) of your keywords.
You will be constantly weeding out and “peeling off” keywords that are not performing – either not generating clicks, or not generating sales.
So don’t use the Budget Optimizer or Preferred Position option.
You want to be in control of every aspect of your marketing campaign.
The way you adjust your ad position and the amount of money you are spending is by manually setting your keyword bids . . . for each keyword and phrase.
To keep your Google bill to a minimum, simply start by bidding very low.
Start with your maximum bid at 5 cents-a-click and see what happens.
If traffic is too light, raise your maximum bid for the keyword to 10 cents a click, and so on.
Depending on the keywords you are selecting and the niche you are competing in, what you will find is that you might be getting very little traffic at first for your low conservative bids. You then increase a nickel at a time. You will then hit a tipping point where that nickel-increase starts to generate a lot of traffic.
You will see almost no traffic at one price. Then if you raise your bid a nickel, lots of traffic will suddenly start pouring in. That’s why you must watch it carefully – especially if you are a beginner. Even if you are an expert, watch it carefully.
This is your money. You want to maximize your result with a minimum amount of money. This requires constant fine-tuning of your Google AdWords campaign at every level and every point.
What Google wants is for you to “set it and forget it” – like my friend Bill did who spent $10,000 on AdWords in his first five days when he went on vacation.
That was an expensive vacation.
Don’t do that. Check what’s going on with your account at least once a day.
It’s the details that matter here. This is a precision instrument, like a scalpel. You’re not running a Super Bowl ad.
This is the exact opposite of broadcast advertising. This is narrow-cast advertising.
This is extreme target marketing. To be successful with AdWords, you must be like a surgeon with scalpel.
But it’s not all that tough. You just need to pay close attention. Those Google defaults can kill you. Letting Google decide how to spend you money can kill you. Keywords that are too broad, and allowing “broad content” match instead of “exact” keyword match, can kill you – especially if you are a beginner.
One decent piece of advice that Google gives is to set a daily budget for how much Google can spend on your ads.
This is probably the one piece of advice Google gives you that can save you money.
I don’t have a strong view either way on this.
I personally do not like to set a daily budget. But I’m not going to tell you not too.
If you are inclined to “set-it-and-forget-it,” daily budget is the way to go.
The reason I don’t like it is that as soon as you hit your daily budget, your ads come down.
I would rather bid lower on my keywords and have my ads run in a lower position than to have my ads come down and to have Google decide when my ads run and don’t run.
That’s yet another reason to start your keyword bids low and increase them slowly. If you do that and watch it closely, you won’t exceed your budget.
Here’s something else to be mindful of.
Google’s reports on what’s happening in your account are about three hours behind. So three hours more activity has occurred on your account than what is actually showing on the report. So if the report shows you’ve spent $50 that day, it might really be $75.
Okay, so now that I have scared the heck out of you, let’s get onto the fun stuff – making Google AdWords work for you and your business.
We have actually just gone a long way toward doing that already by turn off most of Google’s default settings.
Remember what good marketing is.
Good marketing is as much about marketing to the right people as it is weeding out the wrong people. Marketing to the wrong people is very costly.
Your goal is to find exactly the right people to market to – those people who are looking exactly for what you are selling, those people who are typing in the exact keywords and phrases you have chosen that best describe what you are offering.
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