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Video Summary
Howie has been an internet marketing strategist since 1999. He specializes in helping clients use Google AdWords to grow their businesses. He leads seminars and workshops on beginner and advanced AdWords topics and provides coaching and support for individuals and groups privately and through his Ring of Fire membership.
Howie also has a company that produces software tools that help AdWords advertisers and AdWords consultants save time, reduce costs and increase profits. It’s packed with info, and it’s also quite entertaining to read.
In this video, Howie will be providing us some great things that we can do to improve your Google AdWords advertising. Or if you’ve never used AdWords in the past, you’re going to pick up some great pointers so that you do it the right way, saving yourself a bunch of time and money.
What is Google AdWords or Google Ads?
In the past, If you want to buy something and you didn’t know where to go or you wanted to find something out and you didn’t know where to go, you generally went to the library or if you wanted to buy something, you’d go to the Yellow Pages, and you’d look for a furniture store or a plumber.
And these days, how many people use the Yellow Pages for anything anymore? It’s gone by the wayside. And what it’s been replaced with, by and large, is Google. Google is where people go whether they want to learn how to do something or they want to know who that actress was.
So now if you want to be found by people, if you have a business and you want to be found, you need to be found on Google.
Two Ways to be Found on Google
One is to do it organically, meaning to have your site be one of the top ten for that keyword, whatever it is that people are typing in when they’re looking for you or you can use AdWords to buy your way to the first page of Google.
So anyone who wants to be found by people searching on Google needs to know about Google AdWords as a method for paying your way onto the first page.
Ways you can use Google Ads
There’s two main ways you can use AdWords. One is you get customers to your site and they buy from you and you make money from them. So that’s kind of classic advertising. That’s a great reason to use AdWords and not all businesses can do that.
Classic Advertising
First of all, if you have something that people aren’t searching for, it’s hard to use search. Google also has a content network. If you’ve ever seen Websites that have Ads by Google on it, you can put your ad there as well, so it’s not just for people doing actual keyword searches but people kind of tooling around surfing the Internet in general.
But there are also businesses for whom AdWords is going to be prohibitively expensive because you’re competing for the same keywords against people with different business models who have a much higher profit margin than you do. And it’s very hard to compete against competitors who can spend a lot more than you can and still turn a profit.
Market Testing
But the other thing that AdWords is really good for is market testing. It’s just like an endless stream of survey data, and you can kind of dip your toe in the water and stick it in, keep in for a little while, pull it out and then see which ads did the people like better: the one that talked about greed or the one that talked about fear?
You can test keywords and see how many people are clicking on your ad for this keyword versus that keyword. You can turn on traffic on a dime, turn it off on a dime. There’s no minimum spend.
So this sort of data is something that just about any company could use, and it’s a great way to jump in to see whether you can actually make money on AdWords. Most businesses can use it for one or the other or both.
AdWords for Local Businesses
AdWords is wonderful for local businesses because there’s much less competition. If you’re advertising nationally, you’re going up against the best advertisers in the entire country.
But if you’re advertising as a plumber locally, Google is smart. They’re not going to show an ad for an Illinois plumber in Atlanta, so if you go into Google and just type in the word “plumber” my guess is no matter where you are, Google is going to treat that as a local search and show you local listings with the little map, and they’re going to show you local plumbers who are advertising and plumbing companies.
You’re only going up against local folks, and doing anything around marketing generally gives you an edge over most people who don’t do anything. Local search listing is not influenced by AdWords.
Identifying the Right Keywords
How can advertisers identify the right keywords to bid on? As you collect data, AdWords Google will tell you which are the keywords that are bringing you traffic and which are the keywords that are bringing you money.
Just make a list of the problems that people would have, of the ways in which they would think about those problems and the way that they would begin to search for them. Then you can ask other people ’cause you’re going to have a limited perspective.
Keyword Tools
There are also keyword tools that are very useful. In your AdWords account those are all free, so there’s a tool if you type in a major keyword, it will give you lots of variations. You can also look at competitors’ websites or your website for ideas for different keywords, and you can sort of build it organically.
Bidding for your Keywords
Basically it comes down to knowing your numbers, and when you start out, you don’t know your numbers so you just make some very, very conservative estimates.
So how much you can bid really comes down to how much money a person on your website is worth to you, and that depends on what you’re selling, how many times you can sell them and how effectively you can sell them.
Tips for an Effective Ad
One best practice is use the keyword in the ad, maybe even in the headline. Get into the mind of the customer and ask ourselves a few basic questions.
The most important question is “what promise did this persona want me to make them?”.
When you can figure that out, you want to think about what’s that promise? What do they want to achieve at the end of their search? How do they want to feel at the end of their search? What feelings are they trying to avoid right now or get away from? So those are all elements that would go into crafting an ad that would speak to them better than anybody else’s ad.
Common Mistakes in Google Ads Campaigns
The most common mistake in AdWords campaigns is putting all keywords into one ad group and showing the same ad for all of them. Too many businesses send everyone to the homepage for all keywords, but if this is not the quickest path to relevance, people will abandon it.
A second mistake is trying to get as many clicks as possible rather than trying to get only the clicks that are going to turn into dollars. You need to be testing for conversion, testing for return on investment. And AdWords has a reporting center where you can set up some code on your website and it will tell you exactly whether each keyword made you money or lost you money.
Very few campaigns take the time to set up that conversion tracking correctly, and so they end up guessing about what’s making them money and what isn’t.
What is the Best Place to Send Google Ads Visitors?
In a perfect world every keyword would go to its own landing page. Now, a perfect world meaning you had an infinite number of hours in the day and all of them could be spent on AdWords.
Realistically, that’s not going to happen. Most businesses, in fact, find that if they have, let’s say, 1,000 keywords – and that might sound like a lot to people, but it really isn’t when you think about all the different ways you can slice and dice.
But of those 1,000 keywords, maybe only 10 of them are really important. Ten of them will be high-traffic relevant keywords. And so those are the ones that you want to send to their own landing page. You want to have their own ads, and you want to have them in your own ad groups so that you can monitor them exquisitely in case something happens because those are going to be the lifeblood of your business.
For most businesses it’s imperative to get the opt-in type page. But to avoid that problem of getting someone to spend $1.50 for 10 seconds on your website, you want to quickly, if you can, get them to give you their email address so that you can stay in touch with them over time.
AdWords Bidding
There are times when the first-page bid will appear to be arbitrarily high, and there’s almost nothing you can do about that. One thing you can do is take a look at the quality score of your keywords.
In general the bid prices are high because that’s what the market will bear. So what you can do is get better at getting clicks, which will lower your bid prices. You can choose keywords that are more affordable. The second thing you can do is get better at converting, making more money so then you won’t care whether the click price is high or not.
The moment you publish your campaign you’re not done and just move onto something else. You should be getting better and better results. So one thing you can do is constantly be split testing, constantly be trying new ads, constantly trying new landing pages to see if you can beat your controls.
AdWords Reports
You also want to be pulling down reports, paying attention to those reports, and you can do it – you can set it up automatically. You can set up a keyword report by conversion, meaning that it will show you which keywords made money, which keywords lost money.
Set up a filter so you can say show me all the keywords that got more than 100 clicks and lost money. And you can set that up to run automatically once a month so it will look at the 1st through the 31st and it will show it to you. The report will show you which keywords didn’t do well, and you can go ahead and fix them or move them to a different ad group and try a different ad.
What You Can Do Now!
If you don’t have conversion tracking, absolutely get that set up. And if you don’t sell anything online, you can do leads. And if you don’t measure leads online, you can look at views of the key page. Assuming there is conversion data, go into your account and sort the entire account by keyword. And you can sort by impressions or clicks or cost, whatever is most important to you.
Your most important keyword, make sure it’s in its own ad group. Go to Google, type in that keyword and print out the search results page and study it until you know backwards and forwards what everyone is saying to that market.
And then go sit down for five minutes and write a page in your searcher’s diary about that search: what they care about, why they did the search, what matters to them, what they’re hoping to find. Just sit down, set a timer and channel that person and write as if you were them.
Then with that page in mind, go back to your Google search results page and see does any of them talk to them in a way that they want to be talked to. And when you start seeing gaps between what they want, what really matters to them, and the messaging and the marketplace, write an ad that fills in those gaps.
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