Here are the most important things in my point of view.

1. Number one on my list of course is the ability to reach people at the exact time when they are looking for you products and services. This is why search advertising has peaked in the last couple of years because a well structured campaign provides high return with minimal investment.
2. Measuring results – ask your self how many types of advertising allow you to measure results. Very few? AdWords does not only provide you with info about how is your campaign performing and site statistic but at a high level it also gives you information about ROI from your campaign. It offers two fantastic tracking tools Google Analytics and Conversion Tracking and the best part of it all is that they are absolutely free of charge.
3. Precise Targeting – you can choose keywords, ads, specific countries, languages, time schedules and much much more. This allows you to target your campaign with pinpoint accuracy.
4. Accessible to big & small – one of the best things about the Google AdWords is that it allow big & small companies to compete in one place this is the only pace where you can see WHSmith’s and Jeffery’s Stationary store ( a family run business) in the same place. AdWords allows you to advertise with any budget no matter how big or small it is.
5. Being in Google’s results – well i think this is pretty obvious Google is the place to be if you want’t your products and services to be found. Millions of people search it and compare different offers on a daily basis. The ability to be found on the first page of results is key to not only getting high levels of relevant traffic but also increasing your website sales.

If you are planning a Google AdWords campaign you can get a free consultation from our experts here at AdWords Lab. Just mail us on office@adwordslab.co.uk or call us on 0203 137 1048

Best,

Alex

In this post we are going to discuss the important considerations that an advertiser must take prior to starting an AdWords campaign.

Understanding your campaign goals

Before anything else you need to know exactly what you want to achieve from your advertising campaign. Are you looking for more sales, sign-ups, downloads or maybe you just want to popularize your brand and the products that you sell. Only then you can decide upon:

• What mix of advertising tools you should go for (keyword campaign, content campaign, site targeted campaign or a mix)
• What bidding mechanism you should apply to your campaign (CPC, CPA or CPM)
• What keywords and ads would provide the best results for your aims and objectives.

What is your advertising budget

How much do you have to spend for your campaign? This is an important question that you need to ask yourself. Because it will affect the bidding approach, daily spend, keyword and advert selection. For example if you have limited budget you might want to only target certain areas within your country and go for long tail keywords in order to decrease your cost per click as much as possible. Then you would be able to get more traffic at lower cost.

Targeted audience

Ask yourself who are my target audience? Questions that might help are:

What gender are they?
Where are they based?
What income do they have?
Whats their age group?
Do they know the product that you offer or are they looking for a solution to a problem?

Once you have an answer to all of those questions you would be able to chose the right campaign setting, decide upon the keyword type and write adverts that will appeal to this group.

What keywords to use

There are a few thing that you need to consider here. First of all take into account what your campaign objectives are you looking for branding or sales. Whats your advertising budget if its large than maybe you can afford using broader keywords if the budget is limited maybe a better option would be going for long tail and branded keywords.Last but not least who are your targeted audience – do they know the products that you offer or are they looking for a solution to some specific problem. Asking yourself all those questions prior will make defining your keyword list a lot easier.

How much to bid?

A lot of people find it hard to decide how much to bid for their keywords. So here are a few tips that might help:

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool – even though in most cases the estimated bids are not 100% accurate you could still get a rough estimate. Usually the bids are 20%-40% lower that the ones that Google provides.

Look at how much competition there is in the search results – even though it is a very simple procedure it can tell you a lot about how much you will have to pay per click. If there is only a couple of ads out there its likely that bids will be low. If there are hundreds of pages of sponsored links your advertising campaign isn’t going to come cheap.

How much do you earn from your clicks – this is absolutely vital to do before planing your campaign. Find out how much your products/services cost and how much you can afford to spend per click in order to be profitable. Its pointless spending $5.00 per click if you only make $3.00 per sale.

Tracking performance

This is the thing that will make the difference between earning and loosing money. I can’t stress how important it is to measure your campaign performance as not doing so is going to keep you in the dark about whats working and whats not. In Google AdWords there is no secret strategy that works every time every successful campaign has an individual custom tailored strategy. In order to define your strategy you will need to experimenting and measure results. As a rule of thumb conversion tracking and Google Analytics are a must.

Well i hope this help. If you want to find out how your campaign can perform even better why not try our FREE AdWords Audit or just give us a call on 0203 137 1048.

To use dynamic keyword insertion you will need to use the following syntax.

{KeyWord:Nokia Mobile Phone}

The ‘KeyWord’ part defines how your keywords will be displayed. Capitalisation is important for how you keywords will be shown within the actual ad text.

Lets take the keyword ‘ mobile internet’ and use it as an example.

KeyWord – would give us ‘ Mobile Internet’ in our ad.
Keyword – would give us ‘Mobile internet’ in our ad
keyword – would give us ‘mobile internet‘ in our ad
KEYWORD – would give us ‘MOBILE INTERNET‘ in our ad

So you can use the syntax as it best suites your ad format.

The text that you put in between the brackets eg. {KeyWord:Text} is the default keywords for your ad and it will be used if the search query exceed the maximum allowed character length of your ads.

I hope you found the article useful and that it will help with the optimization of your campaign.

Quality score is affected by a number of factor including:

• Campaign structure
• Landing page quality
• Macro factor

So lets take a look at each of those factors in a bit more detail.

Campaign Structure

The way you structure your campaign will play an important role to what quality score you will be rewarded. Here are a few tips on how to boost your campaign quality score.

1. Have separate ad groups for your keywords – this is actually very important and it will not only boost your quality score but your campaign CTR and your conversion rate. Google recommends having 5-10 keywords within a single ad group. However i personally think that if you create an ad group for each individual keyword you will get much better results because you can have a highly relevant ad. So why not start by breaking your keywords into smaller groups and writing a specific ad for each group of keywords. If you want to be really fancy make 1 keyword per ad group.

2. Keyword relevancy – it is important to understand that your keywords need to be specific and closely related to what you offer on your website. The broader terms you use the lower your quality score will be. Lets take a look at this example.

If you are selling ‘nokia mobile phones’:

Nokia N93 mobile phone – will  be a great keyword and would probably get a great quality score of above 6

mobile phone – will be a decent keywords and will probably get an ok quality score of 5-6

phones - will be a bad keyword choice and will most likely get a poor quality score.

So focus on keywords that are highly relevant don’t go off target. My recommendation is to look for brand specific and long-tail keywords.

3. Write good ad copies - specific keyword reach ad copies with call to action tend to get a good quality score due to the high CTR that they achieve. So make specific ads for your products include the keywords in your ads and use call to action and you will see the difference yourself.

4. Use negative keywords within your campaign – this will help you not only get better CTR but will also increase the quality of your traffic and hence your conversion rate.

Landing page quality

The landing page that you have in place will also play an important role in the quality score that you will be awarded. It is important to get some things right in order to be scored highly by Google’s bots.

1.Landing page loading time - it is important to make sure that you page loading time is low. For those of you who don’t know load time is the time a user has to wait once he has clicked on your ads for the page to be displayed in his browser. In my opinion i think the landing page time should be from 1sec to a maximum of 10secs (and thats pushing it). In the end of the day you are not going to wait for too long when you got a see of choices. The competition is only one click away.

2.Page relevancy – I can stress enough how important it is to have relevant content that matches your keywords and ads. You need to provide the user with the information that you promised in the ads. If you have a product or service that you offer but don’t have relevant information on your site. Just don’t advertise it.

3.Unique content - The content that you offer on your site needs to be unique. Don’t in any circumstance use copied product descriptions from your competitors not only that is not going to be read by the consumer but also Google hates that for both PPC and SEO. Original content is a must.

4. Good Navigation – Make it easy for users to find what they need on your site. Navigation must be perfect as a rule of thumb i recommend that your user should be able to get to what he needs in no more than 3 clicks. Also don’t make him use the browser buttons. Make the navigation intelligent yet simple.

5.Security – something that can ruin your camping is potentially is harmful software for the visitors. This will take your campaign down for months so make sure your website is protect properly.

Here you can find detailed information about website quality guidelines from Google AdWords.

Macro Factor

Its called macro because this is the factors that impact quality score which you can’t control.

One of the main factors here is the statistical data that Google AdWords gathers about other peoples campaigns for certain keywords. If a lot of people had a poor quality score for a certain keyword and you decide to use it in your campaign initially it will also have a poor quality score. However as your campaign evolves over time this might change if you get a good click through rate for the particular search term.

Conclusion

Quality score is an important formula that is used to calculate the minimum bids for your keywords. Even though AdWords has not reviled all factors that impact quality score if you use all the suggestions above I am confident that you will achieve fantastic results for your campaign.

I hope this article will help you improve your results drastically. If you want to find out more ways in which you can improve your Google AdWords campaign why not try one of our free Adwords performance reports or give us a call on 0203 137 1048.

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