Google Adwords Tips, Trick and Traps

Google Adwords is, without a doubt, the single most effective, trackable and targetable method for putting your products and services in front of hundreds of thousands of people in a very short period of time.

Google Adwords is Google’s platform for Pay Per Click marketing. Pay Per Click marketing allows you to show adverts on the search result pages of Google for keyword(s) of your choice. As you can see from the screenshot below, the results highlighted are all PPC ads. Each time a user clicks on one of these ads, the advertiser pays google for that visitor. Using PPC advertising, you can receive traffic for any given keyword at the flick of a switch. How much you pay for each visitor depends mainly on the competitive nature of the search term.

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Google Adwords can cost you a lot in unexpected charges unless you follow these basic rules.

• Only spend money when you can track the return on investment
• Be conscious that the click price can dramatically increase without warning
• Set a very, very low budget to start. You should be able to tell how well an ad or keyword combination are selling for you with just a few hundred clicks.  So big ad budgets are wasted money until you know EXACTLY what works to sell your products and services.
• Make sure that the people who come to your site are buyers, not just people who are idly interested in what you sell.  Putting  a price in your ad can help, as can using words like “buy” in your key phrases.
• Make sure your site has something to buy on it. There’s not a lot of benefit in sending people to a site where they can’t actually buy anything . . .

There are some terms you need to understand in order to use Adwords effectively.

• CTR, or Click Through Rate, is the % of people who have seen your ad then clicked on it.
• Quality Score is Google’s in-house calculation for evaluating the quality of the ad writing, percentage of people that see the ad, the CTR, and the quality and relevance of the landing page.
• Bid is the maximum you will be willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your ad.  The amount you have to bid on each feature varies hugely base on how competitive the keyword is.

Where your add appears on Google search pages and affiliated sites depends on these metrics.

Creating google ads is an art that may take years to master, however, here are some tips that should help you achieve better results.

• Title:  Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word.  Include the keyword at the start if you can.  This increases CTR. Include the benefit to the customer if you can. Answer the question “What makes you different?”
• Description: Make full use of the space. You enter two lines of text but it may actually be displayed as one, so bear that in mind. Focus on what’s important to the user. Include your keyword, even if it is already in the title.
• Display URL: Do not use www. at the start of your URL. Attempt to include the keyword after the URL if possible (eg: SchoolforStartups.co.uk/Keyword-Here). Your display URL can be different from your destination URL, as long as the domain used on both is the same.

If you get a keyword and ad combination that’s really effective at selling your products and services, use search engine optimization techniques to modify your site so it can use the same model without requiring you to pay Google adword fees. If you can make it so Google lists your website at the top of its search page naturally, you may get up to 40% of the clicks on the page without having to pay per click.