EBOOK google adwords 3

wishpond EBOOK The Ultimate Guide: Google AdWords for Small Business wishpond.com wishpond EBOOK Table of Contents Chapter Introduction to Google AdWords: Why Does My Small Business Need Them? Chapter Glossary of Terms You Need to Know 17 Chapter How to Plan a Successful Google AdWords Campaign in 10 Questions 26 Chapter The Anatomy of a Google AdWords Campaign [With A Secret Tip to Make it Simple] 34 Chapter How Do I Choose Keywords for My Small Business Google AdWords Campaigns? 54 Chapter How to Write Google PPC Ad Copy that Converts: 12 Ways to Succeed 64 Chapter How to Create Landing Page/ Google AdWord Combos That Convert: 21 Tips 72 wishpond EBOOK Chapter How to Strategize Budgeting and Bidding in Google AdWords 83 Chapter The Practical Science of A/B Testing your AdWords 90 Chapter 10 How to Measure ROI and KPI’s 101 wishpond EBOOK Chapter Introduction to Google AdWords: Why Does My Small Business Need Them? Online marketing and Google AdWords The two go hand in hand When a customer is looking for a product, service, promotion, or anything from anywhere in the world, they’re likely going to search for it on Google That customer is looking for you If you’re in business these day, you’re marketing online It’s the way to reach your customer, drive traffic to your store, and ultimately increase sales For a small business, AdWords can be a hugely successful method of driving traffic, marketing your product and ultimately getting increased sales Is your business doing it, yet? Here’s the top 12 reasons why your business can benefit from AdWords wishpond EBOOK Reach Your Customer When They Want Your Stuff Any business, regardless of size, wants to be found on the first page of Google As a small business, you’re competing with experienced, motivated SEO experts to get those coveted organic top ten search results With Google AdWords you have an edge in getting your message viewed by your market, exactly when they’re searching for your specific product, service or offers wishpond EBOOK Reach Your Local Customer Here’s an example of radius targeting around the “Statue of Liberty”, excluding the 229,000 reach of New Jersey AdWords gives you location targeting options So, if you’re a locally based business, (such as a neighborhood restaurant), a regional company (such as a state bank), or even an e-commerce site (with, say, country shipping restrictions), you can geo-target to get seen by your consumer - and you’re not wasting ad dollars on those who aren’t You can target by geo-based demographics, such as income level So, if you’re selling luxury goods, for example, you can target the top 10% income earners in your specified area AdWords enables you to easily target countries, areas within a country, and radius targeting (to show your ads to people within a certain distance to your business) You can exclude locations, too, even in your proximity targeting Excluding locations brings your ROI up, by lowering costs and targeting more precisely wishpond EBOOK Show your Location By using Google Places, in conjunction with AdWords, you can show a map of your bricks and mortar shop with your ads The easier you make it for customers to find you, the more likely they’ll walk in, or click through to your website Show Your Contact Information You’ve probably seen these on a few ads: ad extensions Ad extensions let businesses enhance ads with phone numbers, an address, app downloads, site landing page links, reviews, previous page visits and lots more They generally show up in blue, just below your ad description By including more contact information in your ads, you make it way easier for your potential customer to connect with you wishpond EBOOK Ad extensions don’t cost anything more to include in your ad But you are still charged for clicks on your ad and other interactions with your extensions For example, if someone clicks on your phone number to call you directly from your ad extension, you’ll be billed for this paid conversion (Yup, Google can track clicked phone calls on mobile, tablets and desktops.) If you’re a restaurant, for example, you can show your local address, and include links to specific menu pages, offers and other specific landing pages on your website Here’s how a coffee chain uses them: Tim Hortons adds their nearest address They link to their “nutrition” “coffee” “Tim Card offers” and “location” pages on their website, so people can click directly through for more information Highly Targeted Searches Keywords, keywords, keywords This is what Google AdWords is known for As a small business, use the right keywords, that are optimized for high quality scores, and target your customers, products, offers, location and more The more targeted your keywords (and keyword phrases) are, the better Google will rank your ad You’ll also reach a lot more consumers, who want exactly what you have right now If you’re using Google AdWords directly, be sure to research through suggested keywords for every ad group you create Some Google ad providers, like Wishpond, offer to the hard work for you - by choosing the most optimized, targeted keywords for your ad group campaigns wishpond EBOOK Here’s an example of suggested keywords from an online shoe store ad: Use the opportunity to think like your customer, and choose words they’re searching for You can set up different keywords for each of your ad group campaigns, too And, you can change your words at any time to keep optimizing your reach Follow Your Customer with Retargeting You’ve seen it, I’m sure You visit a site, stay on it for a while, and then leave But then you keep seeing ads for the company, or even the product page you were on That’s retargeting With Google Adwords, if an interested customer has visited your website, they get a cookie from a code you’ve put on the backend of your site When they leave your site, you can target your ads to follow them on the Google Display Networks, or Google search 10 wishpond EBOOK We changed the Ad headline to be more specific about their products Our headline B variation reads: “Party Tent&Event Rentals” In the party rental ad example, Ad “A” has the the Display URL of “www.partyrentals.com” (a site I made up): Ad “B” Ad “B” gives viewers a specific landing page, “www partyrentals.com/equipment” We ran the test for one week, with keywords, targeting, budget and everything else the same The Result: A 3% increase in clickthroughs to their website Display URL: Short vs Long As you know (if you’ve been reading my series on Google AdWords), you can change the website address in your Ad Copy Test out if a change in your Display URL makes a difference to your advertising outcomes We ran the test for one week, with no other changes to variables The Result: An 11% increase in clickthroughs to their site 97 wishpond EBOOK Call-To-Action: “Book online” vs “Call us” Your Calls-to-Action can motivate a customer to click your ad, book your service and buy your products Test out your action asks to increase your conversions In the same party rental ad, we changed the CTA of “book online today” Ad “A” We ran the test for one week, with no other changes to variables The Result: 17% increase in website traffic Yeah, this seemed like a strange result, considering the CTA was to call them, not visit their site But, they don’t have their phone number on the Ad, and I surmise the “Call us” gives a more personal connection with the consumer Given these strong results, we could test out other CTA’s, too The best CTA’s are action oriented, short and inspire a quick response Here’s a few more examples we could use: We tested it with: “Call us today” Ad “B” • “book online today” vs “Rent Tents and more” • “book online today” vs “Book now and Save” We could then run the tests using “Call us today” vs the next highest performers (See, I told you, this testing stuff can go on forever….) 98 wishpond EBOOK Additional A/B Tests to Optimize Results As you can see, there are many many variables you can test on your Google AdWords campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads Each change can lead to exponentially increased returns on your advertising investment You may be pleasantly surprised at how a few simple words can take your ad results from a 5% CTR to a 17% (or higher) CTR A 5% increase to your CTR can increase profits by thousands A few more top AdWord components to test include: • Your offer • Punctuation and capitalization • Wording your competitive advantage • Location targeting • Ad Extensions • Landing Page Destination URL • Ad Group Keywords • Device targeting • Time of day 99 wishpond EBOOK Conclusion A/B Testing is effective It works Once you get used to it, it’s really not that hard to When you are A/B Testing, make sure you keep your end goals in mind It’s about increasing your business ROI, and making your company more profitable without excess spending Don’t get so drowned out by the testing details that you lose sight of why you started A/B Testing in the first place Start by trying out one or two variables Test Improve your results Read on The next (and final) chapter is all about measuring your ROI and KPI’s It’s the bottom line money part! 100 wishpond EBOOK Chapter 10 How to Measure ROI and KPI’s wishpond EBOOK Do your eyes glaze over when you hear the words “ROI”, “KPI”, “tracking metrics” and “Google AdWords”? I hear from a lot of small businesses and online marketers who get frustrated and overwhelmed by the prospect of tracking their online advertising results But measuring your returns - especially when you are paying to get them - should be your business’ top priority Without tracking your profits on Ad spends, you don’t know if you’re making money If you don’t know if you’re making money or not, well, you’re not going to be in business very long! analyze your ad budget spends But you still need to know if your Ad investments are generating profits Hey, if you’re spending money and you’re not getting back more money than you’re spending - you’re wasting your hard earned cash You’ve got to stop the leak You also should know if one Ad is generating more profits than another - so you can put more money into the profitable one With Google AdWords you can track and measure just about any metric Measuring your ROI doesn’t have to be overly complicated You need to a bit of math, but, hey, that’s part of business Let’s take a look at how to calculate your ROI And it doesn’t have to be complicated! A Simple Calculation for your AdWords ROI In this article I’ll give you simple formulas to calculate your ROI and show you how to measure KPI’s for the top three advertising goals As you likely know, your Return on Investment is basically a ratio of your net profit over the costs you spend to get the profit Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI) To put it in an equation, your ROI looks something like this: When you’re a small business, I’m thinking you likely don’t have a big accounting department to track and 102 wishpond EBOOK • The costs of your goods • Your advertising costs (this is available through your Wishpond account, or your AdWords account, if you used Google AdWords directly) Your ROI is your revenue less your cost of the thing you sold divided by the cost of the goods sold So, for example, let’s say you sell t-shirts The cost to produce one t-shirt is $10, and you sell them for $20 You sell 100 of them from advertising them on Google Your revenue (as you can see) is $2,000 Your cost to produce them was $1,000 And you spent, let’s say, $500 in advertising Your ROI is: 2,000 - (1,000 + 500)/ (1,000 + 500) Do the math Your ROI ratio is 33, which is 33% Measuring ROI for Sales To measure your ROI for sales, you need to know: • The revenue you made with your Ad Campaign Now, you may not always know exactly where your sales are coming from Whether you sell goods online or offline, here are a few tips to improve your tracking Online Sales: If you sell your goods online, it’s actually pretty simple to track Here’s two methods for determining the online revenue you made from your online Ads: • Create a product landing page specifically and uniquely for your Google AdWords Campaigns Then you can calculate how much product was sold via that page • Or, if you’re using Google AdWords directly, set up Conversion Tracking and connect it to your AdWords account (It’s not that hard to set up Conversion Tracking - you just copy an HTML code Google gives you, and you paste it onto the website you want to track results from.) Put the 103 wishpond EBOOK code on your product landing page to track hits Or better, put the code on your “thank you” page, after the transaction has been completed Offline Sales: If you don’t sell your products online, you can still track your sales made from your Google Advertising Here’s my favorite way to track offline sales: • Use promotions, like coupon codes, which are unique to your AdWords campaigns That way, when someone redeems your offer, you can track which coupon code they used and you’ll know where your sale came from Calculating ROI for Leads, Website Traffic and More Calculating the investment return for conversions and traffic is a little more tricky You may not know the exact monetary value for a lead of someone who downloaded your ebook or requested more information You probably don’t know the value of a click on your site, either The first calculation you need to know is: Cost-PerAcquisition (CPA) Your CPA is how much it costs your business to gain an action (such as a lead or a click, or even a sale) from a potential customer Calculate it by simply tallying your total costs for the Ad and dividing it by the total number of sales you obtained from your Ad campaign In other words: CPA = (Cost/Sales) Let’s take the t-shirt example again Let’s say you were also generating leads from potential customers by using an email-gated landing page that gave them access to a series of ‘how-to’ videos you made You got 1,000 leads from this campaign 100 of these leads purchased a t-shirt Your net profit (revenue - costs) is $1,000 (as calculated above) Your total Advertising costs were $500 Your CPA = 500/1000 Or $0.50 If math is not your thing, try ClickZ’s online CPA calculator You guessed it, there are formulas you can use to ballpark your investment returns Or, if you’re using Google AdWords directly, set up your 104 wishpond EBOOK Conversion Tracking You can measure both Conversions and Converted Clicks with the Tracking Metrics to Measure Your Top Advertising Goals Here’s a few more formulas you can use to put your Ad dollar spends into perspective: In addition to understanding the costs incurred and the profits you make, it’s important to measure other Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) too Your ultimate goal in business is to make profits, but there are many steps along the road to achieve this success Value of a Lead = (Net Profit/ Total Number of Leads) Advertising ROI = (Total Revenue - Total cost)/ Advertising costs x100 Average value per customer (AVC) = (Total Sales Revenue/ Number of Customers) Note: If most of your customers are through recurring payments, you can use a much more complicated, but more accurate, formula: AVC for recurring payments = (Total number of recurring payments/number of customers) x ((Recurring Payment Price #1 x Number of Customers Paying this Price) + (Recurring Payment Price #2 x Number of Customers Paying this Price) + … / Total Number of Customers) Read more about AVC for recurring payment Your business has its own unique goals Three top goals that Google advertisers want are: • Website traffic • Brand awareness • Sales and conversions Let’s take a look at what metrics to use to measure your business and campaign objectives KPI’s to Measure Website Traffic The simplest goal to track is website traffic Even with the most basic of Google AdWords Campaigns, you can measure your clicks and click-through-rates for your Campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads 105 wishpond EBOOK Measure your website traffic so that you can improve your results, and get more out of your advertising spends The top KPI’s to measuring your website traffic are: • Clicks - Your Clicks are the number of times someone clicks on your Ad Copy Technically, a click is counted even if that person never actually reaches your Destination landing page You can measure your Clicks for a Campaign, Ad Group or Ad You can generate performance charts to analyze against your Impressions or Click Through Rates, or measure daily, weekly and quarterly performances • Click-Through-Rate (CTR) - Your CTR takes your Click rate further, and measure how many people have actually clicked through to your Destination URL Your CTR gives you more accurate data on the website traffic derived from your Ads Note: According to Google itself, a good CTR on a search network ad is 1% Using these metrics, you can measure your Clicks per Keyword, your Clicks per Cost of Click, your Clicks vs Impressions, and lots more When you get to understand these metrics, you’ll learn to improve your results by improving your quality score, keywords, search terms, CTA, ad copy, and more KPI’s to Measure Brand Awareness Not all advertising is to gain direct sales Your business (or non-profit) objective might be to bring increased awareness of your company, products, services or cause For example, you may be introducing a new product or hosting an upcoming event It’s not available yet, but you want to build excitement and generate anticipation Use brand awareness advertising methods 106 wishpond EBOOK Tip: Display Network Ads are the best method to increase brand reach Your Ad will be shown on sites related to your keywords (including Gmail, Google Finance and Blogger sites) - not just on search when people are more actively looking for you You target your Display Network sites by keywords and topics via contextual targeting The top KPI’s to measuring your brand awareness campaigns are: • Impressions - An Impression metric is kind of like the old school method you may have gotten from advertising in the Yellow Pages or a newspaper Your Impression metric indicates how many people have viewed your Ad You get much more accurate Impression data when you advertise online, and you can see specific information for your Ads, your Ad Groups and your Ad Campaigns • CTR - Again, your CTR is a good indicator of your Ad’s success The more people who are interested in your Ad Copy enough to click through to your site, the more successful you’ve been at raising awareness • Reach and Frequency - Your Reach shows the number of people who could see your Ad Your Frequency shows you how many times a person is likely to see your Ad (It’s the old marketing adage: The more someone sees your brand or product, the more familiar they become, and the more likely they’ll buy from you.) 107 wishpond EBOOK Tip: Use a CPM bidding strategy rather than standard CPC when your goal is raising awareness CPM is Cost-per-thousandimpressions It tends to lower your costs if your goal is to get more views than clicks KPI’s to Measure Sales and Conversions Getting conversions - and sales - is generally the end goal of your advertising spends A conversion means getting your prospect to take action on your ad’s landing page To measure your conversions directly through Google, you need to set up Google’s Conversion Tracking Otherwise, you’ll have to either it manually or use another third party conversion tracking software The top KPI’s to measuring your sales and conversions are: • Cost per Conversions - Within Google AdWords, you can assign a dollar value for each conversion This helps a lot when you are measuring your ROI You can set up a whole spectrum of reports to show you where your Conversions are coming from, and where you should be spending more of your Ad dollars to optimize profits • Conversion Rate - Your conversion rate can make it easy to track how many clicks you need (on average) to get a sale or other conversion • Landing Page URL - You can measure which Destination URLs (landing pages) are generating the most conversions What you want your customer to act on could be anything: • downloading an ebook • signing up for a webinar • a mobile phone call • purchasing your product 108 wishpond EBOOK 109 Conclusion Did you learn a new term or a new tactic to measuring your Google Ad return on investment? Try out one or two of these methods to start to track and improve your business profits Then implement a few more Hey, you might (I said might) just get rich, and grow your business to the success you’ve always dreamed about And that could make you happy, too! Thanks again for downloading my book And thanks for making the effort to read it through to the end! Keep these tips as your go-to resource, and you’re well on your way to Google AdWord success I wish you all the best with your online marketing endeavours! Thanks for Reading! Written by: Krista Bunskoek PR and Content Marketing Manager wishpond.com [...]... through the questions, you’re ready to make a better Google AdWords campaign Draft out your ads Make a few of them Start small, and test as you go In the next chapter, I’ll walk you through the technicals of how to make an AdWords campaign 33 wishpond EBOOK Chapter 4 The Anatomy of a Google AdWords Campaign [With A Secret Tip to Make it Simple] wishpond EBOOK Your customers are online They’re searching... There you have it - all the basic terms you need to get started with Google AdWords You can talk like a pro! It wasn’t that hard, right? Read on for tips on how to plan your next PPC Campaign and Ad Group 25 wishpond EBOOK Chapter 3 How to Plan a Successful Google AdWords Campaign in 10 Questions wishpond EBOOK As I’ve said before, Google advertising can be pretty daunting You have so many other tasks... ads directly on Google Then I’ll show you a simple 3- step alternative Google AdWords: Set up an Ad Campaign So, you’ve set up your Google AdWords account, and you’re getting ready to make your first Ad Congrats It’s an exciting time You get to join the online advertising move, promoting your business to the world - or simply to your local niche Then you see a page like this: 35 wishpond EBOOK And all... missing out? Google AdWords is one of the most effective online advertising methods to reach those consumers But, if you’re a busy small business owner, an ‘always on’ social media marketer, or even a seasoned offline marketer, running a Google AdWords campaign can seem pretty overwhelming I get you That’s why I’ve written a series of articles on Google AdWords, including how to plan your Adwords In... your priorities But you know you need to get your message to your market where they are - online Here’s 25 Google AdWords terms you need to know, to get you started and increase your conversion rates with your paid campaigns Setting Up Google AdWords Terms 1 Campaign - An ad campaign on Google AdWords is made up of your ad groups, and has the same budget, campaign type and your other ad settings It’s... an AdWords campaign on Google (Then I’ll show you a simple 3 step alternative.) 1 Set up a Campaign The first thing you need to do is click on the red button called “+Campaign” Display Select” This will show your ad on Google search and a few select websites It’s the most commonly used option by Google Advertisers (And, no stress, you can change this Ad Type down the road.) Note: if you have a Google. .. Money, money, money You need your PPC ads to give your business profits Plan out your Google Ad budget, before you dive right in Google AdWords are costed on a per day basis If you’ve never run online advertising, this could be something new to you, so make sure you understand how the pricing system works 30 wishpond EBOOK 9 What’s my time frame? How long are your ads going to run? The answer to this... sales • Return on Investment (ROI) Then set up your results tracking system before your campaign starts You might link up your Google AdWords account to your Google Analytics Or you might use an AdWord Tool provider’s analytics to get real-time metric reporting 32 wishpond EBOOK By measuring your results, you can test variations of your ad and optimize them in real time You also get to track (in detail)... strollers They picked up your Google AdWords cookie When they visit, say, a popular parent blog site (who are part of the Google Display Network), they can see your ad for strollers again And so on It is a more advanced marketing tactic from Google You can also retarget with software like Adroll, or Google ads with integrated retargeting software - like Wishpond 11 wishpond EBOOK 7 Reach Your Mobile Customer... triggers a charge to you for the ad costs It applies to automatic payments, and the threshold level starts at $50 It you reach that within 30 days, you’ll be billed, and your threshold then raises to $100 and so on Learn more about Google AdWords billing 23 wishpond EBOOK Ad Creative Terms 21 Headline - Your ad headline is the header of your ad copy It generally shows up in blue when your ad is live 22