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Articles Index >> Marketing
Avoiding the AdWords Minefield
by Michael Cheney
Using Google AdWords is a great way for advertisers to reach more target audience
members on the Internet. When you open a Google AdWords account you simply deposit
a small amount of money and instantly you can create your advertisements and
start reaching massive amounts of people on the Internet through their ads program.
Your ads then appear whenever anybody types in a relevant search term or keyword
into a Google search engine or one of a network of sites that Google owns. It’s
very easy to create ads, manage your account and actually start generating traffic
through to your website.
It’s a great thing that Google has made it so easy for you to manage
and open your AdWords account, but on the other hand it also means it’s
very easy to start spending lots of money on your online advertising campaigns
without actually getting any results.
I’ve spoken to a lot of webmasters that have gone done this road opened
an AdWords account and suddenly they’ve started spending hundreds of dollars
without getting anything back in return. In order to avoid the AdWords minefield
you need to be familiar with a few key concepts.
The first concept is the idea of split-testing. Split-testing is where you
have two cases of a particular ad; one ad with a certain headline and another
ad with a slightly different headline. You then split-test these ads against
each other to determine which headline performs best. You choose the better
performing headline and use it in all subsequent ads. You should always split-test
and always have two versions of each ad running at any one time.
Alongside split-testing you also need to consider the option of creating multiple
ads. Many website owners simply use one single advertisement on Google AdWords
to attract traffic. So they go off and they ad hundreds or maybe even thousands
of keywords to their campaign, but they only create one ad.
What this means is that for the majority of people who see your ad on Google,
your ad won’t actually be relevant to them. What you need to do to combat
this and avoid wasting money on Google is to create an ad for every single keyword
or key phrase.
This may seem like overkill, but it has a dramatic effect on your click through
ratio and your conversion ratio.
You need to have a separate ad for each of the phrases in your campaign so
that when people type in a particular phrase, they see an ad that contains those
words. Because, don’t forget, any words that people type into Google that
appear in your ad are made bold. So the more ads you have that include more
phrases, the better your chances of having bold ads that actually stand out
and get clicked on. Obviously, the more your ads stand out on Google the more
people will click on your ads and the more sales you will make.
The final tip is obviously to use their conversion software. This enables you
to track the actual conversion of clicks into sales or leads. You need to track
every element of your campaign; otherwise, you’ll be wasting money on
Google AdWords.
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