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The Digital Marketing Podcast
How To Start Building Effective Adwords Campaigns
00:23:41
Ciaran and Daniel walk us through how to go about planning and building an effective Adwords campaign using a process that is quick to do and gets excellent results. With a little bit of basic knowledge you can be getting targeted traffic to your...
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and I'm Daniel Rolls. And today, Daniel, we're going to be talking about pay per click campaign planning and building.
- [00:24]
B
We are. So we have been running some pay per click campaigns recently for the kind of public training courses that we do. So we a number of different kind of public digital marketing related courses. And Kieran has a bit of a process and a technique for building these campaigns.
- [00:41]
A
Yeah, I wouldn't say it's the most advanced kind of process, but I think I wanted to share this with everybody because I think actually if you're wanting to get into AdWords, this is a great starting point.
- [00:52]
B
I think it's actually really important because I think it can be a little bit overwhelming. AdWords when you look at the interface, there's so much you can do. I always tell people that the fundamentals are really straightforward, but actually it's so simple, you quite easy to do it badly. And I think this is very much what Kieran's talking about, relates to quality score and the help that I can give you when you haven't got huge budgets as well. So do you want to kind of talk us through this process?
- [01:12]
A
I will, I will. So there's a key theme that runs through all of this and it's very much working with Google and understanding that for Google, giving people exactly what they want is the absolute paramount goal.
- [01:27]
B
And if this comes down to very logically, if you've got loads of ads that aren't very relevant, people look at them, these ads aren't relevant and they stop clicking on them all together. And actually they will reward you for writing nice, relevant ads, basically.
- [01:37]
A
Yeah, well, worse than that, actually, what I'm going to be sharing with you is if you're not relevant, you just don't get shown like you're not even going to get a place at the table. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. So break it down into stages. I don't want to jump in too early because I think it makes it harder to understand. So your very first part of your pay per click campaign is actually taking a step back away from AdWords and understanding some of these things that we've been talking about recently, but particularly who is your customer, what Personas are you working with and what sort of things are they going to be searching, searching for? We need to work that out first. And so I always start with A little bit of a keyword brainstorm. Now that can be quite simple actually, in the initial stages, certainly for our campaign. Actually, Daniel, you brainstormed about a dozen or so fairly relevant terms. I think sometimes when you're brainstorming, the danger is that you go sort of too far upstream. What do I mean by that? Well, you'll find certain phrases that will get lots and lots of attention and searches for, but they're not necessarily relevant to what it is that you are selling. And I've never found AdWords a particularly good place for running like a brand awareness campaign. Like you can do it, but it's really expensive, it's not a cost effective way. There are other channels that do this much, much better. So I know within a lot of the content planning podcasts that we put out, we say you need to make sure you spread your content across lots of different stages. Actually, if you're just starting out AdWords, I really would focus on that buy our stuff stage initially, particularly if your budgets are tight, because otherwise you potentially get a lot of clicks from people who are never going to buy from and that's cost you quite a lot of money in some instances. So we need to brainstorm around our topic. I would literally speak within your teams, come up with the most, a dozen or so most obvious phrases for what it is that you're looking to promote and sell. And then I would expand on that and there's a couple of techniques you can do for doing that. Certainly both Google and Bing have keyword tools. They're good, but they come with a slight overhead. I think they're too good. Right. So they will suggest all sorts of interesting key keywords. And the danger is you get so much that you don't filter it down properly and you end up with sometimes quite irrelevant searches creeping into your keyword brainstorm.
- [04:07]
B
But equally, you don't want to be too precise. Is one thing I've learned as well. You don't say this is the one keyw and that's it because you're just not going to get the volume of traffic off them.
- [04:15]
A
So a particular tool I'm very fond of because it's lovely and simple and it doesn't give you too much in one go is a thing called Keywords Everywhere. And what Keywords Everywhere does is a browser plugin.
- [04:25]
B
I was just going to say, I hope you're not going to mention that other tool because we'll lose our family safe. Now we will put this in the show Notes. There is a very inappropriately Named tool, keyword something. And we're not going to say it out loud.
- [04:38]
A
Well, we could spell it out, couldn't we?
- [04:39]
B
Well, no, I still think that that's against the itunes policy of using foul language.
- [04:43]
A
Oh, man.
- [04:44]
B
Is another one. And just look at the show notes targetinternet.com podcast and you'll find it in the show notes as well. But there are several. So talk about your one.
- [04:53]
A
Yeah, so just before we go on to that, a lot of people don't look at the show notes.
- [04:56]
B
Yeah, I was going to talk about this. The show notes. Look at them. Because what you've got, it's a bit of a direct look at the show notes. But the key thing is there's loads of links and tools and free downloads and all sorts of stuff in there as well. This gets missed by most people. So targetinternet.com podcasts or podcast, it doesn't matter. And you will find for each episode there's a load of notes, a bit of a description and all the links that we talk about in there.
- [05:19]
A
And it's particularly important for this episode because if you don't, you're not going to get to the keyword research tool. That's very good, but has an inappropriately bad name.
- [05:28]
B
Exactly. So take a look.
- [05:29]
A
Yeah. Okay, so this is Keywords Everywhere, and it's a browser plugin. And what it does is it tunes into Google's API. And for any keyword you. You come across as you're browsing, it will highlight that and tell you volume information, average cost per click information, competition information, and do it for multiple countries as well. You can look at UK or India or France or Germany. So it's a really great research tool. But what I think is particularly clever about Keywords Everywhere is it tunes into lots of the other keyword places that you might be using. So I'm particularly fond of using it in relation to Google search. So what I would do is take that initial 12 most obvious phrases, I'd search for them in Google. And Google will always, if you've got keywords everywhere in place, it will always tell you underneath the kind of search volume and the average cost per click. That's interesting. But if you scroll to the bottom of the page, it gives you quite a nice, tightly focused list of other keywords that are sort of relevant. You'll be able to pick and choose. But if you've got keywords everywhere in place, you can just star the ones that you want to keep. And what it does, it squirrels them away in A little part of the tool. So you get a build up, a list.
- [06:43]
B
It's a really good little tool. I mean, Kieran showed it to me, I was really impressed with it. It's a nice way of doing keyword research built into your browsing experience, as it already is, so it doesn't get in the way.
- [06:51]
A
Yeah. So I mentioned, you know, keeping things tight and that's really important. There's no end of keyword sources out there, but the broader you go, the more work you're creating for yourself. And so once you've done your initial brainstorming, you've maybe broadened out your phrases, it's always good to pop them into a spreadsheet and then revisit it. And you revisit it with a view of, well, you know, really how close to the actually making a purchase is this keyword? You're looking at the customer intent and the customer intent to buy your particular product and service. And that's a great way of filtering it down because actually when you're doing your brainstorm, I'm a great believer anything goes. But then you need to refine and literally in a spreadsheet, I just kind of go through and delete the ones that aren't relevant, drill it down a little bit. Then I'd do a little bit of organization and generally speaking, I'll organize my keyword and keyword phrases in alphabetical order, order. What's quite interesting, when you do that, you start to see certain trends, certain groups, and the phrase very often used for this is bucketing. So we need to decide which buckets are each of these keywords going to go into. And the aim of the game when you're bucketing is to keep it really, like close and tight in terms of the range of customer intention that you have in any one bucket. In order to get Google AdWords working really, really well, you need to have a very relevant keyword linked to a very relevant advert. And then in turn, the next stage is you need to make sure it's linked to a very relevant AdWords landing page. Yeah. So that's the page you're driving people through to. Now if you don't do this or you fail to do this, it's going to really affect the quality of your ad group and ultimately of the campaign that ad group sits in. And so by filtering and grouping all your like, keywords together, you're able to create, you know, ad groups, remember, within AdWords, to give you the structure, you've got campaigns at the top level and then each campaign is made up of multiple ad groups. And within the ad group, that is where in each ad group you have a set of keywords and a set of adverts. Yeah. So nice tight ad groups with nice tight keywords and adverts all kind of pointing to the same thing leads to a really good user experience. There's no risk for error, really within that, that's what you really to be aiming at. Now the challenge with this comes making it too granular. And I think if you go to the nth degree and you've only got like one keyword and one advert per ad group, that's hyper, hyper targeted, but becomes a bit of a nightmare when it comes to actually managing a campaign made up of ad groups like that, because it's just too many.
- [09:33]
B
In my early days of running a search agency, we did one of our first big, big pay per click campaigns and it was for a jobs board. So they obviously had jobs of different types in different sectors in different cities. And we worked out this very specific phrase to this landing page, to this, and we did everything and we had 250,000 ads running. Okay. And it was the most horrific thing to manage. It took several people full time to manage this kind of campaign. So, yeah, you can get too granular and actually there's better solutions than that as well.
- [10:03]
A
So we've got our spreadsheet, we've grouped all of our keywords into different buckets. Each of those buckets going to be an ad group. Yeah. So typically just a column and you know, give your. Give each ad group a name and put it next to each keyword that's going to go into that. I'd say initially you probably want to keep it quite tight. So maybe three to six keywords, no more. The more you have in there, the more risk there is that it's going to sort of start getting a little bit untargeted and the next stage is actually putting those keywords into an ad group within a campaign. Now, when you come to do this, if you've never done this before, there are a few different types of targeting that you can use within adwords. The more targeted you can make these, the better. And I know I keep kind of going over that theme, but when it comes to popping adwords in, if you just type in a couple of words with no parenthesis around them, it's just the phrases that you've come up with. Google is going to trigger what's called broad search. And broad search really, really focuses on the Broad. It's not very, very good. And the. I'd avoid it, really, if you can. There are, you know, I know people will say there are uses, there are legitimate uses for broad match. But if your budgets are tight and you're wanting to get off to a good start, I'd avoid it. Because the broader Google shows, your ads, you could start showing for things that aren't really relevant to the advert that you've written because it's just too broad. So far better to make use of exact match where that's the most targeted. You could make things where you actually put your phrase into square brackets. And there's a thing called phrase match as well. I quite like phrase match because basically if I was, for example, cat, hotel, if I put that in speech marks, that's a phrase match. And my advert will only be shown if the word cat is followed by the hotel. In the user's search example, there's an additional targeting method which is called broad modified and I quite like broad modified. This is where you put a plus sign in front of each of the words that you want to insist are part of the user's search.
- [12:10]
B
Don't just do broad. Generally on its own though, is one.
- [12:11]
A
Thing matching to all sorts of stuff. Just avoid that. It's quite an interesting technique we've been experimenting with where you use broad modified, use phrase match and exact. And we're experimenting with that at the moment. That's, that's, that's. It's not quite sure enough shotgun, but it broadens things out a little bit. Yeah.
- [12:29]
B
And I think you need somewhere between absolutely laser targeted and actually a little bit broader so that in reality you are attracting people in that are slightly, slightly different stages of the journey. Also slightly thinking about it slightly different that you might not have considered as well. So it just gives you a little bit of broader reach and then you can start to see what works and what doesn't work.
- [12:46]
A
So I'm gonna share with you a tool that I found quite useful. It's called AdWords Wrapper.com so go along to AdWords Wrapper.com and if you punch in your five or six keywords for each ad group and ask it to wrap the keywords, it'll generate every different combination of broad, modified, broad and phrase and exact match. Or you can just pick and choose, it generates multiple lists and you can pick out the one that you. If you want it to be hyper targeted, Exact match is definitely the way to go. But I think there's definitely merit in Making use of modified broad match and also making use of a phrase match as well. Okay, so we've built our ad groups, we've populated them with keywords. The next thing we need to do is to actually build the ads themselves. Now remember, at this stage we've got an ad group with maybe three to six terms, all very strongly related to one another. And really, ideally, if you've grouped this properly, that ad group will have a very strong theme. And one of the key things Google looks at is like, what's in the headline of this, of this advert? So in the new AdWords format you have two lines of 30 characters.
- [13:54]
B
I really don't like this. 2, 30, 30, 80.
- [13:56]
A
It is a bit odd, isn't it?
- [13:57]
B
It's kind of annoying. But anyway, that's how it works.
- [13:59]
A
Yeah, yeah. And you need to make sure that the key search phrases within your ad group are in that headline. If you fail to do this, the advert is going to have a low quality score. But it kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Because actually one of the key things for your quality score is going to be the click through rate that that advert generates. Now the user's punched in the keyword search, they're going to be predisposed to click on ads that have that keyword search within the headline. So what I try and do is to keep the headlines fairly static within an ad group and actually make reference to some of the other things that are perhaps within my, my kind of ad aim elsewhere within the ad. But the headline is all about, you know, relevance to the actual, to the actual keywords. Doing that is going to really, really help boost your quality score and it's really, really going to help in the early days of getting a campaign live and getting it shown, because it's one of the things that Google seems to look at and go, hmm, is the keyword phrase you're targeting actually in the headline of the ad? If it is, that's a tick. And you're far more likely to get your ad shown.
- [15:01]
B
That kind of brings you on to kind of bidding strategy and timing of this.
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A
Because I thought this was fascinating. Yeah. So what I found was that if I bid too high initially, like I've just got lazy and said, right, for every keyword in this ad group, like bid £4. Because you know, the whole adage of, well, Google AdWords and Bing, pay per click, you know, you only bid one more penny than the next best bid. That should be right. Okay, that should work fine. Yeah. And it doesn't really what happens is if you bid too high, what Google's going to do, it'll attempt to compare your advert with the very best performers in that category for that, for that keyword. And because your advert has no quality score, it's got no history of a click through rate within it. Perhaps that campaign hasn't either. It's all new, you're just not going to show up to end up in a situation well, my ads aren't really showing so you bid more and you just can't bid your way in. A far better strategy is to look at for every keyword you have, Google will tell you what the minimum bid you'd need to bid to get onto the first page of results is. And I'd recommend start there, start there and get your campaign going. And we found it took two or three days for our ads to actually start showing in any volume. I think what Google does is it particularly if there's no history to go on within an account, it tests the waters, shows it to a very limited number of people to sort of work out right, what's the click through rate? Because using the click through rate they can really work out how relevant is this ad to what people are searching for. So it makes perfect sense. But then what's interesting is a few days into the campaign you start to see for the keywords where your ads are definitely showing. You're getting good numbers of impressions. You may be getting some good click through rates as well. You start to see that Google also gives you an extra bit of information when you click in the bid amount to adjust it. It'll tell you actually if you want to appear above the organic results of in the top three positions, you need to bid a minimum of this. That's the point where I think Google's saying, okay, you know, you're right, you're pretty good. Yeah. So don't be in a rush to get to the top. These things take time, particularly if it's a new campaign. I would say, you know, tread carefully and your aim is to really make everything hyper targeted. Hyper tight ad groups with hyper tight adverts that relevant to those ad groups really, really helps.
- [17:20]
B
And then the landing pages.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah. So this is the part of the jigsaw really. Remember in an AdWords situation there are three individual component parts or working as the keywords. There's the advert itself and then there's the landing page. And this is where the synergy between your keywords, the advert and the landing page needs to be there. Now, when we first set up our campaign, what we did just to get things off the ground was we pointed to one sales page for the courses that we were promoting and that's fine, but we ended up with, we probably had about 13 different ad groups within that campaign and one landing page can't possibly be relevant to all 13 of those ad groups. It's just not going to work out. Right. So actually what we started to see within Google AdWords was the landing page in terms of its quality. It was just saying very low or very poor. You know, we want to aim at least average or if we can. Good. Now to do that, you're going to need to create separate landing pages. Now what fascinates me about this and I've been reaching out to a few of my colleagues who, who just specialize in search engine optimization. They're very much of the opinion that actually in order to make sure your landing page is good and has a good quality score, you need to go back to some of the what are now considered rather old fashioned search engine optimization rules and techniques. Yeah. So looking at the title of the page, looking at the URL of the page, looking at the headlines on that landing page and making sure they line up with the keywords that you've got within your ad group is really going to pay dividends. Now this is the really interesting thing. If you line these three things up really, really well and keep things nice and quite granular, very tight and focused, what you find happens is you end up paying a lot less than what the Google API said you would have done in the first place. So a lot of the keywords that we were targeting were 8, 9 pounds per click. I can tell you within that campaign because we've kept things very tight and focused, we're not paying any more than about 2 pounds 40 pence maximum in a lot of is a lot less, a lot less than that. But it's because unlike a lot of the other advertisers who, you know, maybe have just been tempted to be a bit lazy and just create a couple of ad groups and bung all their keywords in there and have lots of different adverts, none of them particularly focused to the keyword ad, the keywords in the ad group, you know, ours are really focused and so we don't have that kind of wastage and we're getting good click through rates. With click through rate on our ads was averaging just under 4%.
- [19:48]
B
The average click through rate is about 1%. So 4% is fantastic.
- [19:51]
A
But I think that's because in a lot of cases, people's campaigns just aren't that targeted.
- [19:56]
B
I think there's something interesting in this, is that if I look at the market we're operating in, the cost per click is huge, like 8, 9, 10 pounds a click. And it's because you're an environment where a lot of our competitors are venture capital funded. They've had millions and millions of pounds injected into them and they're just throwing it at pay per click and they're quite lazy about it. I mean, looking at how they're doing it, they're really not thinking it through. So they're paying a lot per click, whereas actually we're getting clicks in the same area for a quarter of what they're paying, just because we're focusing our campaigns and really thinking it through. So, you know, if you're on a budget and you want to compete in a lean way, it's a great way of doing it, just thinking through.
- [20:27]
A
So the last thing I want to share with you is an important metric, I think, within. Within AdWords. So we talked about, you know, quality score and you want to add some of these metrics in. You know, go into the ad columns and look at the competitive metrics. There's really quality metrics that you find them all in there, experiment with them and learn what they're all about. I'm not going to go into them in great detail here, but the one that I is really important is your impression share, because this gives you a little bit of a view on how Google is viewing your ads. And to start with, your impression share will be quite low, particularly in those first couple of days whilst Google is kind of testing you out. So it's not unusual to see, you know, 10, 25, 30, 30%. It's a little bit of a waiting game, really. You need to wait the time and wait for that to jump up. And it will with time, if you've kept things tight and relevant. And you need to be aiming ideally at around 80% impression share. And what that tells you is you're bidding enough and your quality score is good enough that you know, your ads are being shown 80% of the time for when those things are being triggered. And at that stage, you know, you know you've got the bids about right.
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B
Yeah, and I think that's a good point because it's not a metric many people talk about, but I think it is an indicator of things are going pretty well.
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A
Yeah, Google won't show your ad to lots of people, unless it's happy that it's scratching the itch they're trying to get to. Absolutely.
- [21:50]
B
I think it's just purely about that relevance.
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A
It's great. Now, you can't just set it and forget it, unfortunately, because as you wade into a particular keyword landscape, so your competitors will be reviewing their campaign. Certainly most people review them on a weekly basis if they're worth a salt, some people less. But when you start getting to the top of the cornflake pile, they'll start making tweaks and changes to get back onto their top spot. So it's a constant game of tweaking and changing your ad copy and the ad group and further expanding your ad groups. When you find a particular keyword within an ad group that's doing really, really well, that's the time to break that keyword out of that ad group and create its own ad group. Make it even more hyper targeted. And again, these things take time. But I think what I like about that approach is you're not creating it completely granular at the beginning. You're looking at what works and then doing a bit more work to make what's working work even harder perfect.
- [22:50]
B
And I think that iteration approach kind of goes through everything that you need.
- [22:52]
A
To do with it.
- [22:53]
B
So loads of tools to look at for this. So go to the show notes targetinternet.com podcast. Hope you find them useful and we'll speak to you again on the Digital Marketing Podcast. Thanks very much for listening to the Digital Marketing Podcast. If you want to continue your learning in digital marketing, get over to Targetinternet.com and sign up for the free trial of our digital marketing elearning platform. There's over 140 bite sized courses for you to try and lots of other learning resources as well. So get on there and sign up for the free trial.