Last month, we went over the importance of identifying the right keyword phrases for your website and how you can do it yourself. Now that you have gone through and identified them, you can use these phrases to create a pay per click (PPC) campaign with Google Adwords. Why do you need to bother with Google Adwords? Have a read of our post on why Adwords is a great cost-effective way to promote your website.

So how does Google Adwords work?

When you did the keyword analysis, you would have ended up a whole bunch of keyword phrases which are part of keyword segment groups (i.e., the keywords within each segment group share a common theme. So for Giveaduck, one segment would be 'bath toys', with a number of phrases associated with it like 'baby bath toy', 'water toy' etc.) For each of these segments you will create an Adgroup. And for each Adgroup, you will create an advert that Google will display when a user searches for any of the keywords within that keyword segment. If a user clicks on your ad, you will pay Google an amount that you setup.

The structure of a Google Adwords account

The structure of Google Adwords is made up a campaign (which could be area specific like NZ or Aus). Under each campaign, you have an Adgroup (which is the keyword segment) and you will create an ad for each Adgroup which will use the keyword phrases under that particular segment.

How does Google position your ads?

Google calculates your position in the paid search results based on the number of other companies competing on your target search phrases. So if there are no competitors, you will pay the minimum cost of 5c per click and be at the top of the page. However, it is unlikely (and very lucky) that you will have zero competition. So when there are other companies competing for the same phrases, Google calculates your ad position based on an equation which is determined using maximum cost per click (CPC) and the relevancy of your ad and the landing page compared to the keywords.

Make your ads and landing pages relevant to your keywords

If there is one thing that you should always keep in mind when setting up a Google Adwords campaign is RELEVANCY. It is very important that you make your ad and landing page highly relevant to your keywords. This is why we go through so much trouble to segment our keywords. For example for Give a duck we determined a segment “Bath toy” which contains many phrases centered around the theme “bath toys”, such as "baby bath", "bath for baby", "bath toy", "water toys", "bath for kids", etc. So with this in mind we would create an ad using these keywords and we would also make sure that these search phrases were incorporated into our landing page so it all ties in togethere and makes sense for the user.

Create new campaign

Before you create a campaign you'll need to sign up to Google Adwords account - simply follow the directions supplied by Google.

You should create campaigns to target customers who browse the Internet:

• from a specific geographic area
• using a specific language
• with a certain type of device, i.e., only mobile phones
• using different networks, i.e., Google search or display network information sites using Google Adsense programme

Setup different campaigns if you are targeting different geographic locations. For example, we might decide to sell rubber ducks to New Zealand and also Australia. We would create a separate campaign for each country and label them 'Rubber duck nz' and 'Rubber duck Aus'. We can also create a campaigns specific to regions within a country i.e., Auckland and Wellington. For example a photographer in Wellington, will target Wellington only.

A few steps to help you set up your campaign on Google Adwords:

1. Name your campaign
2. Select the relevant location. This can be either entire country, a city or a radius from a certain point or an arbitrary shape that you can draw on the map.
3. Select the language
4. Choose the device type (we recommend starting with all devices)
5. Choose a network (we recommend just the search network to begin with. You can always setup a new campaign to target the display network.)
6. Select your bidding option (we recommend starting out with automatic bidding to maximise clicks)
7. Set your budget, which is the amount of dollars you want to spend per day. This means that if you have a budget of $200 per month you would divide by 30 to give you about $7 per day. We recommend that you start with at least $200 per month, but a maximum of $500 to a $1000 per month. Of course your budget will depend on your marketing budget and how much you would like to dedicate to your website. The number of clicks that you will receive for your daily budget will depend on how competitive your industry is. So how many other people are competing for your same keywords and how much budget they are allocating towards it, which is known a 'bidding' for the keywords. The number of clicks will also depend on how relevant and compelling your ads are to your target keywords and your landing page. We think that $200 is a great start and it will give you a good idea as to your return on investment. This budget per day means that if you receive $7 worth of clicks for the day, Google will hide your ads and not show them again until the next day. If you do not receive $7 worth of clicks then you will save the money.
8. Don't worry about advanced settings
9. Click next

Setup Adgroup

Before we go over how to set up an Adgroup on Google Adwords, we have a few tips below on how to write a good ad:

1. Use your most popular search phrases in your ads, especially the title of the ad. Meaning for every keyword segment you have identified in the keyword analysis, you'll have a list of keywords and you need to pick the ones with the highest search volume and high relevancy. Choosing these phrases means that your ad will be relevant and cost you less to get to the top. Google will also bold the keywords in the ad to highlight them to a user. This will make them more attractive to the user.
2. Check out what local competitors are doing and also look at what what might be working globally i.e., try a google.co.uk search for the same keyword phrases and see what the ads look like.
3. Convey your unique selling proposition (USP) in your ads. For example, “money to charity”, “Largest range”, "Good price", etc. are all good USPs.
4. Add a call to action and it's always great to create a bit of urgency i.e., "Buy Now", "Don't miss out", etc.
5. Add a compelling offer. For example, "Free delivery", "Mothers day sale", "Half price", etc.
6. Think about qualifying your customer. For example if we only sell rubber ducks, we don't want to incur the cost of people clicking on our ad if they are not interested in rubber ducks. So whatever segment you are creating an ad for, you need to make up an ad that compels clicks that result in buying your products or services.
7. Include prices if possible - again this is a great way to make sure that people that click on your ad are actually willing to pay the price. It's also a great way to convey discounts.
8. Split test multiple ads. This means for each Adgroup, create at least two ads with one or two elements that are different so you can find out what's working better. So you can choose to change the headline to see if that makes a difference or you can choose to change the offer in the ad to see what's perceived as more important. It will also allow you to test which ad clicks actually result in sales.
9. Avoid using competitor brand names

Steps for setting up an Adgroup

1. Choose a keyword segment for your first Adgroup. We have decided to start with the segment “bath toys”.
2. Review the top most popular search phrases to work out the keywords that you should use in your ad. Our top phrases include: "bath for baby", "bath toy", "water toys", "bath for kids", "bath toys", "toys bath". We would use phrase “bath toy for baby” in our ad which includes most of the words from all our top phrases, especially the headline.
3. Write your headline
4. Write each description line
5. Set your display URL. Again use your target keywords or phrases that help to qualify the user. For example we used www.giveaduck.org/RubberDuck. Note this does not need to be the actual URL. It is there to give the user an idea of where they are going to be taken. It must incorporate your domain i.e., giveaduck.org
6. Set your description URL. Find the most suitable landing page that the visitor is taken to when they click on your ad. Make it specific to your ad, make it relevant and ensure that it uses the target search phrases. Avoid sending people to your generic homepage.
7. Copy and paste all the keywords associated with the chosen segment from your research, into the keywords field.
8. Save your ad. Once you have set this up, the ad will be sent to a real person at Google to authorise the ad who will make sure that it fits their ad guideline.

Split test your ad

It is very important that you split test your ad. This means just changing one or two aspects of a Ad group to test out what's working better. It will allow you to test which offer is perceived as being more attractive and which ad click actually converts into a sale. But remember not to set up more two ads at a time for each Adgroup, unless you have many 1,000s of people visiting your site.

Steps to create a split test

1. Create a new ad under the campaign. You can do this once you have saved your ad, you can click to add a new ad under the campaign.
2. Avoid making too many changes to the ad - just change either the headline, or your offer or your USP.
3. In our case, we want test out our offer vs. the USP. So we are trialing out to see if users are more motivated to click an ad because of charity or because of free delivery.

Note that Google will start monitor your split tests and if one them if really under performing, it will cease to run that ad so as to make sure that your click rate is high.

Billing

We recommend that you use the Postpay billing option to ensure that your ads are running smoothly. Often a prepaid balance will run out and your ads will dry-up, meaning once your prepaid balance is out, you will have no click throughs. This means that you will start to lose traffic and more importantly you will lose important test data. It makes it difficult to test and tune your ads and your landing pages if you have big holes in your reports.

Postpay billing option doesn't have to be a scary option because you will have set your budget before hand anyway so there is not way Google will let your spend go over your budget and if you decide that you don't want to spend anymore money on Adwords, you can go in and cancel anytime you like.

Going Live

Your ads will not go live straight away because Google will need to review the ads to make sure that they pass their criteria. This will usually take around a day or so before your ad can go live.

Set up the next Adgroup

Follow the same steps to setup ads for the rest of your keyword segments from your keyword research.

We've tried to make this process as simple as possible but if you're finding that this is too complex or it is taking too much of your time, you can fast track it and get us to help you with it instead. Contact us to find out more.

As you might have read our article on the importance of doing a keyword analysis, identifying the right search phrases has a number of advantages. And it is the most important step before setting up a Pay per click (PPC - Google Adwords) campaign and also optimising your organic search engine ranking.

Before we get started....

In this article, we are taking you through a "simplified version" of the exact process our Google Adwords specialist follows to arrive at the right phrases (we simplified it a little to make it a bit easier). We encourage you to follow this process but please note that it is complex and there is no other way to simplify it without losing value. If you feel that the full process is too difficult to follow, you can get started on the first couple of steps which will still give you a good idea of what your customers are searching for on Google. Otherwise, you might be interested in our Pay per click (Google Adwords) service, which includes a keyword analysis - contact us to find out more.

Tools for the job

We recommend that you use Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or a similar package to follow this process - and you will need to have sound Excel skills to complete this process. You will also need access to the Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Step 1: Brainstorm seed keywords

Brainstorm all the phrases your customer could be typing into Google to find your business. Now put yourself in the shoes of your customer and imagine yourself in front of Google. What would you type into the search field to find a solution to your problem? This means starting with 'seeds' which is an idea and then thinking of a few search phrases under each seed. So for Zeald's Give a duck website which sells rubber ducks for charity - one seed might be 'rubber duck', another might be 'toy', etc.

• Think about the primary search phrases that describe your website or industry in general i.e., for the rubber duck website we would use "childrens toys".
• Make a big list of phrases - think of every possible scenario including local searches like 'rubber duck nz'.
• Consider famous brands that you might also stock as part of your business - be careful to not use a competitor brand though.
• Also consider related topical themes like "baby shower gift" that might have low competition than say "childrens toy" but still has high traffic.
• Solve the problems of your target market
• For large catalogues consider different product categories. For example rubber duck is a small catalogue, but it might be just one category of a larger childrens toys website.

Step 2: Segment the keywords

Group the phrases you have come up with into various themes, usually the 'seed' you start with can be the segment heading. The segments might be for different product groups that your company offers. Or they could be different target customer groups searching for your company's products and services in different ways. Consider different uses of the same product or different target customers or the same customer at different buying stages.

For a traditional website that does not have a large catalogue, you should have up to 5 different segments initially.  You will use these to optimise your homepage and the site in general.

A large catalogue website may have many more than 5 segments. For example an automotive parts website might have many different themes, such as brake parts, windscreens, wheels, oil, cleaning products, etc. To begin with, you should focus on the general theme of the website which would be something like "auto products", or "car parts", etc. You can repeat this exercise later to research the different categories.

Step 3: Determine search volume

We can determine the volume of each of the search phrases you have brainstormed using Google's Adwords Keyword Tool. This tool also allows you to determine search volume of a phrase specific to New Zealand or other geographic locations.

1. Once you have setup a Google Adwords account and logged in, click on 'Reporting and Tools' in the menu bar and select 'Keyword Tool'.
   

2. First thing change your geographical location to match your business, i.e., for Give a duck this would be New Zealand. Click on 'Advanced Options' (next to United States and English) and choose the your desired location.

3. Now copy and paste your seed keywords, one segment at a time into the 'Word or phrase' box and click 'search'. Google will come back with a big list of search phrases related to your seed word segment along with search volumes for each.

4. On the left hand menu, Set the 'Match type' to be 'Phrase' - Google will return the search results with quotes around the phrases which are the exact search phrases in the order that you typed into the box. It might have additions around it like adding 'buy'. This step will be very helpful later on when you start a PPC campaign.

5. Export the results to Excel using the Download button. Copy and paste the results into an Excel spread sheet - call the tab something like 'Primary keywords'.

6. Keep the words in keyword groups by adding a new column at the start of the sheet and filling it with the segment title, i.e., rubber duck. So every keyword should have the relevant segment heading next to it.

7. Repeat this for each segment and make sure that you run a separate keyword search for every different geographical location. Keep adding the search results back into the Primary Keywords tab and write the name of the segment heading next to the words for each word.

Step 4 - Shortlist your words

We now need to shortlist the phrases to a more manageable number:

1. Tidy the spreadsheet

You can do this by removing unused columns, leaving just the following columns:

• Global Monthly Searches
• Local Monthly Searches
• Estimated average CPC
• Advertiser competition
• Plus keyword phrases and segment headings of course

2. Shortlist by search volume

• Order by 'local search volume' or 'global search volume' depending on the location of your primary target market so that the most popular terms appear at the top. Use the Excel sort function for this operation.

• Delete all the rows which have 0 or low search volume, maybe 10% or 20% of your total search phrases depending on how many you have and how thorough you want to be with this process. The less phrases you have the quicker it will be but the greater the chance you could miss out on a golden opportunity.

3. Shortlist by relevancy

• Remove all duplicates. Because we have researched the popularity of each keyword segment separately with Google Adwords, there is bound to be some cross over. We need to remove this crossover. You can use the 'Remove duplicates' option under the 'Data' tab within Excel. Make sure that you choose the 'Keyword' column only.
• Work your way down each keyword/phrase and remove any rows that are obviously not relevant to your business. For example the phrase "Toy story3" is the name of a movie with a large number of page views and not really relevant to our business. Likewise with "wooden toys".
• Consider removing competitor brand names. It is not considered good practice to use competitor brand names. For example with the Give a duck website we would remove the phrase "Toys are us" because this is a competitor.
• Consider commercial intent. There is a tool available online which can give you a bit of guidance on commercial intent if you are not sure of a certain phrase yourself. Click on the 'query' button, type in the search phrase and click go. The result is a percentage so 'commercial intent of .29' indicates a commercial intent of 29% and 'non-commercial intent .29' indicates a commercial intent of 81%. Phrases with really low commercial intent can be removed as well.

This is a long and can be tedious task that requires a lot of concentration.....have lots of caffeine on hand.

Once you are done re-order the spreadsheet based on the 'Group' first and then the 'local/global monthly searches' using the 'Sort & filter' function.

Pheeeew ! Well done!

If you have followed this whole process, well done! Now you have a comprehensive list of keywords grouped into relevant themes, and ordered by their popularity.

You should also have a sound understanding for the type of language that your target customers are using online.

You should have had many different insights and hopefully discovered some nice little opportunities.

What next?

Now you can setup a PPC (Google Adwords) campaign using these search phrases and the themes you have created will form your Adgroups. You can then craft your ad-creative using the search phrase from each group with the highest popularity as your headline.

Stay tuned for our next article on setting up your own PPC campaign. It's best to work on a PPC campaign before starting with optimising your website for organic search engine rankings because PPC will give you a clear idea of which of these keyword segments and phrases are working well for your business in terms of results. Based on that you can start working on your search engine optimisation.

Keywords are the words or phrases people type into search engines like Google to find products and services that might relate to your business.

Why is it important to do a keyword analysis for your business?

1. Doing a thorough keyword analysis means that you will be putting all your efforts and investment into getting your site to the top of Google rankings for search phrases that are relevant to your business. And for phrases that people are actually looking for in the biggest numbers. This will help send targeted quality traffic to your website.

2. Going through the process of identifying your keywords will also help you learn the language of your target customers. Too many businesses use jargon that they are familiar with, but their customers don't understand what that might mean. Speaking the same language as your customers can improve your conversion.

3. You can spend a lot of time, money and resources to obtain and hold a good ranking for a search phrase. If later down the track you realise that you didn't get the right search phrases, it can be difficult to change your target phrases. This is because part of ranking well in search engines involves getting links to your site from other credible sites. An important part of those links is the 'anchor text'. 'Anchor text' is the visual text on the page that links to a site. For example in this article, one of the anchor texts is 'Pay-Per-Click campaigns' (below). The anchor text should incorporate your target search phrases for a good Google ranking. It's difficult to change the anchor text on other websites, therefore finding the right keyword phrases will prevent this from happening.

4. Knowing the right keywords is the starting point to setting up effective Pay-Per-Click campaigns.

An example...

A pig hunter ran an online business selling pig hunting DVDs internationally. Doing a keyword analysis revealed that very few of his target customers actually referred to it as 'pig hunting'. His American customers referred to it as 'hog hunting'. His European customers referred to it as 'boar hunting' and only Australian and New Zealand customers called it 'pig hunting'.

A quick check on Google Insights can show this information:

So how do you go about finding the right keywords/search phrases for your business? Read our article on how to do a keyword analysis.

The success of any website is measured by the results that it achieves - and it can be attributed to two main metrics - the amount of 'targeted traffic' to the website and the conversion rate of the website. By 'targeted traffic' we mean that the traffic to your website is well qualified and targeted, i.e., people are actually looking for services or resources offered by your website. By conversion rate we mean the number of visitors that are persuaded into taking action.

The traffic and the conversion rate need to be continually measured together as they are tightly connected - you can have the best marketing and advertising campaigns but if your website is not persuading your visitors to take action, then it's all wasted. Likewise, you can have the best website in the world but if no one can find it, there is no way that it will be successful.

PPC is a great promotional tool available to business owners like yourselves to generate targeted traffic to your website. Not only that, due to the nature of PPC, it is the best and the most cost effective way to manage, measure and optimise the continual improvement of your website.

So what is PPC?

PPC is short for Pay Per Click Advertising, which is a form of internet advertising. In this model, you will need to the pay the provider of this service only when someone clicks on your ad, which makes it a highly results driven approach. You might have heard this being referred to as Google Adwords - Google is a large provider of this type of service.

How does PPC work?

To set up a PPC campaign, you will have to start by researching the top keywords or phrases that people are typing into Google to search for your services or products. Then you choose the search phrases you want to use for your ads so that Google can display your ads next to the search results every time someone types in that search phrase. Then for each phrase you have chosen, you decide how much you'd like to pay each time someone clicks on your ad - this is called your bid for the ad.

If your bid for the keyword is too low, Google will let you know that this won't appear in the first page, which means that you will not get enough clicks or sales from this ad. For each keyword/phrase that you choose, you will have to create an ad that matches and a landing page on your website that relates to the keyword and the ad. 

Once your ads are up, every time someone types in one of your researched keywords, your ad will come up in the Google ads section on the right hand side of the page and a select few ads will appear at the top of the search results on the main part of the page (see picture below).

To decide your ranking in the results, Google will take into account the relevancy of your ad as well as your bid amount. Relevancy is calculated by how relevant the search phrases are to the copy of your ad and also to the copy on the landing page. Therefore PPC is not just about how much money you are willing to pay for the ads - it's about your content as well. Both your ad copy and the landing page copy should use the same or very similar phrases across them so the user has a seamless and consistent experience - they need to get the information that they are expecting when they click on your ad.

Google will give the best ad space, which is at the top of the main part of the page to the most relevant ads that also have the highest bid - as shown in the example of a search for 'wedding photographer' below:

You can set up and manage the PPC campaign yourself - if you'd like a bit of help managing your PPC campaign stay tuned for our next article that will tell you exactly how to set up, run and manage a PPC campaign.

How can your business benefit from PPC?

1. High ROI

PPC is one of the most profitable and cost effective channels for advertising and marketing an online business. Most of the top online marketers share this view - a Forbes study of the top marketers in US showed that PPC is considered one of the top 3 online marketing channels for generating conversions, with SEO and email marketing ranking 1and 2 - see the right hand column in the table below:

As you can see from the table above, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is seen as the most effective online marketing tactic. SEO is the process involved in optimising your website and the copy so it ranks highly in the natural search results. So when someone types in a search phrase related to your services or products, SEO will help you rank higher. We believe that while SEO is highly effective, PPC has a lot of other great benefits that make it a perfect compliment to SEO activities - in fact if you want to see an instant return on your investment, PPC is your best option.

2. It is instant

Unlike traditional forms of advertising, with PPC you can setup a campaign and generate traffic to your website in a matter of minutes. There is no need to contact advertisers, or have to work with deadlines - you can get your ad up whenever you are ready to do so. You can also run it around specific time of the year and for a short period, for example say you are a wedding photographer, you can choose to run a short campaign around non-wedding season to drum up some more visitors and see how effective this is as a strategy.

Also, with PPC the results are instant. To have your website rank highly in search results naturally, you'd have to use SEO (search engine optimisation) and this could take months or even years, so we highly recommend investing in PPC. This will start getting traffic to your site immediately, therefore generating significant sales within weeks. SEO has its own benefits and is a great compliment to PPC activity so we recommend using both strategies in parallel to get the best results. Read more about SEO.

3. Testing

Because of its instant nature and great reporting, you can also test certain offers by looking at exactly what your potential customers are interested in and what gets them going. For example, as a wedding photographer you could test what offer works best for your customers - you could run a campaign to offer 'free photo album' and maybe with another group you could try 'free CD' to find out what your customers find more valuable. PPC allows you to get inside the minds of your customers so you know exactly what they are looking for.

 

4. Measurable

Unlike other forms of advertising, with PPC it is extremely easy to measure the success of a campaign - you have access to information like page impressions, clicks from the campaign, and conversions and from there it's easy to measure your click through rate (CTR), conversion rate and cost per lead. This kind of reporting makes it very easy for us to see if we are on track or not.

PPC also allows you to determine exactly what search is producing the greatest number of sales. With PPC you have the chance to test hundreds of search phrases, but it's always hard to guess if the most popular search phrase will result in sales for your business. For example, using Google Insights, you will find that there are a lot more people searching for the phrase 'wedding photos' compared to 'wedding photographer' (as shown in the image below). But once you run your campaign you might find that the more targeted phrase 'wedding photographer' actually results in more customers. 

5. Helps improve conversion

PPC also helps you find problems with your conversion - with PPC you get highly targeted traffic to your website and if this is converting poorly, you know that you need to investigate your website to see what's causing the hiccup. Low conversion rate after a PPC campaign usually leads PPC managers to investigate what's wrong.

This is another reason why having PPC at the same time as SEO (preferably when a site is being launched) is a huge advantage because with SEO alone, traffic can take months to ramp up to significant levels. If you have a usability or conversion rate problem in those first three to six months, you may not have enough data to detect it or to fix it quickly, and you could be losing valuable sales!

6. PPC offers great control

With PPC you can optimise your landing pages exactly as you wish unlike with SEO. SEO is when you optimise the copy on your pages so that it appears in the search results naturally. This requires the key phrases that people are typing into the search engines to be used on your website repeatedly so that it is recognised as a relevant source of information for the user. Therefore, you need a lot of relevant words on your website.

But this can sometimes be restrictive. Say you don't really want to use a lot of copy, you want to let the images do the selling for you, like in the case of a wedding photographer, your pictures will do the selling. This means that you probably don't have much of a chance for people to even find you on Google if you were to simply use SEO. PPC gives you the chance to show up on the search results if you have a high bid for your ad.

7. Targeted

Besides providing qualified traffic, PPC also allows you to setup campaigns specific to geographical locations. So you could specify that the ad is shown to users that are in a 100km radius of North Shore in Auckland - this way you are not paying for irrelevant traffic to your website, and you also get a good insight into the size of the local market.

8. Strong branding

With PPC you get free branding - even if the users  don't click on your ads, they might still see them and you don't have to pay for that impression. Branding is strengthened by repetition - when people see your name every where, it makes an impression and slowly burns into their memory. So when they do have a need for the kind of products or services you sell, they know exactly who to look for.

9. Improved SEO

Usually, when you set up an effective PPC campaign, it should naturally lead to the development of good content on your website and help you rank well in the organic search results. This is because when you setup a campaign you'll need to investigate which search phrases generate high volumes of relevant traffic and then create a relevant ad and landing page - which is one of the requirements of SEO.

In our PPC work with our clients and on our own website, we've discovered that by incorporating target search phrases in our landing page, we began seeing the ranking on organic search results also improve - which proves that PPC can help with SEO activity.

10. Banner advertising

When you set up a PPC campaign through Google Adwords, you get access to the Google Adsense network which means that you can run banner advertising on other websites that are part of the Adsense network. So for example if you want to advertise your wedding photography service, all you need to do is specify to Google that you'd like to run an advert on all websites that have a theme of photos and weddings. You could even specify the geographical location like North Shore if you choose. This way you don't have to contact every website that offers banner advertising and ask them if they get people searching for photos or wedding related things - it is all done automatically.

The advertising through Adsense network will also report back with the exact same detail as your Adwords campaign so you know exactly which banner designs are working better, which banner messages are more compelling and what sites are bringing more clients.

> Learn how to set up, run and manage your own PPC (Google Adwords) campaign.