Effective Google AdWords Campaigns - Part 1

By Mitchell Harper

Introduction

Google AdWords is the most popular advertising platform in the world, making Google billions of dollars in avertising revenue each year. When used correctly, Google AdWords is one of the most affordable ways to promote your products or services.

In this series of articles I'm going to explain exactly how you can setup your own profitable Google AdWords campaign from beginning to end. I will only assume you know the basics of Google AdWords. I will teach you:

1. How to perform effective keyword research, including looking at your competitors ad's and web sites
    
   
2. How to write headlines and copy for your Google ad's that will dramatically increase your click through rate and why you must test even the tiniest changes to your ad's
    
   
3. Why and how you can create multiple ad campaigns for the one product to increase your conversion rate
    
   
4. How to reduce the chance you'll get "Google slapped" - reducing how much you pay for your Google adWords ad's in the process
    
   
5. How to write effective landing pages, ensuring you have a "message to market match" and you're speaking the same "language" as the people who click your ad's
    
   
6. How and why you should filter your sales process so you can perform follow up pre-sales (via email) to people who click on your adWords ad's

My goal with this series of articles on AdWords is to teach you not only what I've learnt, but to teach you how we use it to drive significant sales of our software every day.

Sound good? Great. Let's get started

Keyword Research and Segmenting Based On Context

Before you even start a Google AdWords campaign you need to workout which search keywords you want to show your ad's for. Not all keywords are created the same, and one of the most important things you need before you get started is an effective, relevant list of keywords.

There are 3 ways to find your keywords and they are listed below. Use these techniques to find the 10 most popular keywords relating to your product/service only. We will only use 10 keywords because we're going to pay close attention to the performance of our ad's and we will be creating ad's specifically for just a few targeted keywords. This probably goes against what you're used to doing or seeing - creating 1-3 ad's for hundreds or even thousands of keywords - you just accept the keywords Google suggests when creating your adWords campaign, right? Wrong. Don't do that. Trust me.

Here's how to find just ten keywords to get started:

1. Grab a pen and paper and just start writing all the keywords and phrases that come to your mind when you think about your product/service. Just ask yourself: "if I were in my customer's shoes, which words would I use to find my product/service on Google?". List as many as you can.
    
   
2. Go to a few of your competitors web sites and look at the text on their pages including title tag text, meta tags and text between H1 and H2 tags. Write down the words that you think people might use to search for your competitor's products from those you see on their site.
    
3. Use Overture's search suggestion tool to find maybe 10-20 keywords/phrases related to your products/services. For example, if you're selling funny T-shirts online, enter "funny tshirts" in the search suggestion field and click the blue button. You'll see a list of keywords along with the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture in the last month. Because Google has a much larger reach than Overture, multiply each number by about 10 times - that's how many times that exact same keyword is searched for on Google each month (approximately):
   
   
    
   Don't forget long tail search phrases which are search phrases that contain 4 or more words, such as "buy funny tshirts in new york" or "funny simpsons cartoon tshirts". Most big advertisers ignore long tail keywords and if they are overlooked your ad will automatically show up in first place when people search using these long tail search phrases.
    
   
4. You'll now have a list of anywhere from 10 to a few hundred keywords or phrases. You now need to rank them in order from most popular to least popular. You should be able to tell which ones are the most popular by using Overture's keyword tool above and by searching for them on Google. For each search make a note of how many adWords ad's appear down the right side of Google.
    
   If there's more than one page of adWords ad's then competition is extremely tough for that keyword so you might want to instead turn it from a normal search phrase into a long tail search phrase, such as "funny beer drinking tshirts" instead of just "funny tshirts".
    
5. Once you've narrowed down the list, choose the 10 keywords at the top of your list. We will use these on your first AdWords campaign. We're going to split your 10 keywords into at least 2 groups, based on context. For example, look at the list of keywords below for "windows vista":
   
   windows vista
   windows vista screenshots
   buy windows vista
   download windows vista
   purchase windows vista
   windows vista cd
   windows vista vs windows xp
   windows vista demo
   windows vista reviews
   should i upgrade to windows vista?
   
   By putting the keywords into context I can clearly create 2 separate groups: keywords searched for by people just researching Windows Vista and keywords searched for by people who are ready to buy Windows Vista, i.e. they have already researched Vista, want to install it and are ready to enter the buying phase.
   
   Here's how I'd separate the keywords above:
   
   People researching Windows Vista
   
   windows vista
   windows vista screenshots
   windows vista vs windows xp
   windows vista reviews
   should i upgrade to windows vista?
   
   People ready to buy Windows Vista
   
   buy windows vista
   download windows vista
   purchase windows vista
   windows vista cd
   windows vista demo
   
   By working out the context in which people are searching for Windows Vista we can easily separate our keywords into 2 groups, which will allow us to create 2 different adWords campaigns: one to target people researching Windows Vista and one for those ready to buy.
   
   For people just researching, we'll link them to relevant articles and reviews on our site. For those looking to buy we'd send them to a page on our site where they can order Windows Vista. Don't worry too much about where to send them yet though. I'll dedicate a whole article to that later in the series...
   

Conclusion

In this, the first article in the series on creating high performing Google AdWords ad's I've shown you how to perform effective keyword search and segmentation based on the context in which people are searching for your products/services - in our example I used Windows Vista.

Complete the steps in this article for what you're trying to sell and in the next article I'll teach you how to write headlines and copy for your Google ad's that will generate click through rates well above the average of 1%-2%.