After successfully becoming a Google Apps Certified Administrator this week, members of our Cheshire web design agency have no intentions of stopping there… We have eyes firmly set on passing the Google Adwords Certification exam hurdle to help demonstrate our expertise as online advertising professionals to both existing and potential new clients.

With this in mind, we have decided to capture our thoughts and learning’s behind Google Adwords and better explains the basics. Join us as we explore the various campaign types, keyword fundamentals, Adword extensions and how to calculate your Adwords bidding.

Choosing Your Campaign

Search Network Campaign

When creating your very first Adwords campaign, this will be the default campaign Google will recommend. This type of campaign will only appear on Google search results and is typically used to attract users who are intentionally looking for a specific product or service who will find your Ad helpful and most likely to click on.

Display Network Campaign

For a more generic approach, when choosing Display Network, your ads will automatically be matches with websites and mobile apps when Google calculates the keywords used are related to the sites content. Generally, this will lead to increasing brand awareness across a larger audience but will be lower quality leads.

Search Network With Display Select

As you can probably guess, the Search Network with Display Select is a merge of the previous two campaign types. Your ads will appear for users who search for keywords that match on Google along with other partner websites. While this is the most expensive, Google calculates who are most likely to be interested in the products and services that you’re advertising.

Keyword Fundamentals

Ok, so after choosing your ‘Campaign Type’, the next step is to start creating your Keyword List. For each campaign, it is highly recommended that you create more than one keyword group which are called Ad Groups. Here, you should create a list of keywords which best describe the phrases, products or services that you are trying to advertise. When creating your lists, look to use the following tips;

• Generate keywords by thinking like a customer
• Organize your keyword Ad Groups by themes or ideas
• Be specific. Look to create a list of 5-20 keywords.
• Don’t be afraid to use the Keyword Planner tool to generate new ideas.

Keyword Option Filters

After you have created your Adword Groups, you can start to define and filter specific keywords from exact words to words you don’t want to include.

Broad Match: This is the default filter. Google will automatically look to additional keywords that are closely matched or misspelt and is the most effective to capture the largest volume of impressions.

Broad Match Modifier: By implementing the + symbol, this instructs Google that this particular keyword or phrase has to appear. This can still add misspelt or generic words but will always contain the words you have specified.

Example: +Cheshire Web Agency+

Phrase Match: By adding the ““symbols around your keywords, this will mean that these keywords have to remain in this order. You will still find words before or after the specific keywords but Google will never change the order of the phrase.

Example: “Cheshire Web Design”

Exact Match: Here, you will add the [ ] symbols around your keywords which means it will not contain any other keywords. Although this will filter low traffic, this will provide the most accurate reach volume.

Example: [Cheshire Web Agency]

Negative Match: When choosing negative, you are preventing the Ad from displaying when a user search contains the keywords you have added as negative. This helps filter out any irrelevant keywords that may gain impressions, but are actually just little to no quality traffic.

Example: -Cheshire Graphic Design-

Text Ad Fundamentals

As you can see from the graphic provided, Text Ad’s are split into 4 different sections. We have the headline which is 25 characters long, the Web Address which will display 35 Characters. Next we have two lots of Description fields which again allow you a maximum of 35 characters. When you are planning on writing your text for your advert, ask yourself the following questions…

What makes your Ad stand out? What is your unique selling point and how will your key features, products or services motivate a user to click on your advert. Along with adding your website landing page URL, look to take advantage of a call to action. Look to use sales terminology and explain why you are advertising… You may have 25% off a product range or have limited stock availability.

How To Calculate Your Adwords Bidding

In some cases, you may be allocated a budget from somebody else. However, for small business owners, you may not necessarily know where you should start when it comes to making bids on your keywords. Once you have set yourself a monthly budget, you need to calculate how much you should spend on the cost-per-click (CPC) and to do so, please take a look at the following formula.

• Calculate the amount of profit you make from each product or service sale – £100
• Calculate the amount of impressions you get each month (Use Analytics) – 1,000
• Calculate the click through rate – 3% (30 users)
• Calculate how many visitors are converted into a sale. 5% (Roughly 1 in every 30 customers)
• Divide your budget by the amount of click through rate – 50 / 30 = 1.66

What Happens Next?

Simple, monitor your impressions and clicks and see what sort of enquires you are getting. Almost every Adwords guru will also encourage you to try and freshen things up and experiment with different keywords and different adgroups. By the time I next write a blog, hopefully I will be writing as a Google Adwords Certified professional.