Google's AdWords Workshop

Community Business College regularly offers businesses classes on how to conduct online marketing, including instruction on using Google to help organizations improve their businesses.

Today, we had a workshop based on Google’s “Hangout” sessions to help people who want to use Google’s AdWords to their advantage. This is the first of a 3-part series.
“Take Aways” from Session 1

Here are the best tips from the Google AdWords session:

1.       The first, and most important tip, is to make your ads relevant.

Making your ads relevant means thinking about how people might specifically be searching for your type of business online. It’s not enough, for example, to just say you want to use the keyword “flowers” if you’re a florist. Why? Because people searching for the word “flowers” can be agronomists, horticulturists, silk flower artists, etc. The goal of good AdWords is to narrow your scope enough to fit your particular clients.

2.       Use very specific landing pages to match your ad.

When people click on your ad, you want to take them directly to what you’re advertising. Don’t make them work hard to find something within your web page. An example of this is if you have a large grocery store and you want to highlight the sale you’re having on breakfast cereal, the link in your AdWords should not take the user to your main page where they then have to do a search to find the item they were looking for.

3.       Learn to use Google Tools to improve your campaign’s performance.

Google spends a lot of time and money on these tools in order to help businesses learn what is working and how to adapt to new strategies when necessary. Google tools are bonuses that come with an AdWords account so using these can help you put each advertising dollar in the right place. Here are a few Google metrics you can use:

Your Quality Score – Google makes an estimate of its expected click- through rate for your ad based on your ad’s relevance (there’s that term again), combined with landing page experience.

Ad Rank – Here Google calculates your maximum cost per click bid and the quality score. It uses this tool to determine which ads appear on its pages and their position on the search results page (this can be critical to getting your ad noticed).

Keywords and Negative Keywords – A good campaign needs both of these to be successful. “Negative Keywords” are words you want Google to exclude when thinking about showing your ad in response to a user’s search. Add only negative keywords you think would be an irrelevant result for a user.

Here’s an example: If you own a high end clothing retailer, you really are not looking for clicks from people who are looking for discount clothes (remember, negative keywords are not being mean, they’re actually helpful to everybody – i.e. people who are looking for one thing don’t want to be bothered by ads for things they don’t want).  

And you don’t want someone who searched for “discount clothes” accidentally clicking your ad and costing you a click. It doesn’t seem like much but when your campaign is running full blast, these can add up. Negative keywords can help prevent mistakes like that from happening.

Search Terms Report – This is a keyword resource and can be used for both positive and negative keywords. This report can provide a lot of useful insights into how an ad campaign is running and provide some hints on how to improve a campaign. This reports should be checked often (twice a day is not too much if you’re running a very active campaign).

4.       Basic Google AdWord rules for making the most of AdWords:

AdWord accounts need at a minimum:

-          At least 2 ad groups

-          At least 2 ads per ad group

-          At least 5 quality ads keywords for each of your ad groups

-          At least 5 quality negative keywords for each of your ad groups

-          Check the search terms report weekly to understand how your AdWords are working.

So the big theme of this workshop is when you’re happy with your AdWords, Google is happy, too.

Despite the fact that they make a little money off of them, Google really does not want its users to be charged for clicks they don’t want. It annoys the users and lessens Google’s credibility, and it really makes AdWords users feel they’re not getting what they pay for. That’s where Google makes the big bucks.

Google has literally written the book (or, rather the e-Book) on search engine advertising. Using the company’s expertise can help businesses refine its online presence and get the right people to what they do.

Want to learn more? Check back here at this blog periodically for new updates and tips or take one of these online classes from the Community Business College online course catalog:

Marketing Your Business on the Internet

Develop an Internet marketing plan for your business that incorporates SEO, advertising, email, social media, and more.

Introduction to Google Analytics

Learn how to track and generate traffic to your website, create reports, and analyze data with Google's free, state-of-the-art Web analytics tools.

Achieving Top Search Engine Positions

Learn proven, step-by-step strategies to achieve higher positions with major search engines. Discover the industry insider secrets on how search engines crawl the Web, rank websites, and find previously undiscovered sites. Explore how to select keywords, how many keywords you’ll need, and which keywords hold the most potential.

Write Effective Web Content

Learn how to write Web content and produce multimedia elements to make your website or blog a must-visit site on the Internet.