Growing Your Site with Adwords
Do you know just a little about Google AdWords? Want to know more? Mastering the basics of Adwords will give you one of the most powerful tools the Internet provides to get the attention of Google’s search engine and its search partners, raise your page rankings on Google and its search partners, and reach the largest community of Internet users in the world. No other method of paid advertising will bring more traffic to your site. But if you don’t master the basics of Google Adwords, what it is and how it works, you may get disappointing results and waste your advertising budget.
The first thing you need to do to write effective ads for Google Adwords is to determine what your visitors are looking for when they do their Google search. You want to make sure you attract the customers who will find the content they want on your site. If you get inside their heads, you’ll know what they need and you will develop a better rounded keyword strategy.
One way to understand what drives customers to your site is basic keyword research. Look at the keywords that are already on your site. Do some additional basic keyword research with tools like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery. Don’t limit yourself to the high KEI keywords you get from WordTracker or Keyword Discovery. Once you use the keyword search services, do some brainstorming to think of additional words and phrases that potential customers may be searching for that will lead them to content that your site can deliver. Make your list as long as you can. You can whittle it down as you get your campaign underway. Eventually you will have a few high-performing gems that bring you the highest Click Thru Rates (CTR) and conversions.
Next, create and fund your Adwords account. At this point you can begin choosing a smaller list of keywords from your master list for your first Adwords campaign. You will choose that shorter list of no more than 20 keywords and then write your first ad. Write an ad you think will motivate clicks, and then write a second ad with a slightly different wording. This process is called split testing. Comparing ads through split testing will help you find exactly the right wording to attract customers. You will find combinations of keywords and ad text that work optimally to drive traffic to your site. Over and over, you will make small changes that lead to better click thrus and conversions.
If there’s a basic rule for Adwords survival, it’s setting your advertising budgets low until you have completed your Adwords testing. Sometimes just $100 a week will get you the data you need to make your site truly profitable. Other times, it takes a lot more than $100 a week to test ads for a broader niche. Either way, always check your returns against your investment. Adwords allows you to do this by inserting values for goals, such as a sale of a product. You will measure conversions to compute whether you have made your money back and by how much.
The measure of a financially successful Adwords campaign is that it earns at least 50% return on investment. A 50% return will ensure that you can take some profits while still having money to grown your site. If you carefully test and retest every advertising decision as you go along, you can increase your ROI, pumping up your ad budget from the sales you get from Adwords.
Justin Harrison is a leading Internet Marketing consultant responsible for the Internet Marketing strategies behind some of the biggest online brands including Amazon, BBC, MasterCard and many others.
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