Google Adwords Secrets for the Local Business

Google AdWords Secrets for the Local Business

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Table on Contents

What to Know Before Using Google AdWords for the First Time

Keyword Search Basics

How to Write Effective Ads

Best Practices for an Ad Landing Page

The Importance of Capturing Emails

Using Customer Match

The Importance of Using Google Analytics

The Importance of Testing Ads in Google AdWords

Conclusion

Next Steps

Recommended Resources

What to Know Before Using Google AdWords for the First Time

Every business needs to advertise and today, no matter the type of business, that also means advertising online. There are many ways to do it but one of the most effective by far is the use of Google AdWords. Google AdWords uses a pay-per-click (PPC) model in which the business owner only pays if a user clicks on their ad. It’s not only one of the most productive ways to bring in more traffic to a website, but one of the quickest ways to do it, too.

It’s true that there are horror stories online of people who have used Google AdWords only to spend their entire online advertising budget and see very little results. But in most cases, when Google AdWords is used properly, the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.

Business owners just have to know how to use it, and be armed with these key tips before using the platform for the first time. Many of these tips will be explained in greater detail further on in the report, but it’s important to become familiar with them even before you dive in.

Have a strategy in mind

Having a good strategy in mind is important for any advertising campaign, and this is true when using Google AdWords, too. So what does a good Google AdWords strategy involve? It actually includes many of the same things you’d include in any other type of marketing campaign.

An AdWords strategy should include defining your target market, what impact you want to have on potential customers, and what actions you want them to take after clicking on your ad. After your ad is up and running, you’ll also need to know how to measure and analyze your results in order to tell whether your ads are performing as well as they could be.

Set an appropriate budget

One of the greatest things about AdWords is that you get to set the budget. And while once in a while Google will tell you that you need to increase your budget, you don’t need to do it just because they said so. A higher budget will mean that more people will be likely to click on your ad, but like any other campaign, you shouldn’t set a budget that’s higher than you can realistically make. And it’s important to remember that when you set a higher bid, you’ll also be paying more for each click than you would with a lower budget.

Before ever setting up an AdWords campaign, it’s important to know what your budget is before you start and, at least in the beginning, try not to deviate from it.

Have an idea of what keywords you want to use

Finding relevant keywords is crucial to any AdWords campaign. They’re so important that you’ll find an entire section devoted to them further in the report. But before you start really digging around and performing keyword research, you should already have an idea of what they are.

Keywords are simply the words potential customers will use when searching for your product, and they’re probably already words that you use within your business. Real estate agents for example, would use keywords such as ‘open house’ or ‘sell your home’.

You will find a Keyword Planner tool within Google AdWords to help you really pinpoint the ones you want to use, but before you even get started on that you’ll definitely want to have an idea of some that you want to use.

Make a dynamic landing page

A landing page is the page visitors and potential customers will be sent to after clicking on your ad. Many people make the homepage of their website their landing page for all ads, but that is a big mistake. There will be more on this later, but it’s important to know that if the landing page is confusing, lacks the appropriate information, or is difficult to navigate, all of the hard work you’ve put into your AdWords campaign will be wasted. A strong landing page is one that will lead to more conversions.

It’s not a one-time process

With other advertising strategies, you may just set up the campaign and then let it run. But that’s not how it works with AdWords. Even after a campaign is up and running, you’ll need to test different aspects of the campaign, track the results, and regularly make changes to ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. This can be discouraging to business owners that mistakenly believed that once their campaigns were running they’d be finished. And when they find out they’re not, they may not believe it’s worth the effort simply because they didn’t expect it.

Know going into AdWords that it’s an ongoing process; and if you want to get the most out of it, it’s not a one-shot deal. Be prepared to regularly check, analyze and changes things up such as the ad text and your bid amounts to make sure that you’ll get the most out of it.

Keyword Search Basics

Keywords are really the backbone of any AdWords campaign. Without them, customers would never see your ads and you wouldn’t even be able to bid (pay for your ads) because all of this is based on keywords. Essentially, without keywords, Google AdWords wouldn’t exist. This is how important they are, and why it’s so important business owners do some research on them before starting their AdWords campaign.

Keywords are really just the terms users and customers will use in their search queries. So if someone is looking for a store that sells video games, they may use the terms ‘video games’, ‘great video games, or ‘video games for Xbox’, to name just a few. While these might be some of the most obvious keywords a person would use, and therefore that an attorney would bid on in AdWords, there are other things to consider, too.

Think like a customer

Again, the keywords are the search terms your customers and visitors are going to use; so it makes sense to try and think like a customer when creating them. Think about the main categories of your business, and the terms a customer would use when searching for them. Write down the categories, the terms, and the phrases that you think customers would use. So if you’re a retailer that sells video games your keyword list may start with ‘video game stores’, ‘new video games’, and ‘used video games’.

Include general keywords

Selecting general keywords is good, because it will mean the ad reaches as many people as possible. But, there is also a downside to being general. The first is that it could lead to the ad being shown in search queries that aren’t really relevant to the business. General keywords will also cost the business owner more, because these terms will have higher bids and be bid on by more businesses.

Remember that while general keywords can reach more people, they can’t be too general, and they must still be relevant to the business. So while words like ‘great’ and ‘store’ can be used, they should never be used on their own but rather be used in conjunction with other words as part of a key phrase.

But be specific, too

General keywords are good, and not including them on your list may actually prevent your ad from being seen by more people. But when you want to flesh out your keyword list, it’s important to get more specific, too. For the video game retailer, this might include things like ‘multiplayer video games’, ‘role-playing video games’, and ‘good quality video games’. Being specific can help narrow a search down and really target an ad to those that are looking for something very specific. However, being too specific is not good, as it can lead to an ad not being seen by a larger audience that could still benefit from the ad.

Choose the right amount

While you do need a list of keywords, it can be difficult to know how long that list should be. A general rule of thumb is to have 5 – 20 keywords, for each campaign or each theme that you’re using in your ads. Choosing fewer than five will mean that fewer people are seeing your ads, while having too many may mean that you’re paying too much for that lengthy list of words.

Negative keywords

Because keywords really are the backbone of Google AdWords, business owners are sometimes confused when they hear the term ‘negative keywords’. But this doesn’t mean using bad keywords or words that are actually negative. All it means is that negative keywords are words that you don’t want to trigger – or show – your ad. When you include negative keywords in your AdWords campaign, you can save money by making sure your ad is not needlessly shown.

So what are examples of negative keywords? Let’s go back to the campaign a video store retailer wants to run. A negative keyword that could be used is ‘free’, if the video store doesn’t offer free video games. When ‘free’ is chosen as a negative keyword, Google will not show the ad when a user has typed ‘free’ into their search query. This is beneficial to the business owner because without including that negative keyword, if the ad is shown a user may click on it. When they get to the landing page and see that all video games have a price attached to them, they’ll get frustrated and leave to find another website.

While the video store retailer may not have lost actual business, because someone looking for free video games won’t spend money on them, they will have lost money in their AdWords campaign. Because the person clicked on the ad, the business owner will have to pay money for that click, even though they didn’t benefit from the click.

Use keyword grouping

Keyword grouping is an important but often overlooked part of using AdWords. Chances are that, after performing all of your keyword research, you’ll have a long list of the different keywords you want to use. This can make for a disorganized campaign that looks at multiple keywords that might include a broad range of topics.

By grouping the keywords, you can segment those keywords into words that are similar to each other; and you can even separate them into high-level, mid-level and low-level keywords. These groups can be further divided and segmented to target users even more specifically.

Once you have all of your groups and sub-groups, you can then write ads that are targeted just to that keyword, instead of trying to write an ad that includes or is related to all of your keywords. Remember, you can create as many ads as you’d like and have multiple campaigns running at one time. Keyword grouping helps you do this so you can reach more customers and give those customers and potential leads exactly what they’re looking for.

How to Bid on Keywords

Once you have your list of keywords, and perhaps even groups of keywords, you’ll then need to bid on them. Bidding on a keyword means that you’re telling Google how much you’re willing to spend on any one click and how much you’re willing to spend overall. If business owners are going to make a mistake in Google AdWords, it’s likely going to be the amount they bid on certain keywords. So how do you make sure you’re bidding effectively, while also making sure you’re not paying too much?

Determine your monthly budget, and then lower it

Start determining how much you want to bid on a keyword by determining how much you want to spend on it per month. Then, break it down by day. So if your budget is $500 for the month, your daily budget would be about $16 ($500 divided by 30 days in the month).

But the problem with this is that Google has the authority to surpass those daily limits by 20 percent, which means that the daily budget could be increased to almost $20 and your monthly budget could be increased to $600. So once your budget has been set, lower it by about 20 percent.

Determine the keywords you want to bid on

This is where your list of keywords comes in handy. While you likely want to bid on all of those keywords, the chances you’ll be able to are slim. So how do you determine which keywords to bid on?

The best way to do it is to use Google’s Keyword Planner. Here it will tell you the average cost per click of each of your keywords, and will help you determine how much you want to spend on each. So if one keyword is $10 per click and you have a $20 daily budget, you’ll only be able to get two clicks for that keyword. If there’s a keyword however that costs $2 per click, you’ll be able to get 10 clicks for that keyword.

This doesn’t mean that you should automatically choose the cheaper keyword; it only means that you’ll have a decision to make. If the more expensive keyword is worth it to you, then by all means you should bid on it. If it isn’t though, bid on the less expensive keyword and get more bang for your buck.

Don’t worry too much about being #1

All business owners want their ad to be number one and in the top paid search listing. That’s natural. But it doesn’t actually hold the importance that many believe it does. Firstly, customers are likely going to scan through all those ads before clicking on any, and they’ll still click on your ad if that’s the one they like best and feel speaks to them the most.

But, that number one spot will still change throughout the course of the day, which is another very important reason for not focusing on that top spot. At the beginning of the day, no budget has been completely spent and so this is the time that your keywords and ads will face the most competition. But as the day continues on, a competitor’s budget may be completely spent and they’ll get knocked out of that top spot. Even though you had a lower initial bid, your ad will move up because the competition is no longer there for that keyword.

Because of this, during the first few days of your AdWords campaign, you should start with a lower bid. If it doesn’t get you the results you were hoping for, then increase the bid amount and see if your ad moves up throughout the day. In this case, you may even be able to bid less on that keyword and still get the desirable number of clicks.

How to Write Effective Ads

Keywords are important but of course, if the actual ad reads as boring or ambiguous, there’s a good chance it’s not going to get clicked on. That means people will not be making their way to your website and you won’t be getting those conversions and sales you want. So, how do you write a great ad for AdWords?

Start by knowing the specs

Whether you’re going to be advertising in the local newspaper, on the radio, or even with a TV commercial, there are going to be specifications that need to be followed. The organization that will be running your ad needs to ensure that the ad will fit within the space or time they give you, and Google is no different when it comes to AdWords.

While the specs within AdWords certainly aren’t the most important thing in an AdWords campaign, if they aren’t followed, the ad will not be displayed. So it is important to know and follow them.

When it comes to the specs, an ad in AdWords is not given a lot of space. Even though Google has recently changed those specifications to allow for a few more characters, the amount of characters that can be used is still very small; which means that businesses need to make the very most out of the little space they do have.