Adwords Explained - Page 13 - Tips when starting out

General tips: When you’re starting out…..

Take things slowly. Don’t overspend on your Google campaign. You run a high risk of being disappointed if you plough large wads of cash into a daily Google spend and then sit back and expect immediate great results.

It may take many weeks or perhaps even a few months of testing various advertisement and keywords, and bidding approaches in order to get your Google campaign really singing. If you start small, at say 20 - 40% of what you envisage your final daily budget to be, and then spend the first few weeks watching your ad performance and tuning your keyword bids, you’re far more likely to have a positive Adwords experience than if you hastily spend big.

Focus on conversions, conversions, conversions.   Be paranoid and obsessive about lowering your cost per conversion, and focusing on keywords which are delivering conversions at a cost which ensures that you make a profit.   Cost/conversion can be lowered by a) pausing overly broad keywords which don't convert well enough, b) improving your ad wording to ensure it weeds out tyre kicking prospects, c) adjusting your landing page to drive users more strongly to a conversion action.   Beyond all else, achieving strong conversions in a cost effective way is the key to your success.

Once you identify things that work and convert well (ie Advertisement wording, or certain keywords or keyword combinations), keep following these paths to evolving and building on your campaign. Radical new directions are good experiments to conduct in new Ad Groups or Campaigns, but as your core campaigns and Ad Groups achieve success, focus on refining and evolving these rather than taking large gambles with big changes to a winning formula.   In other words, if it aint broke - don't fix it.   Try new approaches in a separate campaign, or you risk monkeying with your winning formula and losing the combination of factors that are working.

Keep your Adwords campaign complexity tuned to a manageable level. If you are a small company with only one person monitoring your Adwords results for 30 minutes once every week or two, then don’t create an unmanageable monster. Keep things simple. If you have a larger budget and more resource available to master your Adwords activities, then by all means try to extract the best from the system with a richer, more detailed approach.  This means a manageable number of keywords, ads, campaigns and ad groups.

The other key adjustment you’re going to need to make to obtain the best results is on the website to which you are sending users and in particular the specific page where the user arrives or “lands” when they get there.

In summary

As you would have no doubt gathered from reading this paper, most of the “tricks” about how to succeed in advertising through Google and other online mechanisms are not tricks at all. Most are common sense approaches to ensuring that you have your eye firmly focused on the needs of your customer, and that you take a careful and planned approach to your advertising efforts. Remember the mantra of “Categorise and Analyse” - and focus on both improving your conversion rates, and lowering your cost / conversion. Google and other pay per click advertising media are the one place where you can extract very precise feedback about user behavoir and use this to your advantage in tuning and adjusting your approach to maximise success.

Salsa Internet specialise in helping companies both create a professional website, and in driving their online advertising and promotion activities to achieve fantastic sales results. We offer everything from some friendly advice on Adwords campaign management, through to fully managed online PPC advertising campaigns on behalf of clients. We would of course be delighted to discuss your advertising needs, provide you with feedback about these, and offer the benefit of our experience if we can.

Above all – we wish you good luck with your advertising efforts.

More information on Google Adwords can be found at: http://adwords.google.com
More information on Yahoo and MSN advertising can be found at http://www.overture.com. More information on MSN advertising can be found at http://advertising.msn.com/microsoft-adcenter .

Contact Phil Baddock or Adam DeGiorgio from Salsa Internet on 1300 727 952 or \n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it or \n This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it for more information.

About the author:

Phil Baddock (short bio is here) is the Director of Salsa Internet's Search Engine Marketing practice. He became involved with Google Adwords through pursuit of Adwords success for Salsa Internet, and recently qualified as a Google Advertising Professional, and has had a long history of working with Search Engines and the business of Search, having lead the technical teams managing the Altavista and White and Yellow Pages search engines in Australia during the 98 - 00 period of the dot.com era.

The above eBook was authored by Phil Baddock, Qualified Google Advertising Professional.



(Salsa Internet has 1 individual who has passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam).

In frustration at not finding any succinct and comprehensive online resources (easily) for Adwords, and having to learn the long and hard way as many do, he wrote this white paper to help people starting out with Google to really start to drive online success through this new media.