Google Adwords, it's just a click...NOT, part I
Google Adwords is not the trick pony many Pay Per Click managers would like us to think. The main focus for Google Adwords is the PPC advertising that appear on the top and right side of a Google page and are labelled sponsored listings.
It’s the main revenue generator for Google and made almost £8billion in 2007.
Let’s consider some of the basics.
The first thing to know is that just because you bid the highest price for your Google advert it doesn’t mean you’ll get to the top of the heap - your position is based on your adverts ranking. This is worked out by multiplying your maximum cost per click by your advert’s quality score.
This is based on your click through rate (CTR), keywords, ad text and landing page. Make sure that these are all
closely related. For example, if you have an advert for a wine rack make sure your keywords used in the adgroup all relate to wine racks, that your advert features those keywords and that your landing page is optimised for those keywords.
Even the download speed of your landing page is now taken into account! If all these items are relevant not only do you get a great CTR but you get relevant traffic. CTR by the way is the percentage of people who see your advert impression and click on it (1,000 impressions, 50 clicks = 5% CTR).
A good CTR varies according to your campaign but I consider a CTR between 1.5% and 5% to be a good average. This can be made up of individual keywords achieving 50% or 0.5%, so check the average overall.
What happens when you go beyond the basics?
Lots of advances have been made in Adwords since I opened my Adwords Pro Centre almost five years ago. We now have many tools to analyse the setup of accounts and keywords, such as the Google keyword tool https://Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and the Adwords preview tool which allow us to see how and where our adverts appear without it costing per click or counting asan impression.
There are so many tools but the most important is the conversion tracking tool. With this we can actually measure the ROI of a campaign and quickly see the cost of acquiring each customer. Once you are using conversion tracking you can use the conversion optimiser, which will allow you to set a maximum cost you are willing to bid to acquire a customer.
It uses historical information about your campaign and automatically sets your cost per click each time your advert appears. Then it uses the Google crystal ball to work out which clicks are likely to be most valuable - the crystal ball in this case being a complex algorithm based on your conversion history. This is great if you are running campaigns with lots of keywords and need to have each cost per click managed automatically.
In summary
Don't think you have to guess to set up a campaign. Google gives you all the tools you need to run successful campaigns, you just need to learn how to use them. Also remember it's not all about who's got the most money - although that can help!
For part two in this series click here
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