WARNING: If you haven’t got any sales yet, working keywords etc - you should not do the Adwords section. This can be very costly and is a bonus killer technique to push performing keywords up another level. It is unlikely to help poor keywords. Just continue with the Maximum Edge Technique for the next three days: write more good articles with good SEO (titles, keywords); Social Marketing; create authoritative backlinks; keep an eye on your traffic; look at how your conversion engine can be made better.

TDC Day 21: Day 21 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

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1. We learnt how to set up our first ad group in Google AdWords. Today, you are going to setup a few more and start split testing your ads.
2. Remember, split testing is extremely important. Ed says that we can see it as a way to give ourselves a pay raise every single week. The aim is to discover a new way to convert our traffic better - when that happens, more conversions = more sales = pay rise. This works with all businesses. I
3. Pay attention to today’s lesson. It is incredibly powerful (and awesome).

TDC Day 21a: Google Adwords Keyword Research (TDC, Video, PDF)

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1. AdWords gives you an option to test your niche quickly and efficiently if you want to spend money on it. This is not necessary and you should not do it if you cannot afford it. Just continue developing organic traffic, as we’ve seen that can be very powerful by itself.
2. Remember if you do not know the profitability of your niche yet, there is no guarantee that you will make any money from it. Do not count your chickens before they have hatched. Be careful with a fixed budget, realising that you may not get the money back. Again, if you are not okay with losing money at this point to test the market, you should not be doing Google AdWords. Instead just continue developing organic traffic.
3. From Day 20, you should have a Google AdWords account and setup one ad (one keyword targeting your main keyword). But you probably have relevant several keywords in your niche related to your product - today, we will use Market Samurai to find more keywords to use in Google Adwords. Then we will learn how to add those keywords to our Google AdWords campaign and set up split testing.
4. Open Market Samurai and create a project with your main keyword.
5. For Keyword Sources: select “Google Synonym Tool” and instead of “SEO Traffic Filter”, select “AdWords Traffic Filter” which means it gets rid of keywords with no Adwords Traffic. Click “Generate Keywords”.
6. You’ll get a list of keywords with probable Adwords Traffic. You need to heavily edit your keyword list before the next step of analysis - remove the ones that are not a good fit with your main keyword niche by clicking on the X button for each keyword. You very well may lose more that you keep, that’s normal. The aim is to have a group of tightly related keywords so that people searching on them will also be interested in your micro niche blog. Click “Analyze Keywords”.
7. Turn off the Organic keyword research and turn on the AdWords option. Click “Analyze Keywords”.
8. Sort on the amount of AdWords Traffic (AWT). We are looking for keywords that have some AdWords traffic. The more AdWords traffic, the more impressions you are likely to have, thus a greater chance that people will click the ad that points to your web site.
9. Export this list by clicking on “Export” and saving to your computer.
10. This list of keywords should be highly targeted to your main niche (if you ruthlessly took all the fluff out before), so if you may decide to use this list as a starting point to expand your Google AdWords campaign. Bidding on a larger list of keywords can increase the chance of getting more traffic and picking up more low hanging fruit. Good luck with your research!

TDC Day 21b: More Google Adwords (TDC, Video, PDF)

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1. Today you will learn how to add more ad groups using Market Samurai’s expanded keyword list with the same strategy (one keyword per ad group) and we will also learn how to split test.
2. First though, we will look at what happened to our campaign from yesterday.
3. MONITOR YOUR AD GROUP. Look at the numbers on the Campaign Summary page.
4. You can see the total cost for the ads (Caro’s example was $4.24)
5. The click through rate (CTR) as a percentage (Caro’s example was 0.87% so less than 1% of people clicked through - that’s very low)
6. Click on the campaign to see the ad groups related to the campaign to see what was the actual average cost per click (CPC) for each ad group - this could well be less than the maximum cost per click you bid. (Caro’s example was $0.15 even though she bid $0.25.)
7. To see it in more depth, click on the ad group. Make sure you are in the Keywords tab (not the Summary or other tabs).
8. Look at the Quality Score column by choosing from the Show/Hide Columns drop down list. The Quality Score can tell you how Google sees your landing page (note this includes how well your landing page matches with the keyword you bid on). You will get Great, Ok, or Poor. Google will charge you more if it sees your landing page as “Poor”.
9. Look deeper into the data into the performance on each keyword you gave, remember you had broad match, phrase match and exact. (In Caro’s case the exact phrase keyword got CTR of 7.66% which is very high.) You will learn how to cull poor performing keywords in another lesson - for now, keep and monitor them.
10. lf you didn’t switch off the content network option, you will get separate CTR results for ads placed in search and ads placed in the content network. (In Caro’s case, she got 0.04% CTR for her content network ads which dragged down a very good 3.26% CTR for search). It will also give you average costs of clicks for search and the content network - they well could be different.
11. Also look at the average position (For Caro it was1.6 for exact match and 3.7 for broad match - the exact match is great, she’s not too concerned about broad match).
12. Look at the average cost per click (CPC) that you are actually paying and see if you can adjust your maximum bid (Caro found she was only paying $0.14 per click for search and getting good positioning for exact match so she brought her Max. CPC from $0.25 to $0.15).
13. Go back to the ad group view by clicking the campaign name on the breadcrumb navigation at the top of the page.
14. CREATE A NEW AD GROUP.
15. Create a new ad group within your campaign by clicking on the “New ad group” drop down arrow and select “start with keywords”.
16. Open up your keyword report you exported out from Market Samurai - make sure they are all tightly related to your main keyword.
17. You will be copying across keywords that have at least 4 visitors per day in AdWords Traffic.
18. Select the one with the most traffic (in the example “Vintage Guitar”) and name your new ad group this. Click Continue.
19. Next, we create a text based ad. Adwords automatically remembers the last ad we made and uses it to fill in the fields. You can keep the current ad text for now. Click Continue.
20. In the keyword box, do the same thing as last time: use the negative keyword –free; and put in the phrase and exact match keywords as well. The example keywords are:
    1. –free
    2. vintage guitar
    3. “vintage guitar”
    4. [vintage guitar]
21. Caro notes that some AdWords pros don’t feel they need to advertise on both phrase and exact-match, but there’s no apparent harm. Feel free to delete those keywords if you know what you are doing. Otherwise, keep them in and click Continue.
22. Base your initial Maximum CPC bid on your most recent adjustment for you main keyword (In Caro’s case,it will be $0.15).
23. Use the View Traffic Estimator link to see Google’s estimate on what your results will be based on that CPC bid - you can tweak your your Max CPC accordingly.
24. Review your ad group and if you’re happy with it, click “Save Ad Group”.
25. This is now one ad group. You will now need to repeat this for the rest of your ad groups (Caro had 20, but just do how many keywords you have).
26. CREATING A VARIATION OF THE AD FOR SPLIT TESTING. Even small variations to the ad can make big changes to your click through rates - that is why we split test. We have one ad doing one thing, another ad doing another thing and we see which has the best CTR.
27. Go to the Ad Variations tab. You can create a new text ad variation by clicking on “text ad” next to Create New Ad.
28. Usually you would only change a small thing at a time (means you can pin point more precisely the element that makes the difference), but in the example Caro makes a completely new ad for the sake of clarity.
29. The ad copy for the variant is (note: Only description lines are changed):
    1. Vintage Electric Guitar
    2. Learn What You Need To Know
    3. If Buying a Vintage Electric Guitar
    4. http://www.VintageElectricGuitarBlog.com
    5. http://www.vintageelectrciguitarblog.com
30. Check that the links go to the right place. Click Save Ad to save the ad.
31. Depending on your traffic, you may make a decision which ones to keep after a few days or after 200 clicks. Also check that AdWords is doing natural rotation.
32. Also be prepared to be flexible. Google changes its algorithm regularly and may suddenly decide your ad which was performing well is now deemed poor quality so you lose your traffic. You will always have to be prepared to adjust parts or all of your ad. It is worth checking out Google’s support network if that happens and just generally.
33. You can split test with only two ads, but this example will use three - it’s up to you.
34. Here is the new one with only the description lines changed:
    1. Vintage Electric Guitar
    2. The 2008 Price Guide For The
    3. Vintage Electric Guitar Collector
    4. http://www.VintageElectricGuitarBlog.com
    5. http://www.vintageelectrciguitarblog.com
35. To make split testing more accurate, make one last adjustment. Go to the “Edit Campaign Settings” page and make sure the “Rotate: Show ads more evenly” is selected and hit Save Changes. In order to get a good picture on how each ad is performing, we need each ad variation to have evenly distributed impressions.
36. In the Keywords tab, you may already be able to see the Quality Score of your landing page for the new ad groups. If you have done your work in previous days and picked tightly related keywords, it should say “Great”.
37. Now continue with the previous step of adding ad groups for each of the keywords (if you only have a few that’s fine).
38. The aim is to have one keyword per ad group with 3 ad variations for split testing.
39. Remember to keep monitoring your ads!

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.