TDC Day 20: Day 20 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)
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.
Note also that Caro likes to set $100 at least as a maximum spend. In the beginning, you do not need to commit to this amount. You can try $25 and many pros find that this is adequate for testing purposes. If you haven’t made any money but you really want to try this – then just set a $5-10 maximum spend – you’re probably not going to get a great result but at least you will have learnt the process for later when you can afford it.
The Adwords procedure taught here is very sound and very worthwhile to learn – for any sort of business. If you don’t use it now, it’s great to know you have it in your arsenal in the future.
- Ed says that for totally targeted traffic, you can’t beat Pay Per Click. But it does cost money so it should only be used when you know that you are getting in traffic and sales. The beauty of it all is that we’ve already done a lot of the work before is that we know whether our keywords are performing and if so, we’ve optimised our website so that Google has it ranked and indexed for those keywords.
- It’s not just online sales, traditional businesses that understand how to use Pay Per Click see amazing results.
- But don’t panic, start out slow and be careful to do it the right way and you won’t burn through money.
TDC Day 20a: Getting Started With Google Adwords (TDC, Video, PDF)
SEE WARNING (Day 20 Intro)
- It is important to emphasize that there is no guarantee that you will make money. This is not for everybody, although it can work very well in your niche. If you are on a tight budget, you really need to think hard whether you want to go down this path. There is a risk. You can minimise it by following the instructions very closely.
- Sign up with Google Adwords. You may have a “Try AdWords Now” or “Start now” button to sign up
- You will given an option to choose the Starter Edition or the Standard Edition. Choose the Standard Edition, click Continue.
- If you already have a Google Account, you have to authenticate so Google can assign that email to your AdWords account.
- Google will ask you to choose different currency you want to pay for this account – this is your choice.
- You will then be asked to login to your account.
- CREATE YOUR FIRST ADWORDS CAMPAIGN. (Be aware that the ad won’t run until you submit your billing information). Click on “Create your first campaign”.
- Target customers by language is set to English but this is up to your target market.
- Likewise, for the customers location, you can choose the major English-speaking countries, such as Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States, but it depends on your target market. Click the “Change targeting” link to open up a new window. Switch to the Browse tab to pick the countries by ticking on the checkbox for each country that you’re targeting. Hit continue.
- Next, you create your ad copy. Caro uses the following example:
- Headline: Vintage Electric Guitar
- Description line 1: Don’t Get Ripped Off! Get The Best
- Description line 2: Vintage Electric Guitar Deal Now
- Display URL: www.VintageElectricGuitarBlog.com
- Destination URL: http://www.vintageelectricguitarblog.com
- Make sure you include the benefits not just the attributes in your ad.
- Notice that every first letter of the word in the description lines is capitalized. You should test whether this works for you.
- The Display URL is the URL that is going to be displayed in the ad while the Destination URL is the actually URL (may be longer) that the visitor may actually end up with. Consider, capitalising each first letter of the word in the domain name too. Again, tiny differences can affect your result so test! test! test!
- In the preview, click on your link to test it is working – it should open up your blog URL in a new window. This is very important, you must have the right URL or you will waste money or Google will switch off your ad.
- Hit Continue to submit your first AdWords ad.
- In the keyword text area, enter the negative keyword –free. It could save you quite a lot of money on traffic. Also in the keyword text area, enter your keyword. Stick to the one keyword but you can include three versions of it as in the example (each keyword version gets a new line):
- -free
- vintage electric guitar
- “vintage electric guitar”
- [vintage electric guitar]
- The rule of thumb is one keyword per ad group – this will make it much easier to optimise your ad down the track. You may have a different strategy and if you prefer it, by all means try it out. For Thirty Day Challenge, this is the approach we are taking.
- Again, click Continue to proceed.
- In the next screen, you are going to set your Daily Budget and Maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) bid.
- According to Caro: “Personally, a normal daily budget would be $500, but to start, you should NOT do that. For this purpose, you want to put a daily budget of $100. If that freaks you out, again don’t do that. Google tends to be more responsive to advertisers that demonstrate that they are prepared to spend money. If you do decide to spend $100, it is your responsibility to monitor your campaign and watch it closely. As a newbie doing AdWords, you should go that route first. In real life, you may not exceed the $500 limit in a day with AdWords, although in several cases, it may go beyond $100, but that’s mostly because it is a major campaign. Again, it is completely your call, but DO monitor it.”Note the WARNING (Day 20 Intro): Commerce don’t put more than $25/day especially while you’re still learning – many pros use this amount to test normally- it is adequate.
- Maximum CPC is the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay. The example starts with it at $0.25 but this depends on the ad group, you could pay less or more. You can use the Traffic Estimator to help you. We use $0.25 first just to get a feel how Google thinks about this particular ad group. Again, this is just testing, so keep your eye on this.
- Click the View Traffic Estimator link to view Google’s estimation. The matrix shows the Estimated Average CPC, Estimated Ad Positions, Estimated Clicks/Day and Estimated Cost/Day of this ad. If it tells you that you are likely to get a good position with this ad, click Continue.
- Next is the billing stage. You may setup billing later or continue by entering your credit card information. Your ad won’t start until you add this information.
- You should “Pause” the ad group and “Rename” so it is more descriptive (use your keyword). Caro has named her ad group “Vintage Electric Guitar Campaign”.
- Hit the Edit campaign settings link to change a few things:
- Enable Google Search and Search partners.
- Disable content network for now – when you start testing ads, you want to make sure you have traffic from search (Google.com pages) before you try ads in the content network (e.g. on blogs, other people’s web pages etc).
- Just leave positioning for now as you are just starting. (Often with your campaign, you will want to choose position between one to three).
- There is no end date at this point.
- Delivery method is set to Standard.
- You should have Ad Scheduling turned off by now.
- As there is only put in one ad at this point, choosing whichever option in Ad serving doesn’t matter at all.
- Double-check to make sure all settings are correct.
- Save Changes.
- When it is exactly what you want, “Resume”the ad group.
- Of course, your ad won’t have had time to collect data yet. But you should keep an eye on your metrics. You should see how many clicks as well as impressions you get for the ad group. Based on the clicks and impressions, Google calculates the Click Through Rate (CTR) of the ad. It used to be (in 2005) that a CTR of 0.5% – 1% was considered good, but now you really want to get at least 1% or 1.5%, even above. 4-5% CTR is quite common too. This is achieved by optimising your ad.
- You should also keep an eye on how much you spend on average (Average CPC), the cost and average position.
- That’s how you setup an AdWords pay per click. Again, you want one ad group in your single campaign. There is one keyword in the ad group (broad match, phrase match and exact match).
- It is your choice if you want to go ahead with Pay Per Click, as well as the different settings. In Thirty Day Challenge, you don’t have to do this, and it is your responsibility to monitor your campaign very carefully.
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.