Google Advertising – AdWords in a Nutshell

Advertising on Google has become an important part of Internet marketing mix. Google AdWords can be marketers’ best friend. Whether you are looking to raise brand awareness, lunch a new product, generate more leads, increase traffic to your site or sell products and services online, Google pay per click advertising can prove useful.

As I mentioned in my Google AdWords Consulting Might Just Save Your Campaign post, it is not a secret that if you do not know Google AdWords system well enough, you might easily ramp up your cost and spend your advertising dollars without gaining a positive ROI. On the flip side, if you can get Google advertising work for you, either through outsourcing SEM to a Google AdWords Professional / Company or by developing the necessary SEM expertise yourself, your business will prosper.

The first step is to set your objectives. Decide what you would like to achieve with your AdWords campaign. It is not uncommon that you have many competing goals. It is important to set your priorities and decide on the best strategies to maximize your Return on Investment. Based on these objectives you need to come up with some Key Performance Indicators.

Once the objectives are set, you can start conducting keyword research using various free or paid keyword tools and keyword research techniques. The result of your keyword research might influence how your final strategy shapes.

In order for your Google advertising to be successful, like any other marketing campaign, you need to segment your campaign. Segmentation in Google AdWords is more than just segmenting by geography, language and demography. You need to segment your Google AdWords campaign into various campaigns and Ad Groups based on the keywords your audience search for. I cannot emphasize the importance of segmentation enough. This could make or break your campaign as it affects how nimble your campaign is and can have a major impact on your Quality Score, cost per click (CPC), click through rate (CTR), conversion rate and ROI.

As the next step, you need to develop high quality Ad Copies that resonate both to your audience and Google AdWords system. By testing various Ads, you need to find the best advertising copy that generates the right balance between high CTR, Quality Score and Conversion Rate. The ad copies need to send visitors to relevant landing pages that are optimized for search engines, usability and conversion.

Congratulations on building your professional Google AdWords PPC Advertising campaign. If you have done all the steps right you are off to a great start. A great campaign structure could dramatically increase the chances of a successful advertising on Google. However, you need to keep a close eye on your PPC advertising campaign`s performance. This should be done utilizing the SEM KPIs that you have developed for your Google advertising when you were defining your campaign objectives. Whether you are using Google Analytics or any other Web Analytics application it is important to constantly monitor your campaign’s performance against your KPIs and tweak your keywords, bids, ad copies and landing pages to maximize your company`s ROI.

Toronto SEM Expert – Nima Asrar Haghighi

Filed Under: PPC Advertising • Search Engine Marketing • SEM