Adwords Seminar Learnings

4 Nov

From my attendance at the AdWords 101 & 201 Seminars
(hosted by Stasia Holden)

First of all, I just want to note that I have been running Google Search campaigns for a while now and felt fairly confident with my knowledge and understanding, but this seminar really filled any gaps I may have had in my process and answered a lot of specific questions and issues I had.  I highly recommend these seminars for anyone who wants to run their own campaign and doesn’t know where to start, or even anyone self-taught (such as myself) who feels like they are just missing a few pieces to the puzzle.

Normally I write more conversational and opinion-based pieces, but what I have written here is really just a quick and dirty download of the information I found most useful from these seminars.

I feel very confident on the material now that I went through this extensive training, so anything I don’t mention here I most likely do have some insight into and can help you out with.   I asked so many questions that I think Stasia got tired of calling on me.. but hey, we paid to be there and I came loaded with questions so I wanted to make sure they all got answered! :)

Ok, on to the recap.

Key Learnings

  • Campaign editing is best done through Adwords Editor (& use to back up your campaigns)
  • Use MyClientCenter if you are going to run campaigns for a client or if you ever plan to give someone else complete control over the campaign
  • If you would like to be recognized as a Qualified Google Adwords Professional, you need to create an account

Campaign Set-up Process

  1. Perform Keyword Research:

    Look at your website to find your best keywords.  You can load the URL into a tool such as Google’s keyword tool to scrape the site for its top keywords.  Do the same with competitor sites to generate a thorough list of keywords to start with.

  2. Create Campaign and Ad Groups:

    Develop ads for each ad group, possibly more than one per ad group if you would like to test more than one marketing message

  3. Build Keyword Lists for Ad Groups:

    Use the keywords you got from scraping your site and competitor sites, and use tools to generate popular search terms and synonyms based off of these terms.  Then use a list generator tool such as the SeoTools.com Keyword List tool which will generate keyword phrases by AUTOMATICALLY concatenating all combinations of your keyword variation (so refreshing for people like me who had previously been using the Excel concatenate function..).  Make sure to have the tool generate your keywords in all matchtypes
    (select broad, phrase and exact).

  4. Add keywords into campaign (via Adwords Editor)

Campaign Optimization Process

  1. Use the “See Search Terms” option in your keywords tab to see what keywords people have searched with to arrive at (and click on) your ad.  These will not only provide you with keywords to add to your campaign, but also important keywords you will want to exclude from your campaign (negative keywords).
  2. Based on these learnings, add relevant keywords and negative keywords
  3. Repeat

Diagnosing a Tanking Keyword

  1. Check Keyword Analysis (quality score, CTR)
  2. Look for account changes to see when things started to decline
  3. Look for website changes

Note: Use ads diagnostic tool when you aren’t getting impressions to see if there is an issue with the campaign, or where the issue lies

Some Useful Tools

Things TO Do

  • Need to set up a new campaign if you are going to have a separate budget, language, or target a different geographic region.
  • Mix up word order for phrase and exact matchtypes to generate new keywords
  • If appearing high up organically on certain keywords, bid on a lower ad position so that you have one ad up at the top, and one lower on the page
  • Run 1 campaign with geotargeting, 1 with geographic terms (not geotargeted)
  • If you have the same ads in 2 campaigns, make sure the more specific one has a slightly higher bid so that that one takes precedence over your other ad
  • Use ad preview tool to see your ads rather than googling (you can use it to pretend you are in a geographic location to see what ads appear there)
  • Only enter 50 keywords for campaign for content network since content network automatically pulls random 50 keywords to determine your campaign’s focus
  • Run content network as a separate campaign to make it easier to track
  • Bid higher on keywords that have a sense of urgency since they are further along in the purchase process

Things NOT to Do

  • Don’t use the same keyword across campaigns or ad groups
  • Don’t use broad match keyword phrases that have duplicate keywords in them

Things to Know

  • CTR is the most important determiner in Quality Score
  • Bing currently has the highest CTR
  • Max: 2000 keywords per ad group, 25 ad groups per campaign
  • General baseline for a good CTR = 6% or higher
  • SEO effects PPC because of content readability – so Flash is BAD for PPC (and of course SEO) because Google can’t read content to determine site relevance (currently Google has very limited readability)
  • If running content network, sometimes best to just run automatic placement to see where you get a high CTR then refining (sometimes not all available URLs appear in the content network URL list)
  • Use dynamic keyword insertion where relevant (only use with exact match keywords)
  • Broad match will automatically show for misspellings – not phrase or exact
  • People choose what company to use based #1 on business location, #2 on familiarity with company/brand (so have address in ad whenever possible)

Comments?  Questions?  Was this helpful?

Be Sociable, Share!