blackhatontherocks
09-21-2008, 12:58 PM
Adwords has changed - Tim's book hasn't. Not his fault.
Actually, I don't even know if he changed his content because I only own the very first edition of the book, but the Adwors info in their is a little dated. Which applys to any other course on adwords aside from one or two I know that cost 2000$ or more.
I've pointed out a few times already what it is that you need to know to make it work in some lenghty posts in other threads, but I wanted to make a thread I can link other folks to whenever adwords questions come up.
So let's get going.
BHotrs Guide to making Adwords work in late 2008
General Guidelines
Disclaimer: I won't explain the "why" to all the single points because actually, all why's are likely to be covered by the answer "Because it will increase your quality score." One more disclaimer - because of recent changes in the adwords algorithm, making one campaign for dozens or even hundreds of keywords has become a lot of work.
On to the Strategy:
Use 1 distinct Keyword per Adgroup, but use the same keyword in broad, exact and phrase match all the time within that adgroup.
Example: Your wanting to sell a program about dog training, do your keyword research and find "dog training tips" to be a very good keyword among a few others. Following this outline, you go and create one adgroup called 'dog training tips' and include essentially 3 keywords (all search type variations of the same term):
"dog training tips" (in quotes -> Exact Match)
[dog trainings tips] (in brackets -> phrase match)
dog trainings tips (broad match)
If you don't know what the match types are for, better check out google's own adwords training videos because even If I tell you now, there's a chance you're missing a lot of the other neccessary basics as well.
Start with the 5-10 most traffic-heavy Keywords (hence, adgroups) that are still closely related to your niche and start working from there.
In order to make this process easy, download the adwords editor and look at the format that Bulk Adgroup adding and Bulk ad-adding requires. Play around with it a little, and you'll find that you can easily create "1 kw per group" campgains through intelligent useage of spreadsheets. Only takes an hour or two of learning (great tutorial videos on googles own sites for this btw), but will save you tremendous time and effort later on.
QS is everything, and to get a decent Quality Score, you basically need to make sure your ad, landing page and keyword go well together. The other factor that's important especially in the beginning is your CTR. So High CTR ads that aren't converting are actually good for something in the first week or two, but no longer. How to go about optimising each other is outlined in the following sections.
"What's a great Landing Page and where do they make'em?"
Optimise your landing pages for the keywords by putting your best kw and 1-2 others in the begining of the title-tag, the first h1-heading, within h2 headings. Use all keywords close to the beginning of the first regular paragraph and about 3-5 times for every 350-500 words of text on your page. About 10 times total is usually enough for anything 2000 words or less if you only want to do adwords and not seo, though.
For multiple keywords, optimise for the ones with the most searches, then later re-optimise for the ones with the best ctr and conversion rate.
For different keywords that should attract different kinds of buyers, as well as if you have too many good keywords to choose from, consider doing several different landing pages (but only after you've workd out a basic working version - having to change a word or every link on not one but 4 or 10 different lp's if you found a typo is really awful unless you use expensive tools).
Optimise Your Google Ad's
Optimise your Ad's to include the keyword in the first or second line of the plain text - or the headline. It isn't neccessary that the KW is in the headline, this can be fully exploited as an attention getter, but it is neccessary that it's somewhere within the ad's body.
Also use it as a subdomain or subpage in the display-url: www.domain.com/keyword(&stuff).html
keyword(&stuff).domain.com
Stick to the following blueprint if you want to make sure at least google likes your ad, and experiment from there:
Attention Getter - Headline
Some Features Of your Product - First Line of Ad Body
A Call to Action (don't use "free" even if you're just collecting emails) - Second Line of Ad Body
A keyword-including display url.
Check your Keywords
Google tells you what keywords your page would rank good for. Simply through your copy into the "website content" area of the Keyword Tool mentioned above, and check for the keywords it lists in the first section.
Then throw in competitors site's and compare them to yours, and see which keywords are missing or not in the first tab, where they should be.
The "other relevent keywords" tab in the results is the "lingo" that google scans for to determine whether the reader will think you're an authority on your subject or not. If you have them on your page even once or twice, your trust and thus QS will go up.
After you've created a campaign
On high-traffic terms, Always split test three ads - your previous ad, a slightly modified version like it's described in the book, and an largely differnt version to see if another angle might help.
Also make sure to turn on "Quality Score Display" in the Keywords tab of your ad group details. It's a little hidden as an option under the "Customize columns" link. There you'll get details about what you can still optimise. Take this with a grain of salt, though, it takes often a day or three until google takes into account updates you've made to your site - and it won't update for an even longer period of time if you don't get any clickthroughs.
Finally start bidding high and lower your bids after a week if you want to. CTR is one of the most important factors in determining your QS, and that's also the easiest to beefed up by just spending a little more. Granted you should only do this if you've created a site that has a chance of actually converting.
Additional Resources:
http://www.quityourdayjob.com/learning
Look for the "Unofficial Google Quality Score Guide" .pdf and the "Mastering Google Adwords" Video Series.
Doesn't Include the advanced strategys layed out in this post, though, but great introductionary content on the topic after all.
If in doubt, I'm usually a little more up to date, but he will be more detailed.
There is also a great adwords and search-marketing section in the quit your day job ebook which you can download on this site. I bought that book when it was sold 50$ and it's the sinlge best ebook I've ever read on the topic. Period. There are better specialised big ticket courses, there are longer, more detailed ebooks, but in terms of overall quality of information, this is unmatched.
And after going through the above and gained some experience, if you have 2k lying around and want to become a professional SEM expert capable of earning 5 figures a month solely doing campaign-management for big Companys and be good enough to even beat me to the chase, spent them here:
http://www.wholesaletrafficsystem.com/
Cheers and remeber to have fun with all this.
Bye,
BHotr
Actually, I don't even know if he changed his content because I only own the very first edition of the book, but the Adwors info in their is a little dated. Which applys to any other course on adwords aside from one or two I know that cost 2000$ or more.
I've pointed out a few times already what it is that you need to know to make it work in some lenghty posts in other threads, but I wanted to make a thread I can link other folks to whenever adwords questions come up.
So let's get going.
BHotrs Guide to making Adwords work in late 2008
General Guidelines
Disclaimer: I won't explain the "why" to all the single points because actually, all why's are likely to be covered by the answer "Because it will increase your quality score." One more disclaimer - because of recent changes in the adwords algorithm, making one campaign for dozens or even hundreds of keywords has become a lot of work.
On to the Strategy:
Use 1 distinct Keyword per Adgroup, but use the same keyword in broad, exact and phrase match all the time within that adgroup.
Example: Your wanting to sell a program about dog training, do your keyword research and find "dog training tips" to be a very good keyword among a few others. Following this outline, you go and create one adgroup called 'dog training tips' and include essentially 3 keywords (all search type variations of the same term):
"dog training tips" (in quotes -> Exact Match)
[dog trainings tips] (in brackets -> phrase match)
dog trainings tips (broad match)
If you don't know what the match types are for, better check out google's own adwords training videos because even If I tell you now, there's a chance you're missing a lot of the other neccessary basics as well.
Start with the 5-10 most traffic-heavy Keywords (hence, adgroups) that are still closely related to your niche and start working from there.
In order to make this process easy, download the adwords editor and look at the format that Bulk Adgroup adding and Bulk ad-adding requires. Play around with it a little, and you'll find that you can easily create "1 kw per group" campgains through intelligent useage of spreadsheets. Only takes an hour or two of learning (great tutorial videos on googles own sites for this btw), but will save you tremendous time and effort later on.
QS is everything, and to get a decent Quality Score, you basically need to make sure your ad, landing page and keyword go well together. The other factor that's important especially in the beginning is your CTR. So High CTR ads that aren't converting are actually good for something in the first week or two, but no longer. How to go about optimising each other is outlined in the following sections.
"What's a great Landing Page and where do they make'em?"
Optimise your landing pages for the keywords by putting your best kw and 1-2 others in the begining of the title-tag, the first h1-heading, within h2 headings. Use all keywords close to the beginning of the first regular paragraph and about 3-5 times for every 350-500 words of text on your page. About 10 times total is usually enough for anything 2000 words or less if you only want to do adwords and not seo, though.
For multiple keywords, optimise for the ones with the most searches, then later re-optimise for the ones with the best ctr and conversion rate.
For different keywords that should attract different kinds of buyers, as well as if you have too many good keywords to choose from, consider doing several different landing pages (but only after you've workd out a basic working version - having to change a word or every link on not one but 4 or 10 different lp's if you found a typo is really awful unless you use expensive tools).
Optimise Your Google Ad's
Optimise your Ad's to include the keyword in the first or second line of the plain text - or the headline. It isn't neccessary that the KW is in the headline, this can be fully exploited as an attention getter, but it is neccessary that it's somewhere within the ad's body.
Also use it as a subdomain or subpage in the display-url: www.domain.com/keyword(&stuff).html
keyword(&stuff).domain.com
Stick to the following blueprint if you want to make sure at least google likes your ad, and experiment from there:
Attention Getter - Headline
Some Features Of your Product - First Line of Ad Body
A Call to Action (don't use "free" even if you're just collecting emails) - Second Line of Ad Body
A keyword-including display url.
Check your Keywords
Google tells you what keywords your page would rank good for. Simply through your copy into the "website content" area of the Keyword Tool mentioned above, and check for the keywords it lists in the first section.
Then throw in competitors site's and compare them to yours, and see which keywords are missing or not in the first tab, where they should be.
The "other relevent keywords" tab in the results is the "lingo" that google scans for to determine whether the reader will think you're an authority on your subject or not. If you have them on your page even once or twice, your trust and thus QS will go up.
After you've created a campaign
On high-traffic terms, Always split test three ads - your previous ad, a slightly modified version like it's described in the book, and an largely differnt version to see if another angle might help.
Also make sure to turn on "Quality Score Display" in the Keywords tab of your ad group details. It's a little hidden as an option under the "Customize columns" link. There you'll get details about what you can still optimise. Take this with a grain of salt, though, it takes often a day or three until google takes into account updates you've made to your site - and it won't update for an even longer period of time if you don't get any clickthroughs.
Finally start bidding high and lower your bids after a week if you want to. CTR is one of the most important factors in determining your QS, and that's also the easiest to beefed up by just spending a little more. Granted you should only do this if you've created a site that has a chance of actually converting.
Additional Resources:
http://www.quityourdayjob.com/learning
Look for the "Unofficial Google Quality Score Guide" .pdf and the "Mastering Google Adwords" Video Series.
Doesn't Include the advanced strategys layed out in this post, though, but great introductionary content on the topic after all.
If in doubt, I'm usually a little more up to date, but he will be more detailed.
There is also a great adwords and search-marketing section in the quit your day job ebook which you can download on this site. I bought that book when it was sold 50$ and it's the sinlge best ebook I've ever read on the topic. Period. There are better specialised big ticket courses, there are longer, more detailed ebooks, but in terms of overall quality of information, this is unmatched.
And after going through the above and gained some experience, if you have 2k lying around and want to become a professional SEM expert capable of earning 5 figures a month solely doing campaign-management for big Companys and be good enough to even beat me to the chase, spent them here:
http://www.wholesaletrafficsystem.com/
Cheers and remeber to have fun with all this.
Bye,
BHotr