Everyone knows that Google Adwords is a great marketing resource. It’s cheap, it’s effective and it’s targeted. But it ain’t easy.

Search optimization with Google can feel like a Sisyphean punishment, but in the long run, once you’ve established best practices, you’re good for a while.

Figuring out Adwords is even more challenging. Adwords are displayed based on a complex rating system that Google more or less makes up as it goes along. Human input on top of algorithm, determines your campaign’s fate. And if you don’t take the time to get it right, you’re ads simply won’t be delivered. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that they’re keeping  the spammers and the perverts out, but it’s frustrating to spend so much time nurturing just one segment of a campaign.

Ad placement depends on the quality of  the keywords you select, the text in your ad, the optimization of your landing page, the amount you bid on the space and some times a hands-on review by a Google employee.  Understanding that no two Adword campaigns are treated equally, here are my 5 tips for moving in the right direction and hopefully taking some of the pain out of the process:

1) Be honest with yourself and honest with Google: Be selective and targeted with all of your Adwords decisions. This is a job for a scalpel, not a shotgun. Be sure your ad, your keywords and your landing page relate in a meaningful way. Don’t try to trick Google by adding a bunch of irrelevant keywords or making claims that aren’t true. It’s also debatable at the moment whether you’ll get away trying to buy a competitor’s name as a keyword. I’d err on the side of caution and avoid it.

2) Use multiple keywords to target better and pay less: Say you’re a Ford dealer in Boston. If you want to run an ad, you might consider bidding on the keyword “Ford” or “Truck”. But that wouldn’t capture the audience you’re looking for. If someone types “Ford” into a search engine, they’re probably looking for Ford’s corporate site. You’d be competing with every business in the world who wanted to appear when someone searched Ford and you’d probably spend a small fortune on worthless clicks. However if you cluster your keywords and used “Ford trucks Boston”, you’d not only save a lot of money, but people performing that search are probably the ones who are actually looking for you.

3) Checking and changing often – but be careful not to wreck your good numbers: Because of all the variables that go into displaying your ad, it’s understood that you’ll want to do some testing and make changes. You need to tweak your ad copy for better clicks, add and subtract keywords to display with better frequency, raise and lower your bid to save money and get better positioning. Follow your metrics and continue to make those changes until you find your sweet spot, but be careful. If you edit too much and add the wrong keywords or price yourself out of the bidding, it may take a while to recover a spot you once held.

4) Landing pages matter: It should go without saying that if your landing page isn’t any good, the fact that you got someone to visit it doesn’t really matter. But because Google looks at it to determine your ad placement, you need to take an even harder look at it. Your landing page should be geared toward your customer, it should use keywords that are relevant to those that are associated with your ad. It should have a clear navigation to other sections of your site as well as other SEO-friendly things like page title, alt tags on images etc.  The url structure of your page should make sense too, so be cautious when using internal marketing codes in your url. Spending the extra time to get it right is worthwhile, especially if your commercial effort gets you organic search optimization.

5) Read “Winning results with Google Adwords” by Andrew Goodman: I bought the second edition and Google changed the rules again shortly thereafter. Most of what’s in the book is still valid though. A lot of what I’ve shared in this post is tempered by what I learned from Goodman. He’s a little long-winded in spots, but it’s worth the time if you’re planning on spending any serious money with Google.

Tagged with: advertising • Marketing • online • SEM

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