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Google AdWords Best Practices

by Seth Worby

If you have a small business and are interested in advertising online, Google AdWords should be your first stop.  Google is the #1 search engine and they make a conscious effort to help website owners get exposure to potential customers.  There’s no doubt that paid listings (Google AdWords) can generate quality business leads but the proper strategies and techniques must be employed to run a successful ad campaign. If you’re not using AdWords best practices you could be throwing money down the drain. So, in an attempt to prevent that here is an entry level lesson on Google AdWords best practices.

Start With the End In Mind

This is a concept I’ve borrowed from my boss who builds websites based on the motto “start with the end in mind”.  Before you plan your ad campaign it is important to clearly understand who you are targeting?  Who is online looking for your product or services? Who is going to actually buy from you? Let’s assume from research and experience you know your target market fairly well but have no clue how to find them online.  Have no fear Google’s “keyword tool” will guide you through the darkness.

Keywords are phrases that describe the essence of a topic in a given website. Simply enter the phrase or words most relevant to your business and the keyword tool will give you the most popular keywords based on the terms you provide. Go through the relevant keywords carefully to make sure the terms are related to your website and the services and products you offer. If you find a keyword that gets a high amount of clicks per month but is not directly related to your business do not use it, you don’t want to appear for irrelevant searches. It is imperative that you continually check your keywords for effectiveness as they are the building blocks for your ads.

Making the Ad

Once you’ve determined the best keywords to use it’s time to build your Google Ads.  The buying customer knows exactly what he wants – so be specific. There a few strategies and techniques to always keep in mind as you are writing and testing ads. Page Christenbury from Roi Revolution lays out the three key ingredients to writing effective ads in her “Easy Recipe for Successful Ad Text” blog post:

Keyword Relevancy: This is plain and simple: have your keywords in your ad text. If possible place the keyword in the headline, also in the description lines and the display URL.

Differentiate From Competitors: This takes a little more work. Study your competitors’ ads. What do you do differently? What sets you apart? Whatever it is, make sure it is in your ad copy (and stands out)!

Call To Action: Engage the visitor to take action on your site. Offer them a free report, a free consultation, ask them to call now, buy now, browse more. Whatever call to action makes sense for your industry and is the most powerful.

These three elements provide a great foundation on which to build your ad text. However, one other essential practice to ensure a successful Google Adwords campaign is to continually rewrite and test multiple ad texts. One of the great features of Google AdWords is that you can run multiple ads simultaneously. Take advantage of this! If you continually test your ads (to beat the current best performer) you will constantly improve the performance of your campaigns.

Landing Pages

Once you’ve developed some great ads that receive lots of clicks you need to make sure those links are sending people to the appropriate landing page on your site. You put all this time and money into getting ads that people click so it’s very important to send users directly to a page that displays exactly what they are looking for. If people don’t find what they are looking for within seconds they will have left your site and head to a competitors. Also, you want to direct people to a page where they can purchase your product or service right there. That’s the whole point of this! If an ad gets very high click-through, developing a customized landing page may make sense. Learn more about landing pages here  (http://landingpages.blogspot.com/).