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Where to Start with Google Adwords (Budget, Ads, Conversion)

Jacob Brain

Author

Are you interested in starting an Adwords campaign to bring in new leads but don’t know how or where to start? Here are some basics on how to start your campaign the right way.

Picking Your Adwords Budget

Starting your Adwords campaign can be daunting. The first thing to decide is the budget you are willing to spend in your campaign. I would suggest thinking no shorter than three months, and no longer than six for your first campaign. And for any real traction, you would need to think about at least $500 a month for your budget. This will give you a good base to build your campaigns, and give you enough time to realize returns on your campaign and optimize. If that sounds like too much to start, you might want to scale back or try a very simple campaign on a social media network which you can target more closely. But SEM (search engine marketing) will be your biggest bucket of new leads in a sales focused campaign.

Creating Your Ad Campaigns

In thinking through your campaigns, we’d suggest starting with three types of campaign. The first one is a name-based campaign. It might sounds strange, but you’ll want to create an ad around your own name as keywords. If your company name is “Al’s Remodeling,” you’ll buy “Al’s remodeling,” “remodeling by Al,” “Al’s construction,” and so forth. You want to make sure you are getting all the traffic that is trying to find you, but for some reason can’t. Create a short list of keywords, and your ads can be very targeted and literal about your business name.

Your second campaign will be focused on your literal service that you offer. So for Al’s Remodeling, you’d target keywords such as “kitchen remodeling,” “bath remodeling,” etc. All the services that are related to your company, and that you do. This will be your larger budget, since these keywords will be the most expensive because they are the most competitive.

Lastly, your third campaign will be your stretch campaign. For this campaign, you will pick keywords that are relative to your industry, but not directly related to your services. This will bring you into the “awareness” part of the marketing funnel that could lead business to you that has not decided to work with a solutions provider yet. For example, “Bathtub Installation,” or “Best Tile For Kitchens.” These are searches that show someone has interest or is entering the market for your services. Being able to track this type of campaign will help you gather lower cost traffic, and put more eyeballs on your site.

Creating Adwords Ads

Ad creation is a special type of copywriting. There is not a magic formula to this type of writing to size in this targeted context, but being clear and concise is always good writing. Try to use the keyword in the title of your ad for better relevancy. Keep your copy directed to the call-to-action and what they can expect on the other side of that link. Here are a couple great resources on creating your ad copy.

The key is to bring copy to drive the conversion and give context to the viewer who will see this among the other ads and search listings.

Optimizing Your Adwords Campaigns

Once your campaigns are running, you’ll want to optimize your ads. Optimizing is basically managing your money spend, to make sure you don’t spend money in bad places. The basic cycle of optimization is to review ads, review keywords, and manage budget. For ads, you’ll want to review you ads and find which ads are working well, and replace the ones that are not doing well. For example, if you have three ads, you’d find the best one, and replace the two that are not performing well with two new ones based on what you think is working in the best one. This will keep your ads fresh and seeking better return.

For your keywords, you’ll look for search volume and score, to make sure you are not paying too much based on bad landing page relevance. Having a strong landing page in place for your keywords will help your relevancy score. Remove low conversion, or low traffic keywords that don’t equate to results. Try some new keywords if you have time.

Lastly, you’ll review your budget to see how your spending is working. You might increase or decrease based on your overall clicks. You might narrow your exposure, to increase your budget per day. You might stop showing ads on the weekends, so you can put more money on the weekdays. You might also look at your bidding, which should be auto setup, to do some custom budgets based on conversion rates. But overall, you’ll be looking to make sure your money is going to the effective sources.

Good Luck!

With this high level fly though you’re ready to create your campaigns. Go for it, and start to watch your results come in. If you need help with your campaign, we’d be happy to help with your PPC marketing, or your overall marketing efforts online with our free 30-minute marketing review.

Some Campaign Tips:

  • Always target the right geographic audience. It does not make sense to buy ads in Australia if you are in Boston and don’t travel.
  • Allow Google to do your budget allocation when possible.
  • Make sure your ads are not running at strange times of day for your business. Granted there might be some late night searches, but most leads don’t come in at 2 a.m.
  • Be sure to check and create negative keywords that can help target your clicks on better traffic.

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