Your First Day in PPC Marketing

How hard is it really to set up a few ads on Google and start getting hits to your web site? Is it really that complicated? I’d love to be able to tell you that you could sit down for one hour today and start cranking out great ads, picking great keywords, and creating tons of sales or leads for your company or web site, but it’s not that easy. I am going to try to give you the best outline possible for a successful first day of Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing. And keep in mind that at any time, we (who have been doing this for over ten years) can do this for you at a very reasonable price.

The first thing to understand is that Google is not the only player in this space. If you choose to delve deep you will find that this same model is used in similar ways on Yahoo, MSN (Bing), Facebook and even Myspace. Obviously you are not going to be able to learn how to use all of those in one day. So lets just concentrate on the behemoth that is Google Adwords.

The area in the red box is where your Google Ad Words ads will appear

Let’s imagine your perfect scenario for your business or company using Pay Per Click Marketing. Lets say you own a florist shop in San Francisco, CA, and you have several days during the year that are great for your company. We will use a few obvious ones: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas. Already, you are in an ideal situation for PPC Marketing. You can use the marketing to geographically target your customers (just getting local area flower buyers in San Francisco); you can use ad scheduling (just targeting the days before those holidays); and you have abundant relevant keywords to work with (buy flowers, roses, mother’s day bouquet etc.).

So how would you go about setting up a campaign to maximize your sales on those days?
Lets run through the steps:

1. You need to create a Google Adwords account.
2. You need to create a gmail account at http://mail.google.com
3. Now that you have your gmail account, you can use it to create an account by selecting the "Start Now" button.
4. Select the Starter or Standard Edition (For the purposes of this article, we’ll use the Standard Edition.)
5. Fill in your personal or company’s information.

You will be prompted by Google to "Start a Campaign." This is not the only campaign you will be able to create, so don’t worry that you won’t be able to erase or change the things you do. In the future you can select the "New Online Campaign" drop- down on the screen to create another campaign.

There are two types of campaigns to choose from. If you have never used PPC marketing before and you want your ad to show up on Google.com whenever someone makes a search, then choose "Start with Keywords." "Start with Placements," although probably not what you are looking to start out with, is an advanced setting that you can use once you have played around with the site a bit. Google offers "placements" on its network of millions of sites on the Internet (i.e. text ads or banner ads on businessweek.com).

Now, it’s time to pick where you want your ads to go, or "geotargeting." Your San Francisco florist shop probably does not want to have ads appear for "bouquet" in Albuquerque, New Mexico (too much of a drive for your delivery person!). You would therefore choose to change your targeting next to the United States option for "Target customers by location". This will take you to a new screen where you can enter any location into the search box and then decide on where you want to place your ad, and even where you would like to exclude your ad from showing.

In this example we have highlighted the San Francisco Metro Area which includes the area surrounding the city.

When you pick your "campaign" and "adgroup" names, it’s a good idea to make sure they are something you understand. These titles will never be seen by searchers on the Internet and will only help you identifying what the campaign’s purpose is and what the ad group is about.

Now we’re ready to create our first ad! You have a limited amount of space to accomplish so many different goals. Obviously you want some sort of call-to-action statement. I think it is best to view how other people’s ads look under your chosen keywords. Do your search on Google’s Adword test page. So now that you’ve looked over the different ads, the first step to actually creating your ad is to create a title.

Most people try to put their keywords in their title. This is where I differ from most people, because I don’t believe the keyword is a must in the title! If it’s a keyword with ten ads, for example, all of which say "flowers." At that point, it would be better to create a title that will be different from the rest. Here’s a simple visual test. What do you notice first in this list?

Flowers
Flowers
Flowers
Flowers
Fresh Bouquets
Flowers
Flowers
Flowers
Flowers

You probably noticed "Fresh Bouquets" even though it was fifth in the list. What would YOU click on, what would attract YOUR eye? Use that as your title to make your ad sparkle more than a generic Bizrate ad. Use your second and third lines to emphasize your company’s strengths. Can’t win on price? Leave it off. Do you have a better return policy, warranty, or customer service? Put that in the ad. Make yourself different! Here is an example of an ad for the keyword "Mother’s Day Flowers:"

This is the ad creation page on Google Adwords.

I believe ad copy is important, but KEYWORDS are the most important! Don’t let anyone tell you anything else. I’d rather have a bad ad and 10 good keywords than the reverse.

Keyword Selection
Would you trust Google to put your ads in the right place because they are friendly and never evil? Would you assume that there is no way a major company would throw away thousands (or millions) of dollars on bad traffic? If so, you’d be wrong and you’d be convinced in one day that Google Adwords is awful and a waste of money. Don’t let that happen to you. Just understand that Google, like all companies, wants to make money. It’s up to you to give them money for the right traffic and customers, not the other way around. Google doesn’t guarantee anything from their Adwords other than to take your money! They can’t get your money from creating ads, so they get it from where they put your keywords. You probably assumed that your ad would only be showing on Google.com when people make searches, but that’s only the case if that’s what you tell them to do. Much like a form that has 15 things pre-checked at the bottom for you to received fantastic free offers, Google pre-checks you into their "search partners program" and their "content program." What are these programs?

Search Partners
Do you remember the old movies where a guy would get into some debt or want to start a business, so he would take a loan from a trusted friend or partner with someone for the venture, and when it went south he went back to his friend expecting him to be sympathetic? Then he would find out that his friend was really part of the Mob, so the guy really was partnering with the mafia and never even knew it. That’s very similar to what’s going on with the search partners. Google throws up their nice guys in images of AOL, Earthlink, Netscape, etc. You think it would be a great idea to have your ad appear when someone makes a search on Aol.com, so you check "yes." Then you make your keyword selections and it turns out that often, you’re getting more impressions (searches) from the search partner network than from Google. How is that possible, if Google controls 70% of search online? If you think about everything that Netscape or AT&T Worldnet owns, then you realize that your ad could be just about anywhere, especially if you use broad and phrase match. What you end up having to do to use the "search network" is create an exact match campaign to keep those partners under control. They know you want to appear on Ask.com and Aol.com and so they have you trapped.

Content Network
This is a disaster waiting to happen. I don’t advise anyone just starting out in PPC marketing to use this. It is the disaster of the Search Network writ large. If you are going to keep this on, make sure to place a low bid on each ad group and never use a default bid.

Now that we have gone over the basics of what isn’t Google search and what is, let’s delve a little deeper into the keywords. Thankfully for us, Google has made life a little easier by adding a Google keyword tool. This tool allows you to put in a word and it "searches" for all the related keywords people have searched, and it lets you know how many people have searched that term this month. Obviously you can’t expect to see all of the traffic from a given keyword to your site from Google Adwords; even in a perfect scenario, more than half of the searches are going to natural or organic searching on the left hand side. So how do you know what keywords to use? That is the million dollar question. Once again, use your common sense. If you want to sell flowers, is it important to show up when someone searches, "How do I create a flower garden?" Probably not, but it’s up to you to decide. If you want to blast the world with your message, perhaps showing up for every word that has flower in it is for you. You might also blast right through your budget too quickly, though!

Let’s say you did a search on the word "flower" using the Google Keyword tool and your list looked like this:

Flowers
Flower
Flower arrangements
Flower seeds
Silk flower
Flower delivery
White flower
Flowers on line
Rose flower
Flowers shop

Google Keyword Tool Results for the word "Flower"

When you look at the keyword list above, give each keyword a number of relevancy based on a three-point scale
(1 = highly relevant, 2 = kind of relevant, and 3 = not relevant).

This list would probably look like:

2 - flowers
2 - flower
1 - flower arrangements
3 - flower seeds
3 - silk flower
1 - flower delivery
2 - white flower
1 - flowers on line
2 - rose flower
1 - flowers shop

Now take the list (which in most cases will be 100 keywords and not 10) and put it into Excel or any program that does a numerical ordering. Tell Excel to numerically order it. Now you have all of your relevant keywords lined up for you. Your first campaign should start with these keywords. At that point, you want to distinguish which keywords need their own ad group and which ones can be bunched up together. In the above case, all of the #1’s are important and need their own specific ad. You should also do a search again on the #1’s to gain even more long tail keywords. Don’t take any short cuts when creating your ad groups. If you need to make hundreds of ad groups, do it. Let your competitors make cookie cutter ads. Remember: by embarking on a campaign like this, you are an advertising professional; your reputation and company are on the line. Make both of them look good with a little bit of hard work.

Campaign Budget Settings

Last but not least are budgeting and keyword bids. Obviously, setting a good daily budget is important; so don’t be too shy or too overexcited when setting your budgets. It’s a good idea to start out with a budget of $25.00 and then move up as you see more and more traffic. You also will need to setup a payment system with Google. That is between you and your money and what you are comfortable with. Keyword bidding is important, but not as important as the keywords. No matter how much I hear traffic is important, I always believe the "right" traffic is more important. If you are upset because you are only getting 100 hits a month and spending $200, imagine how upset you’d be if you were getting 1000 hits a month for that same $200 and nothing was happening. If you choose the right keywords, keyword bidding will be easy. I consider keyword bidding, Google’s Quality Score, etc. to be an advanced course and beyond my abilities to share in one article.

All these checks above are very important, make sure to familiarize yourself with what they all mean

In summary, before setting up your first PPC account, remember these 3 rules:

1. No one cares about your business or your money more than you do.
2. Prepare the right message and put it in front of the right people.
3. Don’t get discouraged by a few bumps in the road.

I can be reached anytime at richard.l@trycm.com if you have any questions about PPC marketing or want a professional’s hand to create or improve your current PPC efforts.

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