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Contact Us at Click Success Paul's Top Tips For Pay Per Click Success
Paul Williams is a qualified Google AdWords professional, and a director of Click Success Ltd. He has been managing AdWords accounts for major businesses for over three years. To contact Paul direct, call 0845 4745348.
Follow these simple guidelines and you could see your ads in higher positions than your competitors but you'll be paying less for the click! But remember, traffic is only one part of online success. To make this work, you need quality traffic landing on a good website that will convert those visitors into leads or sales. This is how you'll achieve click success - and this is a small part of what we do on a daily basis for our clients.
Do Your Research
Spend some time looking at the precise keywords people are using, don't just guess. People use some strange phrases sometimes when searching online so make sure you add these to your campaigns. Remember to also include misspellings as there may not be as much competition for these keywords.
Most advertisers who use Adwords fail because they end up with a keyword list of about 30-40 generic keywords to bid on that they thought of over lunch. The main problem with this is the competition has also thought of those words and you'll be bidding expensively for them.
Come up with a minimum of 200 keywords to start with. For some of our clients we have generated in excess of 13,000 keywords for just one adgroup. The actual phrases may mean the same thing, but change the words used to include singular and plural, hyphenations etc.
For example, an Adgroup for a toy shop selling Star Wars toys may focus on Lightsabers and contain keywords that cover all the different angles such as;
paddling pool
paddling-pool
Child paddling pool
Childs paddling pool
Child paddling pool
Childs paddling-pool
Child paddling-pool
Childrens paddling pool
Childrens paddling-pool
paddling pool for child
paddling pool for children
paddling pool child
kids paddling pool
kids paddling-pool
paddling pool for kids
(And even include some misspellings . . .)
Child padling pool
Etc, etc
(And a couple of negatives. . . )
-swimming
-cheap
-ebay
Etc, etc
. . . I'm sure you get the idea.
Trying and testing new keywords should be something you constantly do. The interesting thing is, on average 90% of your traffic will come from 10% of your keywords. And that 10% will probably be keywords that you think off after several months, not several minutes.
You most likely will not be able to predict beforehand which keywords will bring you the most traffic, and even more importantly, convert the best.
This is why we constantly monitor campaigns and keywords to further optimise their success.
Create Multiple Adgroups
Don't just shove all your keywords into one big campaign and one Adgroup. Split them up to make your ads more relevant. For example, if you own a sports shop, you would do better grouping all your boxing supplies into one Adgroup and your football shirts into another. This will give you greater control over your daily spend as you may decide that you want to spend more per day on Football T-Shirts during the season than snooker cues.
Put Relevant Keywords into Your Ads
Following on from this, create different ads for different Adgroups. Don't be lazy and use a general one-ad-fits-all approach. To achieve click success you want a boxing gloves ad to appear to people searching for boxing gloves. If somebody types in a football t-shirt keyword, you want a relevant, powerful ad that talks about your football t-shirts. You can only do this if you set up multiple Adgroups.
Don't Send Users To Your Homepage!
Few businesses take the time to decide which page to land people on, also called your destination URL, so just have everybody turn up on the homepage. You must avoid this. If a user types in boxing gloves, you can safely assume that's what they want. If you land them on your homepage and make them search for the boxing category you run the risk of them giving up and clicking back and going to someone else site.
The great thing about online businesses is also the scariest thing. New customers are only a click away, but if you screw up you can lose them in a click.
It takes more effort to leave a shop and try somewhere else which is why most of us will ask an assistant if we can't find what we're looking for. Not so online! Can't find it? No worries, just click back and try another site. It only takes a nano second. If you want to prevent click backs and get click success you MUST make it easy for people.
This goes for any product or service. Make sure people looking to buy boxing gloves land on the boxing gloves page. People looking for a Magimix coffee maker land on the Magimix coffee makers page. People looking for a divorce solicitor land on the divorce solicitor page, not the home page, about us page or any other page. Think about your landing pages, they are key to your success in Pay Per Click.
Match Your Keywords
With Adwords you have 4 main choices how to set up your keywords. All of them can bring you success, all of them can bring you misery so you need to think about them carefully. Not enough clicks can be just as bad as too many when your survival in business depends on sales.
Below are the different keyword tools, how you write them into your Adgroups and what the outcome might be:
Keyword phrase - weight loss book
Broad Match: This is the default option. You would simply write this as weight loss book. This will show your ad to anybody typing in these keywords in any order, even if they typed in book on weight loss or book a hypnosis session on weight loss. You don't do hypnosis but your ad will still show. They may click on your ad out of interest but they are not a great potential customer.
Phrase Match: Surround the keyword in quotes "weight loss book". With phrase match your ad will only show if the keyword is typed in that particular order. For example, someone typing in buy weight loss book will see your ad whereas someone typing in book on weight loss wouldn't. Phrase match allows you to refine the search and show your ad to better targeted users. Remember though that someone looking for free weight loss book pdf will also see your ad so you would need to use negatives and/or qualify the users by putting the price of the book in the ad to make sure anybody clicking on it is aware there is a purchase price.
Exact Match: Surround the keyword in square brackets [weight loss book]. This will ensure your ad is only shown to users who type in that exact phrase in that exact order with nothing before it and nothing after it. This is for when you want to really narrow down your users.
Negative Match: Not a stand alone keyword tool but rather to accompany Broad or Phrase Match. Simply put "-" before the keyword that you want to prevent from triggering your ad. In this example we may decide to notch out the word free, session, cheap, like this:
-free
-session
-cheap
So if a user types in new weight loss book the ad will be shown. However, if they type in free weight loss book our settings will ignore this and the ad will not be shown. Likewise, a user trying to book a weight loss hypnosis session will also not see the ad.
We are a pay per click partner for a UK client who sell canvases for artists. When I took over the campaign, I noticed all the keywords were bunched into one Adgroup. The keyword canvas was on it but the client didn't realise that there were lots of people searching for canvas tents which was showing the ad! Making tents a negative word stopped this and kept his campaign lean.
The obvious benefits of using these different matches is to give you the best chance of attracting qualified users to click through to your site and eliminate the wasted clicks.
Optimise and Test Your Ads
Coming from a direct marketing background I am used to testing different ads with different headlines, different prices, different copy etc. One of the parts I love about Adwords is your ability to carry out true A/B split tests and see which ad performs better.
You simply write 2 ads and Google will alternate them automatically. As users click on them Google will work out which is the better ad due to the Click Through Rate (the % of people who click on the ad when it's shown). It will then give more weight to the ad with the highest CTR and display this more often then the lower performing ad.
At the end of a day, week or month you should re-write the bad ad and let them run head-to-head again. Google will repeat the process and give you back the performance figures. The trick is to ever be refining an ad until it cannot be beaten so you know your getting the absolute best performance from it.
Track Your Results
With Pay Per Click you can track your results down to the keyword. Get to know the reports and set them to run at the end of the week or month and spend some time getting to know your conversions.
With Adwords reports you'll be able to make informed decisions on which keywords to eliminate, which to invest more money into and which to leave as they are.
I have some clients whose individual Adgroups give back conversion costs regarding the products being sold. Some Adroups are performing better than the target conversion cost. Other Adgroups are slight above target.
However, we still run the above target Adgroups because the overall average conversion across all campaigns is lower then the target so it still remains profitable. Without running reports we wouldn't know which Adgroups were doing what.
You must run reports to make sure you are making a profit.
As you have seen from this short introduction to pay per click, there is more to it than simply chucking a bunch of keywords and a wedge of cash into a pot. Google has all sorts of secret algorithms that apply to PPC as they do natural Search Engine Optimisation.
Even though you don't pay for an ad until a user clicks on it, Google is counting how many times (impressions) your ad is being shown Vs how many clicks it gets. If the click through rate is low then you may find your ad falling down the position chart and your competitor who has a better pulling ad may be higher than you but paying less once a user does click on the ad.
So take the time to make sure your keywords match your ad, that matches your product or service that matches your landing page. Invest the time or hire a professional agency to help you set this up right from the beginning.
The great thing about pay per click is you can test and tweak as you go, but I firmly believe that your future success is built upon your early foundations. Get the foundations right and your success will be progressive.
If you would like Paul as your UK Pay Per Click partner call Click Success on 0845 4677683.
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