Beginners Guide to Google Adwords

The Basics

The basic principle behind Adwords is quite simple. Lets say you are selling Barney Oven Gloves on your E-commerce site. You setup a campaign within Adwords to target the keywords “Barney Oven Glove” Now whenever someone searches for those keywords via Google your Text advertisement will appear on the screen with the associated search results as a sponsored link.

Different keywords however are more popular than others, therefore you need to bid high enough to meet the reserve in order to be placed on the page. If you want to be given the priority position on the page you need to bid higher then all your competitors.

Each time a user clicks on your ad they are taken to your predesignated landing page and you are charged the rate you bid for the click through rate.

Now not every user that clicks on your ad is going to result in a sale or whats called a conversion. The percentage of people who actually are converted to a sale balanced against how many users actually clicked on the ad is called the Conversion Rate. Your Goal is to get your conversion rate as high as possible but typically it can be as low as 1% so for every 100 people that click on your ad 1 person decides to buy.

So if your Oven Gloves sell for 10 dollars and it takes on average 100 clicks throughs to secure a sale and the rate you are paying for each click is .05 then you are making a 5 dollar profit on the campaign per sale. as .05×100 = 5

Now if you could increase your conversion rate to 1 in 50 then you would make a profit of 7.50 you get the picture.

Basic Secret to Success

You have only a few characters per ad to make an impact so every word counts and more than you think. You need to start thinking completely from the customers point of view. Google loves relevant content  so you need to make your ad as relevant as you can to the search terms they relate to. Make your search terms as focused as possible don’t try and cover the whole kitchen ware market, you will end up with loads of impressions and no click through or worse click through that cost you money where the user has no real intention of purchasing.

In Adwords you can rotate different ad copy to test which works best. A simple change in wording can result in 20% increase in sales without costing you a penny more in advertising. That’s how important getting the right copy can be.

It’s simple to get started open an account at http://www.google.com/adwords and start experimenting. You can set limits on your daily budgets so you don’t have to worry about making a big loss while you experiment.

If you would like us to set Adwords up for you and run a calibrated campaign specific to your needs don’t hesitate to drop us a line.