I have looked at quite a few peoples PPC campaigns in my time and I can honestly say that some of them might as well be direct debits straight to Google’s giant cash mountain. I mean these campaigns were like a drain pipe with cash rushing out through them.
So let’ s have a look at just what you need to do to create a profitable adwords campaign.
Mind Set Of The Buyer
The first and most important thing that you need to consider is the mindset of the buyer. This may sound rather obvious but I have seen a lot of campaigns that have adgroups full of useless keywords. What this means is that when these so called ‘useless’ keywords get typed into the search engine by a person then your ad gets shown.
Let me just back track for a second…a useless keyword is one that is typed in by a customer who is in information seeking mode and not interested in buying anything. For example a person might type “German Shepherd” into the search engines, but this does not mean that they want a product for training their dog, they might just want to see pictures of German Shepherds, but your ads still show if you put the exact match keyword “German Shepherd” in your adgroup.
Adgroups
Another important trick to make sure you do is to have tightly focused ad groups and by this I mean only have one keyword in each adgroup. Please for the love of all things good, do NOT have hundreds of keywords in one adgroup, as this is a recipe for disaster.
For example you may being selling acne treatment online, so a good adgroup would have the word, ance cure using all three match types. However a poor adgroup would have the words, pimples, zits, bad skins and acne altogether.
If you do this then you create adgroups that are not relevant, because the ad running for that adgroup can not be relevant to all keywords triggering it.
Benefits
With limited characters to write with in your ad copy your must make sure that you don’t waste any! Therefore ensure that the first line of the ad has a strong benefit to the customer, and the second line has a call to action. The other thing to avoid is not to continue one thought from one line of ad copy to the next, instead try and finish each thought on the line.
Landing Pages
A good adwords campaign is one where every part pulls its weight and all parts remain relevant. By this I mean that the keywords need to be tight, and the ad groups need to run ads that contain benefits, and finally the destination landing page must convert to sales!
You have about 7 seconds to grab the visitors attention and get them to take the action you desire on the page. Therefore you need to make sure it is very obvious what they are meant to do. If your goal is to collect an email address then you will want to have a bold headline explaining the benefit and an even clearer sign up box!
Bad landing page are cluttered and make it difficult for the visitor to work out what they need to do. Basically if you make it hard work for the guest you will lose them
Another important aspect of landing pages to note is that most people’s eyes hover over the top middle and top left of the page, so make the most of this space!!
Perhaps the most important part of landing pages is to create theme based around themes. By this I mean group your adgroups into themes where the adgroups in theme are closely related. For example in the acne niche you might want to have a theme for all the adgroups that mention pimples, another one for all the adgroups that mention acne, bad skin, zits etc…
Next you create unique landing pages for each theme. This way the page is more relevant for the visitor and you will get a better quality score from Google.
Tracking
Conversion tracking is super easy to do, yet is not done enough. Too often I talk to people that are doing PPC but have no tracking going on. Sure you might make sales but you could be fine tuning your efforts if you knew exactly where the sales where coming from. When inside your Google adwords campaign, click the tools tab and then tracking. Next you set up a new action that you want to track and Google will generate a piece of tracking code that you paste into the page that the customer arrives on after completing the action that you desired. This may be signing up to your email list or purchasing a product.
If you take nothing else from this post, take this: RELEVANCY and TRACKING are your best friends when it comes to PPC success!
See ya
Matt Carter
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Thanks for the info Matt. I haven’t had any success with PPC yet, only tried one clickbank product, but lost $100 with no sales!!! I kept getting a really low quality score…any advice?
Thanks Lisa
Hey Lisa, with quality score make sure that you have tightly focussed adgroups, so 1 keyword per adgroup, and you may need to develop many landing pages to make sure that they are relevant to the adgroup, and make sure the keyword is in the landing page too.
Matt
Great post. So what you are saying is even if my ads have all the right keywords in them, my quality score will never be high if i dont have plenty of the same keywords in my landing pages?
Thx Steve
Hi Steve. No, what he is saying is your keywords need to be relevant to your landing pages and your landing pages need to be relevant to the product your selling. Yes, your keywords should be on your landing page but not all of them on the same landing page. That’s why you will need to make many landing pages. All of your keywords won’t make sense necessarily on one landing page. That’s why you’d make different landing pages.
Google just wants to see that your landing page, your keywords and your ads are all highly relevant. Hope that makes sense. I highly recommend Mark Lings Affiloblueprint which shows you exactly how to building landing pages that are relevant. It’s an extremely effective course.