Google Adwords Explained
Google PPC Markerting & Advertising DIY eBook

Introduction

eBook: Promoting your website with Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click advertising media. This eBook was authored by Phil Baddock, Qualified Google Advertising Professional.



(Salsa Internet has 1 individual who has passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam).

This eBook will explain strategies allow you to improve your advertising results through the “Pay Per Click” advertising mechanism offered by Google called “Adwords”. We’ll try to answer the most common and frustrating questions that arise when trying to maximise your Adwords results.

It will also explain the fundamentals of improving a visitor’s response to your website content through appropriate page structure and layout, and improving the inquiry rates and sales resulting from these prospective client visits by including an effective call to action within these pages. 

For those who aren't inclined to read all of this paper, if you take away one piece of advice that will benefit you strongly in your adwords campaigns, it should be to enable "conversion tracking" (explained in detail later), and ensuring a focus both on increasing conversion rates, and lowering your cost per conversion.   Conversion tracking tracks inquiries and sales resulting from your campaign, and your ultimate goal should be both to increase your conversion rates, but also to ensure that the amount of ad $'s you are spending to acheive these conversions, actually makes sense in your business and delivers you a profitable outcome.  Conversion tracking is covered in more detail on page 10 of this paper.

While this paper will describe techniques for achieving great results with Adwords, a step by step instructional guide to using the Google Adwords system is beyond the scope of this document. Google offer great introductory tutorials on Adwords on http://adwords.google.com for the first time user, or video tutorials at the Google Adwords Learning centre. Beyond the focus on adwords however, many of the concepts in this paper (split testing, copywriting principles, keyword research, conversion analysis) should add value to those simply wanting to improve the effectiveness of their online promotional activities using other pay per click services such as Sensis (for Australian clients), MSN and Yahoo/Overture.

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

“Pay Per Click” advertising can deliver fantastic results for some clients in driving prospective customers to their new website and allowing those searching for similar products and services to the ones to find your business. Search engines have two types of results which are displayed when a user searches. There are free search results (sometimes referred to as the "organic results" or the "natural results"), and Pay Per Click advertising results. The screenshot below shows the presentation of these 2 different types of results for the Google.com search engine - in pink (paid PPC advertising) and blue (free search engine results).

Pay per click advertising, as the name implies, involves paying these search engine providers – but only if a user clicks on your advertisement and visits your website. To display your advertisement if the user does not click on it – costs nothing. How much you pay is governed by an auction system where you “bid” for particular search phrases or keywords that users may be looking for on the search engine. You are in control of how much you pay for the clicks – the more you offer to pay, the higher your ad appears in the list of advertisements. There are some other factors involved as described below, but bidding is the basic principle behind ad position. Your ad is only displayed when the user searches on those keywords that you have bid on, so you are in control of relevance in the targeting of ads to your prospective audience.

For example, if you sell vacuum cleaners you might bid $0.50 a click for terms such as “vacuum cleaner”, or “hoover”. Whenever a user searches on these – your ad is displayed (for free), and you only pay the $0.50 if they click on your ad which takes them to your website. If the user searches for some other terms, your ad is not displayed.

There are some key benefits of this system including:

• you get a lot of exposure of your advertisement for free as people aren’t going to click on the ad each time it’s displayed (you would usually expect a large number of free presentations of your ad for every time a user clicks through).
• because the user was searching for keywords or search phrases that are so highly relevant to your products and services, if they click on your ad, they are likely to be a well targeted potential client
• because the user is likely in fact to be seeking products and services in your field, the ads displayed may in fact represent what they are looking for where in other forms of advertising, the ads may be a distraction from the primary user goal
• you can tightly control your ad spend with a budget of as little as $5 per month or up to thousands of dollars per day depending on how aggressively you want to promote your new website
• detailed statistics provided by Google, allow you to analyse which words and ads are the most successful, allowing you to focus your investment on strategies which work
  

And the list of benefits goes on.

When working with Google’s Adwords system, a number of questions quickly arise which can not be easily answered. Many experts websites available on the internet offer to reveal “the top 10 secrets of Adwords success” or similar attractive sounding suggestions. While you can easily craft 10 accurate points about improving your Adwords results, there’s simply more to it than that.

Page 2....The Basics of Pay Per Click