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Top 3 Google AdWords Secrets (Tips, Tricks) - Beyond AdWords Help and the AdWords Learning Center
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Google AdWords is a powerful advertising medium. Unfortunately, however, Google AdWords can quickly siphon the budget of a small business. What is even more unfortunate is Google itself and the cheerleading squad of AdWords guru's don't clearly explain major secrets and tricks that can save you money. AdWords is like alcohol: you can have a lot of fun with it, but it can also get you into deep trouble. This blog post identifies the top three secrets for save driving while under the influence of AdWords.
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By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor - JM Internet Group.
Posted: August 16, 2010
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Contents:
Know Your SERP Rank vs. AdWords Ads
As I teach in our online SEO training course, especially our sessions on Google AdWords, AdWords should work WITH your SEO strategy. Many companies do not coordinate their SEO efforts with their AdWords efforts - and a few focus solely on paid advertising to the detriment of their SEO. Integrated Marketing is all about making EVERYTHING work together in a company, and so it is on the Internet - your FREE SEO efforts should work hand-in-glove with your PAID AdWords advertising.
Google, however, doesn't really help you coordinate the two. First and foremost, you need to know for a given target search where does your company appear on the NATURAL or FREE results. Why? Well, assume you were a New York City Hypnotherapist. Google SEO (including Google Places) and Google AdWords are all fantastic ways to attract potential clients. These sorts of searches would be very valuable to you -
- Hypnotherapist New York City
- NYC Hypnotherapy
- New York Hypnosis
- Hypnosis (single word search, with searcher IP in the New York City area.)
The most effective campaign would be to have this protocol -
If your 'free' SEO ad (or Google Places) appears on Page 1, then DO NOT run your paid AdWords ad.
In other words, run your AdWords ad if and only if your free SEO / Google places listings are not showing well. How do you know this? You need to know your Google Rank. As I teach in our courses, the best tool to do this is the FREE SEO Rank Checker from SEObook. This tool helps you coordinate your paid AdWords with your free Google SEO efforts.
That's Top AdWords Secret No. 1: know and use your SERP rank to deploy your PAID advertising where it is most needed.
Turn Off the Google Display Network
Scandalously, in my opinion, the default and recommended setting for a new campaign on Google AdWords is to run on BOTH the Google search engine AND the so-called Display Network. Now the Display Network per se isn't bad. There are many great blogs, portals, user forums, publications and the like that participate in Google's advertising network and show its ads.
However, there are many nefarious and poorly matched sites as well. Chief among them: Parked Domains. These sites with Google's support and blessing show ads upon ads, and in addition other sites are specifically set up to capture Google traffic broadly and show more ads. The user experience is poor and the keyword matching on the Display Network is also not that good.
So for new advertisers, I highly recommend turning OFF the Display Network to begin with. It can easily siphon your budget.
So here is Top AdWords Secret No. 2: turn OFF the Display Network and run solely on Google for beginners and new campaigns.
Broad Match Can be Too Broad
Google AdWords runs on matching. You as an advertiser input the keywords that you think will be used by your most likely customers, and Google then matches the ads displays based on your keywords and the inputted keywords by the searcher. (There is also a feature called Quality Score and of course the ad Bid...). The problem here is that the default setting on AdWords is broad match.
When you enter your search terms in to AdWords, you can enter them in these formats:
Dog Boarding San Francisco (no quotes)
"Dog Boarding" (quotes)
[Dog Boarding] (brackets)
Quotes indicate a phrase; brackets indicate the exact phrase and only that phrase must be entered. The problem is on Broad Match. Broad Match asks Google to 'think for you' in setting up your AdWords matching. Contrary to popular belief, this will catch not only searches that have one or more of your search terms in them, it can even catch search queries that do not have a SINGLE word in common with your inputted terms
So in our example you might catch 'Dog Boarding SF' or 'Bay Area Dog Kennels' or 'SF Bay Pet Boarding' but you could also get searches like 'I like Pets in SF' or 'Fun pet places in San Fran' - Broad Search, like AdWords in general, is the alcohol of online marketing. You need to know how to use it, and use it responsibly. Otherwise your budget will be gone in no time.
Our Top AdWords Secret No. 3: know how Broad Match works, use only phrase or exact match at the beginning, and when used, use Broad Match appropriately.
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