Bryxen Software. Inc.
Brad Callen's
Google
Simple, Fool-Proof Strategies You Can Use Right Away
Made Easy
For Adwords Success...
TABLE OF CONTENTS nChapter 1
"Are You Prepared To Profit From Instant Web Traffic?"...............................4 nChapter 2
"10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic"...........................................................10 nChapter 3
"Keyword Research Basics".......................................................................23 nChapter 4
"How to Write Ads that Attract Clicks".......................................................33 nChapter 5
"Tracking Ads and Landing Pages"............................................................45 nChapter 6
"Adwords Keyword Strategies"..................................................................55 nChapter 7
Bonus Chapter - Finding Profitable Markets..............................................63 nChapter 8
Bonus Chapter - Finding High Paying Adsense Keywords..........................72 nChapter 9
Bonus Chapter - Finding Profitable Keywords...........................................78Disclaimer
This product was originally created by Brad Callen, search engine optimization and pay per click expert. All efforts have made made to make the information contained in this eBook correct. Brad Callen and Bryxen Software are not liable for any actions that may result from the information contained within this eBook. Brad Callen and Bryxen Software have no affiliation with Google Adwords. Google is a trademarked term.
Get the latest Updates to Google Adwords Made Easy, for FREE! To get the latest updates to this eBook, visit the link below and follow the short instructions listed.
http://www.keywordelite.com/Updates.htmChapter 1"Are You Prepared To Profit From Instant Web Traffic?"Warning - If you're not serious about creating an online business that "makes your money for you", please stop reading this now! Welcome toThe Player's Guide To Adwords Domination.
Before we start, I want to cut a deal with you. You see, I wrote this eBook out of a desire to teach others how to createserious wealth using PPC advertising. I've poured a lot of effort into this eBook, but only because I know 200% that this works. And what's more, it should work foranyonewho uses these strategies for their own business.
And because I've worked so hard to create this, I want it to work for you. If you end up "wasting" your time by reading this once and not applying it…well let's just say we can't have any of that.
The only way we're going to do this is if you promiseto apply the money-making strategies that I'm about to share with you. In return, you have my word that I will show you the exact steps that I have taken to bring in instant traffic and build my online empire. I still get kicks out of calling my business an empire.
Simple give and take (or show and tell).
To give you a quick idea of what I'm talking about (and to show you what's easily possible)…
This is from just one campaign I run on Google AdWords (more on this later) for just one of my products for last month. This is for a $167 product. You'll notice that the cost/conversion is as low as $2.59! You'll also see that almost all of the groups running have a clickthrough rate higher than 5%. Some as high as 10%! The great thing about this, is once it's up and running, it literally take NO work to earn money via Adwords. It's all on autopilot.
In the next few chapters, I will be teaching only those skills that you absolutely need to know in order to create your own wealth (and then maybe take your own screenshots?) like I have shown above.
Ready to roll? Let's start with the lifeblood of any online business - website traffic - and how you can create it instantly.How to create instant website traffic? While I was preparing my notes for this chapter, I started to think about what people want to learn the most when it comes to making money online. What do you want to learn most about making money online?
Is it:n How to make more sales?n How to create a winning product?n How to actually make a sale (the technical aspects of online business)?
The first thing I want to tell you is to start focusing on what is truly important in business, whether it's a brick-and-mortar store your grandpa owned or a snazzy new website you've just started.
The first question that you should be asking (not the only question because there is more to creating online wealth, but this is the most important point) is:How do I drive more traffic to my website?As an entrepreneur, your income will always be (beyond a certain point) a function of traffic.n More people coming in to your store to look at antiques = more sales = more money. n More prospects getting your sales letter in their mailboxes = more sales = more money.n More people visiting your online store… you get the picture. Traffic is important. It's the lifeblood that runs and determines the success of any business. You may know it by different names, so to put it in another way: More people seeing your sales pitch = more money coming into the bank. (granted your sales pitch is something people want) Doesn't get simpler than that. Note: In later chapters I'll talk to you about the other factors that determine your income - product value, pricing and most importantly, converting this traffic into enthusiastic, buying customers.
Back to the original question: How doyoucreate instant website traffic?
Search engines are a good way to bring free traffic to your website - and while I've been teaching business owners like you, how to bring in truckloads of free search engine traffic for several years now, the problem with this method is that it takes time to rank highly in Google and other search engines.
... And we all only have a limited amount of time. The challenge here is to create a money-making machine that attracts prospects, reels them in, converts them into customers and repeats the process all over again. Think of it as a revolving door prospects just keep coming to your website and keep going out as happy customers (hopefully).
The good news is that there already is such a system for bringing in instant traffic - pay-perclick advertising (PPC). I'll be talking exclusively about how you can use PPC advertising via Google Adwords, to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into customers.
The bad news is that 95 percent of PPC advertisers end up throwing several hundred bucks down the hole before they even begin to understand how pay-per-click works. What's more, there are many business owners who, after being burned to the tune of several thousands of dollars, give up on PPC advertising because they don't get how it works.
Imagine the pain of giving up a marketing opportunity like that, just because you were so frustrated that nothing was working.
What I've done here is I've broken PPC advertising down for you in simple terms - and as you will see in this chapter and the next, I'll be taking you by hand and cutting through all the mystery that surrounds AdWords (my ad network of choice) and pay-per-click marketing.
Pay Per Click Advertising in Plain English
Perry Marshall, in his Guide to Google AdWords, says this about PPC advertising: "[It] is about getting in front of people who are looking for what you sell right this moment and get them to respond."
You have the ability to reach your target market instantly, and get them to make a decision on your product/service. And that's not just it. It takes just 10 minutes for you to set up an ad campaign in Google AdWords - and immediately after your ad is ready, it will start bringing in traffic to your websites. No matter what you're selling, you have a chance, in 10 minutes, to start making sales.
What other advertising platform let's you make a sale that fast?Better question- how can YOU use this speed (of getting an idea to the market and testing it almost instantly) to your advantage?
The biggest advantage of PPC advertising is that you can test new business ideas quickly and cheaply by running an ad campaign for a few hours and monitoring its results. This alone can save you thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of dollars in advertising and product creation - but only if you do it right (I'll show you how to in the next 6 chapters).
Pay-per-click advertising operates on two simple premises: n You pay only for visitors that come to your site (no upfront costs - every "click" while being an expense is also a chance for you to convert that visitor into a customer). You pay a certain amount "per click" on your ad. If nobody clicks on your ad, you don't pay a dime... and also get no visitors. The goal is to get many TARGETEDvisitors, while paying as little as possible per click.
n Your ads are displayed in the search engines according to what people are searching / looking for. (i.e. If someone search for "weight loss" and you're bidding on the term "weight loss", your ad will be displayed when someone searches for that phrase.)
There are two major PPC ad engines: 1. Google AdWords2. Yahoo Search Marketing(formerly Overture).
While they are both very effective in pulling in traffic, I exclusively use Google AdWords (and I'll explain why in just a minute). Having said that, I don't discourage you from using YSM. In certain niche markets the YSM network is still not hyper-saturated (unlike AdWords, where the competition is higher) and you may be able to realize serious short-term gains if you play the PPC game right.
What I would discourage you from is to using a PPC ad network other than AdWords or YSM. Beyond these two the situation is pretty bleak with poor traffic quality, click fraud and lack of a sizeable user base all contributing to an abject failure.
5 Reasons why youshouldbe using Google AdWordsReason 1: The Google audience / user base has traditionally catered to technical audiences and more importantly, to Internet savvy users. The kind of users who arecomfortable with buying online. These users (the tech-savvy, buying kind) are more likely to use Google than Yahoo or MSN). Reason 2: Google AdWords delivers instant results - you can have your ad campaign up and running in 10 minutes flat. Compared to this Yahoo can take anywhere from 2 to 5 days while they manually review ads.
Reason 3: With AdWords, you can go target your prospects geographically down to countries, states and cities. This is a great advantage for businesses selling hard goods or services - they would prefer local prospects as opposed to someone half way across the world.
Reason 4: My favorite quality about AdWords is that it rewards good ad performance - that is, for an ad that converts (clicks/impressions percentage) exceptionally well (high click-through-rate (CTR)), your ad will get better ad placement as well as better pricing. Google wants to display the most relevant ads for the user. So... it makes perfect sense that YOU will pay less per click, the higher the clickthrough rate of your ad is.
Note: Click-through rate is simply the percentage that users click on your ad. For example, if 100 users saw your ad, and 2 people clicked your ad to visit your website, your click-through rate would be 2% (2/100).
Reason 5: Your competition cannot see the exact amount you're bidding for your keywords or the CTR your ads are getting - a distinct tactical advantage that Yahoo lacks. Basically, your competition will NEVER be able to tell how you are marketing your product, unless they use a trick I'm going to show you later ;-) So, they won't be able to copy off of your marketing and steal your prospects.
Bottom line - bringing instant traffic to your websites and converting those prospects into satisfied customers is a much better option than waiting around for your search engine rankings to.
And, in my opinion, Google AdWords is the only game in town when it comes to PPC advertising.
In the next chapter, I'll sit with you and take you through the entire process of creating an ad campaign through Google AdWords. I'll take you from start to finish - from picking your keywords to creating an account to writing an ad to making it go live - and we'll do it in less than 10 minutes.
Chapter 2"10 Minutes To Instant Web Traffic"Welcome back. In the last chapter you read about how pay-per-click advertising (PPC) was simply the best method for bringing instant traffic to your websites.
Today you'll learn about a simple, 10-minute process that anyone can use to setup a fullyfunctional Google AdWords account and start driving traffic to their website almost immediately.
Before we get into the more Advanced strategies, we need to build a very strong foundation and make sure you understand the basics. The stronger your foundation, the more earning potential you'll have for the future, so pay close attention to every detail I'm about to teach.
Let's do a quick example... We'll pretend that we sell home theater systems . I am going to show you exactly how to build a campaign for that type of product, starting with some sensible market research.Research your market
PPC advertising is very competitive for a reason for any high-value product/service, PPC is a cheap and effective way to get your name in front of the people looking for products just like yours.
With all the competition there's just one big problem: If you jump in blind, the sharks will eat you alive. You must first dig up the details on your market and your competition, and that means knowing:
n Which keywords are getting the most trafficn What are the top bid prices for those keywordsn Which keywords are being ignored and why this is a high value product so we wait till we see bids and competition.
It says there are 31,761 searches for the term "home theater system" last month. You can multiply that number by 3 to come up with roughly how many times that word was searched for at Google.com.
Next... We'll copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step. Here's the list I've come up with so far:n home theater systemn wireless home theater systemn home theater system reviewn home theater speaker systemn home theater audio systemn buy home theater systemn home theater system designn home theater sound systemn dvd home theater systemn best home theater system Note: This is just a sample listing - you can, and should, create much larger lists (around 200-300 keywords minimum - I'll show you how in the next chapter) to start with, and then build them up as your ad campaign requires it.
Now we want to find out what the top bid prices are for these keywords. That is, how much money is your competition (i.e. other Google Adwords advertisers) are willing to spend on this niche to buy traffic. A high number is a good indicator that your niche is profitable, but on the other hand, if you know for sure that a niche is profitable (like home theater systems, which sell for quite a lot of money), low bid prices can mean that this is a market that is ripe for domination. One way to check bid prices is to use another Yahoo tool - the view bids tool.
Go back to the Yahoo Serch Marketing Siteand click on the "View Bids Tool" as I've shown in the screenshot below:The first time you load this page, you will see the following screen:http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/search/tools/bidtool/()
Remember that list of keywords you just saved? Take the first keyword and plug it in the first box on this screen. Then, enter the verification letters in the second box and click on 'Search' to continue.
When you do this, you'll see the following:
Above is a search for "home theater speaker system" - notice that the top bid on Yahoo is under $1.00 - that's pretty cheap considering that a pair of high-end speakers can cost several hundred dollars. Allowing for the cost of the physical product, you can see that this is a very nice, lucrative, under-priced bidding market.
Repeat this process for all your keywords and check the top bid prices for them. You are doing this to estimate how much you will have to pay, per click, to match / top your competition. In this case, you'll see that most of the keywords have a bid price of under $1.00. That's good news, but keep in mind that in AdWords you'll have a bit more competition, so you can expect the top bid price in AdWords to be at least twice that much of Yahoo, and maybe more. After we do our research, we should have a nice list of targeted, profitable keywords to start our AdWords campaign with.
Couple of interesting things you'll notice here:
Despite being a very expensive market (full-fledged home theater systems costs thousands of dollars), there's a low level of competition (bid prices are fairly low). This will allow you to corner the market quite easily, IF you know how to sell to it.
People are as concerned with specific aspects of home theaters (wireless systems, speakers) as they are with the "how to" aspect (design, setup). This can work to our advantage, as you'll see when we get to writing the ad.
Now that we have our keyword list ready, let's go setup our AdWords account. It's going to be fast, so make sure you pay attention :-)Start the clock…Step 1 Setting up your AdWords account Go to the Google AdWords homepage (http://adwords.google.com/select/) and click on the "Click to Begin" button to get started.
The next screen will give you an option between two types of accounts Starter and Standard. Since we're going to be going deep inside AdWords, there's no need to go for a Starter account select "Standard" and then click on "Continue".
On the next screen, you choose the languages you want to target. So if you were in Germany and wanted to target German-speaking Google users, you would select German. Google also let's you target specific countries, specific regions and cities or even a specified geographic location (such as a 20-mile radius around a certain street address, for example).
I selected the 'target by country' option, so in the next screen I was asked to enter the countries I wanted to market to in this case, since we are selling physical products we will restrict our target market to US and Canada (a good thing, because this where the heaviest demand for home theater system resides as well).
I'd recommend sticking with "country-level" targeting for now the other two options are a bit more advanced, and I personally never use them. Let's move to the next step writing your ad.[Time taken 2 minutes]Step 2 Writing your AdLet me take a minute to explain what we've done here, and why. Ourmain search phrase is also the headline whenever possible, follow this example and put your main keywords in the headline.
The first line is a benefit in this case, expert advice for people who are looking for help on how to set up home theater systems. No matter what your level of knowledge, the chance to get input from an expert (in this case, free advice) is hard to pass up.
The second line is our feature a free report available for immediate download. Your feature will be a specific offering that matches your previously stated benefit most closely.
The last two lines are the URLs first url will be the one displayed this must resolve to an actual web address. The second line is the actual url where the prospect will be redirected to that is, it must contain the address of your landing page.
And your ad is written! Following this template, you can put together ads in as little as 4 minutes (like I did right now).
Click on "Continue", and Google AdWords will do an automated check on your ad text and the provided urls to make sure that they follow their guidelines. Once that is complete, you will be taken to a screen where you have to enter your keywords.
[Time taken - 4 minutes]Step 3 Bidding on Keywords Enter your keywords:
You'll notice that I've enclosed my keywords in quotes as well as brackets. Basically, AdWords uses three types of phrase matches to match your ads with the terms being searched at the time broad match (no quotes or brackets), phrase match (quotes) and exact match (square brackets).
Broad match: This is the default option. When you include keyword phrases such as tennis shoes in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order and possibly along with other terms like: new tennis shoes, mens shoes for tennis, and so on...
Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches. Phrase match: Your ad appears when users search on the exact phrase and also when their search contains additional terms, as long as the keyword phrase is in exactly the same order. A phrase match for "tennis shoes" would display your ad if a user search on: red tennis shoes, new tennis shoes, but not for: shoes for tennis
Exact match: The search query must exactly match your keyword. This means [tennis shoes] will only match a user request for: tennis shoes and not for: red tennis shoes, even though the second query contains your keyword.
More details on broad, phrase and exact matches in chapter 6, when we will study keyword research for AdWords in full detail. On to the next step...
Once we've entered the keywords, we now have to choose our bid amounts. You'll see a screen as shown below:
First you'll select how you'll pay for AdWords. Based on your IP address, Google automatically determines your local currency and sets that as the default value, but you should change it to US dollars. That makes it a lot easier to manage your account as you'll find that almost everyone discusses bid prices in dollars (especially all other guides on AdWords). This setting cannot be changed once your account is activated.
After this, you set your budget. This is the maximum amount you're willing to spend throughout the day (divide your monthly budget by 30 for an easy way to reach this number). For our example, I want to get maximum exposure here as well as test the ads quickly (so I can refine them based on results), so I'll set this to $100 (for big campaigns and especially for high CPC terms, you might have to set this much higher).
Note: If you're just beginning, you can set your daily bid amount to $5/day if you want and Google will just stop displaying your ad after your daily limit has been reached.
Next, you set the maximum cost per click(CPC) for your keywords. Ideally, you should set the CPC for your main keywords individually, but for now (and for the beginning part of your campaigns) an overall CPC will do just fine. Since we already know from our keyword research that we can get top position for our ads by staying within $5, I'll be conservative and bid $1.00 per click. This will allow me to get a good position and stay within budget our budget
After this, you get traffic / clicks / position estimates based on your settings. It gives you an approximation of how many clicks (and what average position) you will get for each entered keyword (based on your max CPC and daily budget).
By now, you're almost done. Click "Continue".[Time Taken: 2 minutes]Step 4 Pushing the 'Start' button You'll be asked to review your account (what you've entered so far).
The page simply lists all the information that you've input, including your ad, selected keywords and your max CPC / daily budget as well.
Scroll down, make sure you haven't made any errors (you can fix them by clicking on the 'Edit' button next to each field), and then click on "Continue". The next page will ask you if you have a Google Account. Depending on your subsequent answers, it will either ask you to create one, or ask you to enter your Account login info.
I'd recommend that you create a separate account for AdWords (for security purposes), but in this example we're going to assume that you already have a Google account and will use that instead.
Once you've passed this step (and confirmed your account), Google will send you a confirmation email to the email address you've entered. Open the email, click the link back to Google, and then enter your credit card or payment information to officially open the account.
[Time Taken: 2 minutes] And that's about it. Once you've entered your payment information, your ads will start showing almost immediately. That took you more time to read than it takes to create an AdWords account! Before we end this chapter, I want to draw your attention towards a couple of basic AdWords concepts that you need to master before we go any further.Google AdWords Basics Most of your questions about Google AdWords features can be answered at the Google AdWords Help Center. Here I want to discuss two structural features within an Adwords account, campaigns and ad groups. I'll go over these REALLY briefly here and will go into more detail later.
Campaigns
A campaign consists of one or more Ad Groups. The ads in a given campaign share the same daily budget, language and location targeting, end dates, and syndication options. You would usually create separate campaigns for separate projects / sites, and within those campaigns you would create different Ad Groups to cater for sets of keywords.
Ad Groups
An Ad Group contains one or more ads which target one set of keywords or sites. This comes in extremely handy when you are targeting focused keywords, as you can setup different ad groups for different sets of keywords.
In your ad campaigns, your ad groups should ideally be tightly focused around a subtopic, but how you select this subtopic and how you determine whether it is profitable to put that set of keywords into a separate topic is a different matter. This is discussed in much more detail in future chapters.
For more definitions, you can check the Google AdWords Glossary page. In the next chapter, we will do a similar walkthrough with keyword research, taking you from identifying a topic to producing the final keyword list. This next chapter will be EXTREMELY helpful in showing you the process of finding a niche market and/or good keywords to use for your campaigns. I also want to mention a very cool tool I use for all my keyword research:Keyword Elite But, first let's get you a nice solid foundation built with what I'm teaching you in these chapters. Then, you can use Keyword Elite to find MORE than enough niche markets to completely dominate.
Chapter 3"Keyword Research Basics"
Remember, we're building a very strong foundation in these first few chapters, so that when I teach you the more advanced "stuff" later on, you'll be able to truly grasp and use the concepts. So let's get started…
Successful PPC campaigns are based on three things: n FocusedKeyword Research n CompellingAdsn EffectiveLanding Pages
In the next three chapters (Chapters3 to 5) I'll pick up each of these topics and give you mini-tutorials on doing the best in each aspect of your ad campaign. Important: I'll also be showing you little tricks that I personally use to make each of these tasks MUCH easier, allowing me to make a heck of a lot more money with my Adwords campaigns. The more chapters you get through, the stronger your foundation will be, and the more tricks I can share with you :-)
Today, we start with keyword research. It basically boils down to two steps finding a profitable topic and then using keyword databases and PPC engines to create lists of keywords around that topic.
There's a lot to cover, so let's get started.How to Find Profitable Topics
Information that helps readers take an action is always more valuable than information that helps your readers think. In marketing terms, that means that your target market is people who are looking to buy / acquire something and are looking for ways to do so. It's what we call the 'end of the buying cycle' your best chance at getting your prospect to buy something isright beforehe makes a purchase.
When you are looking at topics, you can use the metrics mentioned below as a means to judge whether a topic is worth pursuing or not, but when you are doing keyword research, make sure that you target those keywords that prospects will be searching for when they are collecting information that will help them make a positive / negative buying decision.
An easy way to determine the profitability of a topic is to measure it by the 'PPC metrics' which are Popularity, Price, and Competition.Popularity
In crude terms, the more popular the topic is the more clicks you will get on your ads and the more chances you will have of converting those prospects into customers. Higher popularity meansmore profitsfor you. On the other hand, popular topics are already very competitive (in most cases), so you have to analyze it from all sides.
Low-popularity topics can also turn good profits, so just because a topic does not get 100,000 searches a month does not mean you shouldn't go near it. The key is to match all three factors popularity, price and competition before making a decision to target that market.
Price
The price of the product you are promoting will determine your profit margins. With highpriced products you can afford to spend more money per click, and that's mainly why you see such outrageous bids for terms like real estate, insurance, lawyers and pharmaceuticals they can afford it because making a couple of sales gives them huge profit margins.
On the other hand, with products with a low price point you will have trouble going overboard with your bidding, and you will need to be very careful with what you're willing to pay. In such a case, keyword research becomes even more important as you absolutely must find those keywords that you can target cheaply.
Competition
What is your competition like? Heavy bidding will suggest one of two things either the market is lucrative enough to risk investing so much money (back to the 'price point' discussion above) or there is someone trying to price their competition out of the market. In either case, you wouldn't want to spend too much money at the start, so this step will give you an idea of whether you can enter a niche without getting totally burned.
Another point to consider is that if there is low competition for a topic, you have to figure out why that is. Is it because the niche isn't well known? Are people having trouble 'selling' in this market? Or are they targeting the 'wrong' market?
How To Do Keyword ResearchOnce you have a topic (see previous section for more on this), you can quickly run it through the following steps to judge its profitability and create a focused list of keywords. For this walkthrough, we will continue with our earlier topic home theater systems. Specifically, we will be doing keyword research to do three things for this topic:n Use the keyword databases to find out if it ispopularn Research the PPC engines and find out what thetop bid pricesaren Go back to the keyword databases and create afocused list of keywordsStep 1 Popularity CheckJust as we did in the previous chapter, head to the Keyword Selector Tool from Yahoo Search Marketing (Overture). As it's shown below, enter your main keyword in the box and click on 'Go'. This will give you a list of keywords with search estimates.() Copy the top 6-10 keywords in a text file; we will need them for the next step. Alternatively, you could use the same keyword list you made earlier.Trick #1I don't typically go to the Yahoo search term suggestion tool shown above. I simply use a software product called Keyword Elite. Here's what I would do in this case...Step 1:OpenKeyword Eliteand select project #1, "Create keyword list".Step 2:Enter the main keyword: home theater systemStep 3:Select Overture.com from the list, and select 200 results, then click "ok"See screenshot below:Keyword Elite will process and give you a nice list of 200 related keywords, plus, you'll be able to do a bunch of editing to the keywords to give you an even larger list. See the screenshot below for some of the cool things you can do. You can save the keywords to a textfile instead of manually copying and pasting them from the Yahoo search term suggestion tool, which is a big time saver.
Also, what I like to do is in "step 3" above, I'd select 5,000 keywords to be returned and then select the "ask.com" option and Keyword Elite would bring back a list of 5,000 related keywords, within a few minutes! It's really cool...
Check out this video clip showing how this project type works. (Note: The video was created using an older version of Keyword Elite, so you'll notice there are a few less features in the video than in my screenshot above, but it'll give you a good idea how it works.)
Step 2 Bid Price Check
Most people will tell you to go to the Yahoo Bid Tool and see their numbers to get an idea of what the top bids are. It's a good idea, but why not go to Google instead and use the tools THEY have provided to us inside the Google AdWords account? This way we get to see numbers for Google AdWords (where we will be bidding), and not some other PPC engine.
You've already signed up for a Google AdWords account in the last chapter, it's time to put it to use. Login to yourGoogle AdWords account(https://adwords.google.com/select). Within your account, go to Tools > Traffic Estimator (or just visit the link below) to launch Google AdWords' traffic and bid cost estimation tool.()
Enter your keywords as above in the first box (don't worry about broad, phrase, exact and negative matches for now we will cover these in chapter 6). These keywords will be the ones you copied off into a text file in the previous step.
Next select the maximum cost-per-click that you're willing to pay, as well as your daily budget. Since we are going for maximum clicks here (top ad position, unlimited budget), we will leave these empty because in that case Google automatically selects values that give you max clicks daily.
Scroll down. Language and location targeting will be set to your default account values, so you can leave them as they are.
Enter countries that you want to target Here, I've selected US and Canada . When you're done, click on 'Continue' and you'll be taken to the next page with the Traffic Estimator's results.
This screen above is very helpful because it will give you a good estimate as to how much the top Adwords bidders are paying "per click" for each of the keywords you entered. Also, you'll be able to see roughly how many clicks you can expect to get "per day" if you were in a certain ad position in Google. And finally, you'll be able to see roughly how much you could expect to pay "per day" for each of the keywords.
These are some VERY helpful numbers. At first glance, this seems a very expensive niche to get in. With most of the keyword phrases costing over $2.00 a click to be in one of the top 3 Adwords positions.
Now $2.00 a click is a high amount at a 1% conversion rate (1 out of 100 people clicking through your ad convert into customers), that means that you will need to spend $200 per sale!But...when you think about the niche, you'll realise that most home theater systems go for thousands of dollars even a pair of high-end speakers can set you back $500. Add to that the fact that you can improve conversion rates by following simple tips (chapter 5) and suddenly this niche looks very, very interesting.
You'll also notice that most clicks go to a few keywords these are the ones you will be shaping your ad groups around. Adwords is all a numbers game. No your metrics (how much a customer is worth to you) and you'll be a step ahead of the competition.
Now that we know that this niche can deliver, let's look at how we can create focused keyword lists around this topic.Step 3 Creating Keyword Lists for Sub-Topics
Once you've put together this list, go back to the Keyword Selector tool and enter the second keyword into the search box - that is, enter 'wireless home theater system' in the search box this time, and press the arrow to generate a new keyword list.
What are we doing here? The best strategy to choose keywords here is to start off with your parent term, pick up the top terms from its list, and then 'drill down' to find more keywords forthoseterms.
For example, with home theater system as our parent term, we see in the screenshot above that we have lots of targeted keywords for that term. You also see that terms like home theater sound system, wireless home theater and home theater system design are 'different' from the parent keyword and are subtopics that could be used to create more focused keyword lists. Not only that, they are also getting quite a number of searches themselves, so it's worth targeting that traffic specifically (as opposed to running general ads).
So for each term that is a "subtopic" (you have to use your judgement here) and has a lot of searches, you should run it again through the Keyword Selector tool and create a list for that term as well.
For each subtopic, create separate lists. By the way, you can keep these lists in simple text files - no need for fancy spreadsheets or anything like that - you don't that yet. At the end of this process you will probably have around 100-200 strong keywords on 4-5 subtopics (and 1 parent topic). That's a good number to start with.Trick #2UsingKeyword Eliteto gather the Adwords bid data really quickly... In "Trick #1" I showed you how we could use Keyword Elite to build us a big keyword list quickly. Well, after we do that, it's very easy to grab everything we need to know about each of those keywords (i.e. Adwords bid data that I taught you about above.)
Here's how I'd personally do it...Step 1:Select all of the keywords that we generated from "Trick #1" above.Step 2:Right-Click on your mouse and select "send keywords to project 2" Step 3: Our keywords are now sent to project 2, "Analyze pay per click listings". Select Google, KEI, Top bids, Title Results, Broad match, phrase match, and exact match, and click "ok"
Keyword Elitewill then show us everything I spoke about above, plus a TON of other figures that are extremely important in determining which keywords to use for our marketing. You can see that the Google bid data is listed below.You can sort the columns however you want. I use this analysis feature all the time. It really helps with finding profitable niche markets. I'll show you some very cool things I do to find profitable markets in some later chapters.
Check out this video clip showing how this project type works. (Note: The video was created using an older version of Keyword Elite, so you'll notice there are a few less features in the video than in my screenshot above, but it'll give you a good idea how it works.)
Congratulations now you're ready to write ads and get the ball rolling.
If this is your first time doing keyword research, don't worry it gets easier with practice, and there are tons of tips and shortcuts you can use (that we will see in chapters 7 and beyond) to drastically cut down your time in this.
In the next chapter, we will see how you can use these lists towrite ads that attract clicks.Chapter 4"How to Write Ads that Attract Clicks" One of the best things you can do to really kick butt with AdWords is to understand that managing your PPC campaign is a step by step process which each step designed to accomplish a specific objective, and with all steps linked, leading your prospect from the start (where they search for the key terms you're bidding on) to the end (where they 'convert' either into buyers or leads or subscribers).
Note: What I've found is that when I break down AdWords (or keyword research, or SEO, or sales writing basically, any skill) into small steps like this, people instantly find it a lot easier to understand what's going on. I'm hoping that you'll find the same thing with today's chapter on ad writing.
Writing ads, then, is just one step of this process. But before we dive into the specifics, I want to discuss something that is at the heart of any successful Google AdWords campaign:
Focused Keyword Lists.
If you remember from the previous chapter on keyword research, you will remember that it is absolutely critical that you break down your main keyword lists into smaller lists that are focused around subtopics. If your ads are not targeted to your keywords (i.e. a generalpurpose ad on insurance showing up for someone who is searching for car insurance) they might not click on your ads. Worse, if your site does not offer a particular type of product (you are targeting custom home theater systems when you don't offer any customisation), all those clicks will be wasted.
And that's the single biggest problem with most AdWords campaigns - a lack of focus. Start off with a basic list, and then expand it into specific subtopic lists as you refine your campaign. One of the ways to do this is the 'Peel and Stick' method (I'll talk about this in more detail in chapter 5).
Ok then, on to writing ads.Ad Writing Basics Before you write an ad, you have to remember that in even a low-competition market, your ads are under pressure to perform (that is, your clicks must also convert), or otherwise they will end up costing you money. Because of this you should always write ads with two things in mind:
n The ad must persuade the prospect that the page this ad points to will hold the answer to what they arelooking for.n The landing page must deliver on what the ad promises , otherwise the clicks will be wasted (we discuss landing pages in chapter 5).
In addition, you also have to ensure that only those people whom you are targeting will click on your ad. Or to put it differently, you want to make sure that you get the clicks that are most likely to convert into buyers.
Now that we know what's required, we can map out some guidelines for writing the ad.n Identify what you are selling Make sure you have a clear idea of what you're selling and how that will tie in with your ad. Choose the keywords that apply to your site, and include them in your ads.n Narrow down your target market
Understand who you are selling to. An excellent example of this is one of Perry Marshall's recent ads for his book, Guide to Google AdWords. He's targeting serious businessminded people who are willing to pay for quality products, so he's made sure that he lists the product price in the ad. Does that help? It will potentially keep out people who are looking for free advice or those who cannot afford the book. Narrowing your market.
You can refine the focus of your market by writing down who exactly you are selling to for my weight loss e-book that I wrote way back when I was
starting out in Internet Marketing, I focused on young adults who led extremely busy lives and wanted an easy, effective and time-saving solution to managing their weight problems.
n Use focused keywords to help you create a targeted ad
As I've explained in the previous section, focus on subtopics rather than ads for the general keyword they convert much better into customers because you are able to direct them to exactly that page that contains the information they are looking for.
n Write to persuade this is sales writing in a very small space
Sales writing boils down to a simple principle convincing the reader to take immediate action on what the writer wants them to do (sign up to a list, buy a product, etc). To do this right, you have to first attract their attention (headline), convey the most powerful benefit (first line) and provide a logical justification for taking that action through your most powerful feature (second line).
Your Template for Writing Successful AdsIn the previous section we learned three very important concepts on writing successful ads:n Targeted keyword listn Focused adsn Quality salesmanship As we breakdown the ad template into 5 separate components, keep these three concepts in mind and see how you can use them to help you write better ads.Headline
Your headline's main purpose is to attract attention of your target market. By wording it correctly you can avoid "curiosity" clicks, but the best part is that when you start targeting specific keyword sets (subtopics instead of general terms), you can use the headline to target your specific market and thus gain a considerable edge over competitors who are not using targeted keyword lists.
Whenever possible, use your main search terms for that ad group in the headline the reason for this is that whenever terms in your ad match the searched keywords, they are put in bold by Google. This way your ad automatically attracts more attention. This works better with low-competition terms than for main keywords (where everyone has put the keywords into their headline).
First Line
This is not a "hard and fast" rule, but it has been proven to work effectively. There are two kinds of reasons you can provide a prospect into clicking onto your ad benefits and features. The first is an emotional, psychological argument, where as the second one is factual and logical.
And when it comes to salesmanship, emotional arguments work much better than factual arguments (possibly because facts can be countered by other facts, but emotions are a difficult breed to beat).
But you cannot survive without having both. That's why you have to find a way to fit them both into the 2 lines you have (70 characters in total).
Stick your biggest, most powerful benefit in the first line in the ad example I showed in the last chapter which is reprinted down below), the benefit is expert help on how to set up home theater systems. This plays on the idea that anyone looking to make such a huge expense would want to seriously research the market and would welcome advice over a sales pitch. No matter what your level of knowledge, the chance to get input from an expert (in this case, free advice) is hard to pass up.
Your benefit will be your best guess on what people are looking for when they search on your main keywords. For a high-value item like home theater system, people tend to shop around before buying, so you want to pull them in with an informational benefit.
Second Line
Put your most important feature in the second line. In this case, it is a free report available for immediate download. In this case, anyone reading that ad knows that the report is one ad is going to perform better than the other) you discard the ad with the lower CTR and write a new one (making only marginal changes) to try and beat the betterperforming ad.
You should ideally repeat this process all the time, right from the start of an ad campaign. Write two ads, run them to get enough clicks, establish which ad is the 'control' (one that performs best) and then try to "beat the control" by writing better ads.
You shouldn't be changing too much of the ad during split-testing the purpose is to change around certain sections of your ad and see how small changes can make a difference. Making small changes also allows you to pinpoint the exact change that causes an improvement in CTR, and if you can figure out what takes your CTR higher and what brings it down, you can essentially write class ads from the word go.
How to do Split Testing in AdWords
For each ad group, make sure that you're running two ads at the same time. Google will alternate between your ads for that group, and once you have enough clicks (30 is a good number) for each ad, you can determine effectively that the current CTRs of both ads will remain relatively the same (for very close CTRs, you might want to let them run a bit longer).
How did we reach the number '30 clicks'? It has to do with statistics and confidence levels…let's just say that it's not an arbitrary number but in fact a scientific estimate. There's an excellent online tool that helps in all this intuitively, it's namedSplit Tester.
Split testing is a must if you want to continue improving your CTR. The goal here is not to make rapid changes, but small measurable ones so that you can figure out which change causes improvements and which change causes a decrease in CTR. This way, you will soon be able to determine what type of ads work best in your niche and thus create effective, compelling ads.
Bad Ads, Good AdsWhen we talk about good and bad ads, we are also talking about:n the keywords that those ads are targeting.n the landing page of that ad.
A bad ad will be unfocused, using a general keyword list and will probably send traffic to the site's main page. This will first of all hurt the advertiser's CTR, and worse, it will hurt their conversions as well. And in competitive markets, that means that you will be losing money badly.
Here's an example of a poorly optimized ad (I'm going with a different niche here insurance):.. and they'll use the following keywords for this ad.n auto insurance quoten auto insurance raten affordable insurance ratesn affordable insurancen auto insurance onlinen health insurancen california health insurance quoten california health insurance plan Then what they'll do is they'll send their visitors directly to their homepage, no matter what keyword the visitor had searched for in Google, to find their ad. ... and they'll use the following keywords for this ad.
auto insurance quote auto insurance rate affordable insurance rates affordable insurance auto insurance online health insurance california health insurance quote california health insurance plan
Then what they'll do is they'll send their visitors directly to their homepage, no matter what keyword the visitor had searched for in Google, to find their ad.If we created a little organizational chart of their campaign, it would follow this path: What's wrong with this? Well, there are several things that are MAJORLY wrong with this campaign. Let's list them below: 1. They've placed ALL of their keywords into 1 single Ad group. You should place only "similar phrases" into their own separate Ad groups.
2. The headline of their ad is horrible: a team financial Really... I'm assuming A Team Financial is the name of their company? I really don't know... They SHOULD have included the main keyword in the title of their ad.
3. Their ad description talks about what "their" passion is. People don't care about what the company's passion is. The ad should talk about the customer. What's in it for me?
4. Their ad takes visitors directly to their homepage, for all of their keywords. Each keyword "group" should take visitors to an individual web page designed specifically around that keyword phrase.
Now... Here is how they should have structured their Adwords campaign:
Alright, now what they should have done is grouped their keywords into the following different Adwords groups:
Once they've done this, they could write 2 different ads for each of these 3 Adwords groups. The ads would be written to target the main 3 keywords: auto insurance, affordable insurance, and health insurance.
Here's an example of 2 much better written ads for the newly created ad group, health insurance. What I've done...n Added keyword to the headline.n First line of description contains a benefit. Tells the visitor "what's in it for them".n Second line of description contains a feature.n All words have been capitalized URL has part of the main keyword as a subdirectory. In ad #2 I've done the same thing as ad #1, but I've changed the URL by adding a more specific subdirectory. It's always best to split test 2 ads to see which will give you the highest clickthrough rate. The higher your clickthrough rate, the less you'll pay Google.
So, that's the basics of splitting your keywords up into targeted groups, so you can write specific ads based on the EXACT keyword phrases that people are searching for. Make sense?
To get high CTR and high conversions, you have to focus on targeting keyword sets, not a generalised list. In addition, you have to write as a salesperson which means following the process that I've detailed in this chapter.
Trick #3Let's do a quick example so I can show you how I use Keyword Elite to seperate my keywords into their own Adwords groups. Step 1: Open up and run project 1 "create a keyword list". We'll enter the keyword "insurance". Under step 3 we'll select "Overture". And under step 4 we'll tell Keyword Elite that we want 400 keywords related to the word "insurance". We could choose more, but for this example, let's just go with 400. Then click ok.
Step 2: Keyword Elite will begin to gather keywords for us, related to the keyword insurance. Once it's finished processing, we'll highlight all of the keywords. Then "rightclick" out mouse and select the option titled "Export as groups to TXT".
What this will do is it will automatically separate all of our keywords into their own Adwords groups for us! It will create 1 text file for each group. So, all we'll need to do is open up each text file and paste our keywords into our Adwords account and we're all set. It can't get much easier that that :-)
The text files for our "insurance example" will look like this:And, for example, the "life insurance" group would contain these keywords:You'll notice that all the keywords contain the word "life insurance", so you could write 1 ad based on "life insurance". If you wanted, you could also take 1 of these keyword phrases and then use Keyword Elite to create a brand new keyword list based on 1 of the keywords from this file. This would then give you an even more specific list of keywords, which you could then break down into smaller ad groups...
This is a real time saver for me. Coming up... how to track your keyword performance through Google AdWords, how to track conversions and the what makes landing pages so important.
Tracking EXACTLY which keywords are making you the most money is the absolute most important thing you can do to increase your revenue via Adwords. Tracking is vital. We'll cover the ins and outs of this in the next chapter, so pay close attention.
Chapter 5"Tracking Ads and Landing Pages"
In the last chapter, we talked about split testing your ads as a means of continuously improving the CTR for your keywords. You can apply the same principle (of steady improvement) to your whole AdWords campaign, and today, we're going to learn how to do just that.
There are three specific parts of your campaign that you can keep improving:n Yourkeywords creating focused keyword lists (discussed in chapter 3).n Yourads(split testing discussed in chapter 4)n Yourconversion rate how your keywords convert into sales and the effectiveness of your landing page (discussed today, chapter 5). In this chapter we'll discuss two major topics how to measure the conversion rate of your landing page, and what to do to improve it quickly and easily.Landing Page BasicsWhat is a landing page, and why is it so important?
A landing page is a web page that your prospects (the traffic that you are driving to your website) will land upon after clicking through your ads. It is the 'destination URL' field in your AdWords ads.
Depending upon the type of product / service you are promoting, the landing page could ask the user to do any one of the following:n Subscribe to a newslettern Buy a productn Download trial software
And more basically, any visitor action that you would want taken place on your website. The look, feel, content, quality and focus of your landing page is critical in making sales if the landing page is not able to 'hold the visitor's attention' and convince him to buy your product, not only have you not made a sale (when you had the chance to do so) but you have also lost some money.
Not all clicks will produce conversions. That means that in order for your marketing campaign to turn a profit, you have to make more sales than you spend on ads (i.e. bringing in traffic). And since selling products is not always easy, you should always be improving your landing page (and thus trying to improve your conversion rate) in order to make more money out of AdWords.
Conversion Rate: The rate at which people purchase your products. For example, if you got 100 visitors to your website and 2 people purchased your product then your conversion rate would be 2%.
(2/100 = .02)How can I make sure that visitors to my site buy from me Quite simply find out what works best, and then meticulously apply that on your website. There are two approaches to doing this:n You can learn from your industry (by observing your competition) and from marketing experts who have a proven track record of success in improving conversion ratesn You can test different configurations on your own landing pages and then track the results. In practice, you would be doing both applying what you've learned from the experts, and tracking actual conversions to evaluate how you can improve on them.
Conversion tracking is in fact one of the most underused and important tool in AdWords. It lets you track the performance for each ad group (that is, each landing page) and also allows you to see how traffic from different keywords react to the same landing page.
The importance of conversions can be traced to one simple principle no matter what your ad position or CTR, without conversions you are simply spending money on ads that do not make any sales.
Use conversion tracking to help you improve the selling power of your website here's a look at how to use Google's ad tracking code on your website.Walkthrough for Google's Ad Tracking Code
For AdWords' Conversion Tracking to work, you just need two things accepted and running ads, and the tracking code inserted in your landing page. Let's see how this is done.
Log in to your Google AdWords account under the 'Campaign Management' tab (the default screen that you land on after logging in), there is a link for 'Conversion Tracking'.Click on the link and you will be taken to the Conversion Tracking page.Several important things to note here:n The conversion tracking is free n You can track both Google AdWords campaigns and non-AdWords campaigns such as Overture (conversion tracking for non-AdWords campaigns is known as crosschannel tracking for more information on this visithttps://adwords.google.com/select/crosschannel.html
n You can use the Flash presentation and the PDF guide to understand more about how Conversion Tracking works and get specific code instructions on setting up tracking on your website. To start, click on the button at the bottom of the screen titled "Start Tracking Conversions" (Shown in screenshot above). This will take you to the following page:
You have several options here, depending on what the 'key action' is for your site. If you are directing traffic to a product site that offers both a newsletter and products for sale, then you would set up conversion tracking for each of those pages one for the newsletter page and another for the product.
They give several suggestions as to where to place the conversion code.
For this example, we will select purchase/sale, as that's the most common option, and really the only option I ever use. Pick whatever suits your business best and click on 'Continue'. Google asks you to place a small box saying "Google Site Stats send feedback " on the landing page where you insert the conversion tracking code. This page asks you to set the background color for this box match it with the background color of the page where you are putting your conversion code.
Once you are set to go, click on 'Continue'.It's important that you read these points.
Basically the page says that you should make backups of the pages you are changing and that if you are not skilled in doing this, you should get your webmaster to help you out. Google does not take any responsibility if you delete something by mistake and your website stops working (and come to think of it, I'm not responsible for that either, so make sure you know what you are doing or get someone who knows. It's really no that difficult, but just to be safe, make sure you get someone that knows how to insert tracking code into your web page.)
Scroll down to the bottom of the screen Don't worry, we're almost done now. Choose the language your site is in usually this will be the default language of your account.
Choose security level leave it set to http in most cases unless you are using SSL security on your site. If you don't know what that means, just look at your website's URL if it starts with 'http', use that, if it starts with 'https', use that instead.
Now here's why this is so important AdWords allows you to set a value to what each 'conversion' means to you and then uses that to calculate what it is costing you to make a sale.
All the hard work is taken out of it for you all you need to do now is to keep an eye on the cost/conversion figure (I'll tell you where to check it from) and you will know within a split second if you are profiting from your AdWords campaigns or not.
If making a sale gives you a net profit of $47 (subtracting credit card processing fees), then put in 47. Whatever the amount, enter it in the textbox and press refresh (you must press refresh for the code to reload and be configured properly.
Once the page has refreshed, click once on the text box containing the code that will select all the text right-click, select copy and then paste that into a text file. Save that file in a place you can easily access, and then click on 'Continue' (I'll cover code-installation instructions in just a minute). On to the next screen: You will see that the page talks about two new columns on the campaign summary, Conversion Rate and Cost/Conversion. You can spot them here in the "Campaign Summary" page the same page AdWords loads when you login to your Google AdWords account.
Below I've included a screenshot of my Adwords account. You can see how I'm using this tracking feature. It's very important, as it shows me exactly which keywords are converting to sales, and which ones aren't.
Over time, you can just remove the keywords that aren't making you money, and keep the ones that are... You'll notice there are two campaigns and the cost per conversion is $24 for 1 and $62 for the other. The products I'm selling here are selling for much more than what it costs to generate a sale, and that's the goal.
Now all that remains is that you test this system to make sure that it works. How do you do that? AdWords suggests: Click on one of your own ads that directs you to the landing page Wait for someone to make a purchase Note: Typically, the data inside your AdWords account takes a few hours to update (it's almost real-time, but not quite).
But before you choose to test the system, you have to insert the tracking code into your conversion page, right?How do you do that? Well, if it is a basic html page (it is a page likepage_name.html), here's all you need to do:n Make a backup copyn Open your "Thank You Page" in a text editor or in your webpage editor of choice Note: The page you'll be adding this tracking code to, is the page visitors are taken to AFTER they purchase your product. I call this a "Thank You Page".
n Scroll down to the end of the documentn Locate the
