Welcome to the final part of our introduction to PPC. If you’ve not already done so you may like to look over parts one, two, three, four and five.

So, by now you should have your account structure nicely planned out – it’s now time to write your ads and get that campaign live.

Back in part three we talked you through setting up your account, so you’ll now need to either login to that account, or if you’ve not done so already create your account.

Step One – Targeting Languages & Location

First you will be asked which languages, and which locations you wish to target. So, pick a campaign and input the relevant details.

Step Two – Creating Adverts

You’ll then be asked to create your first ad. This feels a little backward, as you haven’t inputted any keywords yet. Don’t worry – just pick an adgroup – you’ll be asked to input the keywords after you’ve created your ad.

You’ll see that you have a strict character limit of 25 for the headline, and 35 for the following two lines. Ultimately it’s all about targeting. You want your ad copy to match your keywords as closely as possible. Try to:

1. Mention the keywords targeted
2. Make the ad relevant
3. Add in an offer or call to action to encourage people to click

It’s not a bad idea to have a look at other advertisers to make sure that your ad is competitive – for example offering a 10% discount for online orders sounds great, until your competitor starts offering a 20% discount.

It’s all about testing and learning. You won’t know what works until you try. Always create a minimum of two ads for each adgroup so you can see which ad performs better.

Step Three – Keywords

Now you can cut and paste the keywords which relate to the ad you’ve just created directly from word or excel. Or type them in if you’ve formulated your keyword lists on paper.

Step Four – Pricing

Again here – this is a little confusing - you’ll need to input the daily budget for the campaign, (i.e. the amount you want to spend on all of the adgroups in the campaign) and the maximum cost per click you are willing to pay for the keywords in your adgroup.

Right now I would recommend that you do NOT bid on the content network. To do this, simply leave the box marked CPC Content Bid blank.

Step Five – Billing

You’ll then be asked for your billing details. Again, I know this feels kind of strange – you haven’t finished setting up yet have you? Don’t worry. Just complete your billing details, and you’ll then get the opportunity to continue to build your adgroups and/or further campaigns.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

You should now find yourself in the Adwords interface. You’ll now need to input all of your other adgroups and campaigns. Until you’re 100% ready to go I’d recommend pausing all campaigns – you can then go live once everything is inputted.

Track Conversions…

If your customers can convert online, it’s really important to track this. If you’re using the new adwords interface, click on the tools tab, then on to conversion tracking. If you’re using the old interface, you can click directly on conversion tracking it’s the fourth option on the campaign management tab.

Don’t Go Live Yet! Top Tips to Save the Pennies…

When you’re starting out, it’s easy to blow your budget on clicks you don’t want – avoid this by following our top tips:

1. Make sure you’re geo-targeting the right area – if you’re based in the UK, you probably don’t want US clicks – check your campaign settings
2. Check that you’re not on the content network (unless you want to be) – again check your campaign settings
3. Add negative keywords – remember when we did keyword research in part four we were left with unrelated terms? Add these as negative keywords to prevent your ads from appearing for unrelated terms – you can add negative keywords at a campaign or an ad group level.
4. Consider keyword matching options – for further details see Google’s explanation

Ok, so you’re good to go? Unpause those campaigns and make it live!

One Final Note

Remember – everything you’re doing right now is a test. You’ll find that some keywords work better than others, and likewise some ads work better than others. The key is to test and learn, then refine your campaign accordingly.

Image credit Miss Turner

Hello there, well it’s rolled around to Friday again which means it’s time for another round up…

SEO

Danny Dover has written a killer post on SEO best practices over at SEOmoz – essential reading.

Garrett French writes a very thorough guide to analysing SERP dominators for link building over at Search Engine Land – great actionable tips abound.

Struggling to write press releases for SEO? Angie Haggstrom’s on hand with 5 great tips.

Last, but by no means least – Matt McGee tackles the difficult question over what small business SEO should cost.

Social Media

Is there space for direct marketing in social media? If implemented well Lisa Barone thinks so, and does a great job explaining how to do just that.

Meanwhile Habitat illustrate precisely how NOT to market via twitter.

PPC

Kate Morris shares some excellent ad writing tips on the Search Cowboys blog - one part of the PPC puzzle that’s often neglected – review your ads, test and learn people

Brian Carter busts some ad-serving adwords myths over at Search Engine Land – explaining why the ‘rotate’ option shows your ads ‘more evenly’ rather than simply showing each ad version an equal number of times.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

This week’s comes courtesy of xkcd

XKCD - Game Theory

 Have a lovely weekend

Thank crunchie it’s Friday! I’ve had a bit of a busy one this week, hence no blog posts – I’m sorry, I promise to do two next week.

In the meantime here’s my pick of the best blog posts on search this week:

SEO

Matt Cutts offers some clarification re PageRank Sculpting, following his comments at SMX Advanced. Rand’s synopsis over at SEOmoz is also worth a read.

Does your content educate, engage, entertain and entice? Lisa Barone argues it’s more important to create good content than try to keyword stuff your way to the top. I couldn’t agree more.

Social Media

You might be  great at Social Media, but if this great experience doesn’t follow through when your customers hit your website, call centres, stores etc – then you need to get your ducks in a row. Excellent advice from Kristy on aligning your messaging across all touch points.

PPC

Joe at PPC Hero’s done a fabulous post on using Google Wonder Wheel for Keyword Research – it’s a must read.

Online Marketing

If you work in-house you may well be familiar with the topic of Bruce Hendrickson’s post Take Me To Your Leader - the online marketing game’s really changed, are you ready to join the fray?

Search Engines

Should Google be worried about Bing? Patricio Robles at Econsultancy cites 5 reasons…

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Nope, that’s not photo-shopped. That’s the power of social media. Happy Friday!

Crunchie image credit trekkyandy

Wow – we’re up to part five of the series! If you’ve not already done so, we’d recommend that you read part one, two, three and four.

So in our last post we dealt with keyword research – so hopefully you’ve now got yourself a lovely long list of keywords. Now it’s time to organise them into appropriate groups.

You might remember in part three we talked a little about account structure. To give a quick recap, an adwords account is structured as follows:

There are three levels account, campaign and ad group:

1. Account - this is the top level, your adwords account has a unique email address & password for access purposes and your billing information.
2. Campaign - A campaign is associated with your account. At the campaign level you set the daily budget, language & geographic targeting, distribution (where your ad is shown), when your ad is shown (e.g. particular days of the week, and timings) and if desired an end date.
3. Adgroups – adgroup are associated with a campaign. At the adgroup level you select appropriate keywords and/or placements, set the bids for those keywords/placements, and create appropriate ads.

At the adgroup level you control which adverts are shown for which keywords.

Ultimately you want people to click on your ad, then go on to convert (e.g. buy your product / service; sign up; become a member etc, etc). It’s therefore important that the ad (or ads) that you show for your keywords are relevant.

Let’s imagine that you sell fruit online. You might decide that you want to bid on ‘buy green apples’. Lets consider the following ads:

Buy Green Apples Online                                                             

Golden Delicious, Granny Smiths &

More. Free Next Day Delivery!

Buy Fresh Fruit Online

Huge Selection of Fresh Fruit &

Free Next Day Delivery!

Clearly the first ad is more relevant to the ‘buy green apples’ query. It’s therefore more likely to elicit a click than the generic fresh fruit ad. When it comes of PPC relevancy is King, both for attracting visitors, but also because of the way paid search networks calculate the price you’ll pay per click.

Quality Score

Google calculate the price you’ll pay per click based on a number of factors all of which contribute to quality score. Google say:

Understandably Google don’t want to reveal the precise weighting of their quality score formula, however the core components are:

1. The click through rate (CTR) of the keyword and matched ad on Google (i.e. the number of times the ad has been shown divided by the number of clicks it has received)
2. Account history – the CTR of all of the keywords and matched ads in your account
3. Historical CTR of the URLs in your adgroup
4. Landing page quality
5. The relevance of the keyword to the ads in the adgroup
6. The relevance of the keyword and the ads to the search query
7. The account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

By taking the time to create your adgroups appropriately you give yourself the very best chance of achieving a high quality score, which will mean your ads will appear in a higher position, and at a lower cost per click.

Creating Adgroups

Now there’s no ‘ideal’ number of adgroups – it really depends on the account.

If we go back to the example of selling fruit online, I would create an adgroup for each type of fruit which I sold – e.g. apples, pears, bananas, peaches, plums etc, etc. I would then also create other adgroups for more generic search terms like fruit, fresh fruit, dried fruit etc.

When I’m trying to split keywords into adgroups I just try to think about the ads which I’m going to create – e.g. it would be awkward to create a good ad which simultaneously do a good job targeting those who want to buy apples and those who want to buy pears – hence I’d split those keywords into two separate adgroups.

Well that’s all for this week, next time we’ll cover writing your ads and of course getting your campaigns live on Google.

Image credit oskay

Happy Friday! Here’s the round up of some of the best blog posts I’ve read this week…

Search Engines

What could cause the death of Google? Boris writes about a potential Google killer… nope it’s not Bing, but you knew that, right?

SEO

Does PageRank sculpting work anymore? At SMX Advanced Matt Cutts said no.   There’s also controversy over Google’s new handling of JavaScript’s “onClick” function. Rand’s take on this, and his follow up over at SEOmoz are also well worth a read.

Molly over at Distilled is reminiscing about global hypercolor t shirts (weren’t they brilliant?) and more usefully from an SEO perspective reminding us about the 90’s SEO technique that still works.

Social Media

Dealing with negative online reviews of your business? David Ingram dispenses some excellent advice on how to handle it.

PPC

When it comes to PPC is the what more important than the how? Interesting reading from SEMGeek

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

A literal version of Total Eclipse of the Heart…

Have a lovely weekend

Image credit “T” altered art