Peter Faber

How to Use Google Adwords PPC Avertising

High rankings in the organic results of Google are the best, but it may take several months upto a year before you gain top 10 positions. During this optimization period it may be interesting to use Google Adwords to get those needed visitors.

This is what Google says in its Adwords site:

"More than 200 million times a day, people use Google and its partner sites to find what they're looking for. Make sure they find what you're selling.

With Google AdWords you create your own ads, choose keywords to tell us where to show your ads and pay only when someone clicks on them."

That sounds very interesting, doesn’t it? But is it as profitable as it seems? As with many things the answer starts with: “It depends on ….” The catch, so to say, sits in 3 little words: “to tell us”. So it depends on where you tell Google to show your ads.

Specific Phrases versus Generic Phrases

Of course it is simple to spend lots of money on very popular phrases and receive many visitors, only to find that conversions are low. Many advertisers then conclude that PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is not worth the money spent.

But nothing is less true. PPC and especially Adwords advertising can be very rewarding, but it is not a magical system (do magical systems actually exist?).

From SEO we learn that the most popular keyword phrases are also the most generic phrases. This means that popular phrases generally are high level topics. To give an example: A very popular phrase is “real estate”, it is literally searched for tens of thousands of times each day. A real estate company may be very interested to get visitors that search for that phrase, since their site is about “real estate”.

In Overture the term “real estate” has a max bid of $1.10 per click. (I used Overture for this information since Google does not give this type of information. Adwords may actually have higher costs per click.) More than 1 dollar per click is not even that expensive, there are much more expensive phrases. (Example: Search engine optimization: max bid of more than 6 dollars per click)

It sounds great to have many visitors that are searching for real estate, but of course,… if you do real estate in New York, then you really are just interested in visitors that are searching for real estate in New York, and not in the 99.9 % that is searching for real estate in other places. So bidding on a term like “real estate” may not be such a good choice.

According to Overture the phrase “real estate new york” has a max. bid of $0.55. That is interesting, we have decreased the CPC (Costs Per Click) by 50 % and at the same time we are targeting a much more interested audience. This will result in higher conversions.

If your real estate is in Queens, New York, then it may be wise to target a phrase like “queens new york real estate” as well. And guess what? Overture’s max bid for that phrase is $0.26. This is a phrase that is even better targeted and again, we have decreases the CPC by 50 %. From $1.10 down to $0.26 and we can expect much higher conversions at the same time.

Now we learned that specific phrases are cheaper and are likely to have higher conversion rates. This is the most important lesson to learn, but there is more to a successful PPC campaign than just this one point.

PPC keyword research

This is where it gets difficult. When you’re targeting specific phrases, you will probably find that these aren’t searched for as often as the generic phrases. And since you’re also paying less per click, you may find your self not being able to use your whole PPC budget. That would mean you can get more visitors than you would have ever hoped for. But how to get these additional visitors?

This is where keyword research comes in play. You need to find as many phrases as possible, that you can use to target searchers. If you already have a good website, you could simply go through your logs and find out which type of phrases are used when people find your website. Your log files may be full of phrases that the site was found for perhaps once or twice a month. Lower positions in the search engines are less valuable, but some people occasionally do go down the results to find sites and when they do, you will know about it through your log files. Some of these phrases may be excellent for use in your Adwords PPC advertising campaign.

Besides that, there are many keyword suggestion tools available, which can be of great help as well. Once you have a list of 100, 200 or more phrases, you can start setting up your Adwords campaign.

Set Up Multiple Ads

Having 100, 200 or more keyword phrases ready, you need to divide them into groups of about 30 to 60 phrases each. Each group should include phrases that are related and for each group you set up a separate ad. For each ad group you can set up different daily budgets and different CPC’s.

To use the real estate example, you can set up a separate ad for each neighborhood, or even for each street.

Monitor your Adwords PPC Advertising Campaign

This may seem obvious, but it is worth mentioning. Every day, check out the results of your ads. Check which ads are performing better. Monitor things like Average Costs Per Click, Number of Clicks, Click Through rates, and work on your ads to improve the results.

Try reducing the maximum CPC and see if what influence that has. If Click Through Rates are low, you may need to change the ad to make it more attractive. Just like the importance of the title of a page, the title of an ad can increase the click through rate.

Does this all sound like too much? You may hire somebody to set up and run an adwords PPC advertising campaign for you. Lower CPC, more and better targeted visitors may result in higher Return On Investment.