I have added these webpages in response to a number of questiosns I received from my customers while trying to take advantage of the Google’s Adwords advertising program. Here you will find tips, techniques, and FAQ’s as they come in from users like you.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions about any item posted here.
After creating your Adwords account,
1. Go to the Billing tab
2. Choose Billing Preferences. At the bottom of the screen, there is an empty box labeled “Redeem code ”
Enter you coupon code in this box and press the Redeem button.
It may take up to one hour to see the promotional credit appear in your account, but in most cases, it only takes minutes.
To check your balance, go to Billing Summary.
Welcome to Google AdWords! We want to wish you every success with your new online campaign and let you know there is help at hand if you need it.
To get you started we’ve designed a short email series, The AdWords Welcome Pack, to give you a solid foundation to achieve success with your new online campaign.
This email covers the top 4 things you should know once your ads are set up and activated: how you can see your ad, pay for your AdWords advertising, control your costs and organize your account.
You’ll receive your next 5 emails on a weekly basis, so keep an eye out for them!
1. Where is my ad?
Check if your ad is up and running using the Ad Preview tool. Type a keyword from your account into the Ad Preview tool, and it will show you exactly which ads are appearing for your keywords in any given location, including your own ad.
We suggest you view your ad with the Ad Preview tool instead of searching on Google. When you search for your ad multiple times on Google, it can affect your ad performance by showing your ad too many times without being clicked on.
If you can’t see your ad, use the Ads Diagnostic Tool to help identify the reason it’s not showing. Remedying the problem can be simple. Bear in mind that your ad will only show once you have entered your billing details. If you haven’t done this yet, log in to your account now to select one of the payment methods below and activate your account.
2. How can I pay for my AdWords advertising?
Available payment options depend on the country of your billing address and the currency with which you make payments. You’ll see the options available to you on our Payment Options page.
To enter your billing information, select the Billing tab in your account and click the Billing Preferences link. Once you’ve chosen a billing method, learn more about your payment options and how you can print invoices in our online AdWords Beginner’s Guide.
3. What will my AdWords advertising cost?
With AdWords, you are in control! You control the amount you pay with your daily budget and maximum cost-per-click bids (Max CPC).
Your daily budget is the maximum you’re willing to spend per day. This amount is entirely up to you and you can adjust it at any time. You are also in charge of the max CPC for each keyword within your campaign. This is the amount you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. The actual cost of each click can be lower than your max CPC bid.
Learn more about how to adjust your budget and keyword CPCs.
4. How should I organize my account?
With AdWords, the organization and structure of your account is important. It can have a huge effect on the performance of your campaigns. We recommend you structure your account in a similar way to your website. So, if you offer multiple products or services, you should create a new campaign for each product/service.
Each campaign will contain ad groups that should be based on different themes.
Within each ad group are your ads and keywords. Your ads are what your customers will use to decide whether or not they will visit your website, and your keywords are the words your potential customer will use when searching for your ad.
Take a look at an example account structure to see how you might structure your own account!
If you would like more information about these topics, please visit our online AdWords Beginner’s Guide.
We hope you found this first email in the AdWords Welcome Pack useful! We welcome any feedback you may have regarding this email, so please let us know what you think.
Thanks and happy reading,
Keywords are the search terms (words or phrases) which trigger your ad, and they are critical to the success of your AdWords advertising. This email explains how you can choose the most effective keywords, assess your keyword performance and how this affects the amount you pay.
Top tips for great keywords
A great keyword is:
- Ideally, 2-3 words long
- Specific (keywords that are too broad or general will not reach users as effectively as keywords that are highly targeted)
- Directly related to the text in your ad
- Directly related to the page your ad links to (specified by the destination URL)
What keywords should I choose?
First, look at your website content and write down every word, word combination or phrase that describes each category of your business. This is the starting point for creating your keyword lists.
Include all brand and product names as well as plurals, synonyms and alternate spellings for each word or phrase. Capitalization does not matter. Take out keywords that are very generic, irrelevant, or obscure.
Then, group your keywords into close-knit themes and create a new ad group for each theme. Put your keywords into these new ad groups. For example, if your campaign is for digital cameras, you can group together mini digital cameras in one ad group and SLR digital cameras in another.
Try using negative keywords. Negative keywords prevent your ad from showing when a word or phrase you specify is part of a search term. If you specify the negative keyword -repair, for instance, your ad won’t show for search terms such as digital camera repair.
Want more keyword information and examples?
How can I tell if my keywords are working well?
Check your keyword performance regularly in the ‘Keyword’ tab of your account.
An ‘Eligible’ status means your keyword is eligible to trigger ads. Click on the icon in the status column to get more detail on your individual keyword performance.
Then, one of the most important metrics to assess is the clickthrough rate (CTR), as it shows the proportion of people who clicked on your ad after they saw it. Keywords that produce a relatively low CTR (e.g. less than 1% on the search network) can often be improved. Implementing the tips above will help improve your keyword performance. A higher CTR will help to increase your ad’s position on Google.
Learn more about what keyword metrics to look out for.
How do my keywords impact how much I pay?
If your keywords are well chosen and you follow the tips above, your ads may show in a higher position or at a lower cost.
AdWords bidding works on an auction-style system, with advertisers bidding for keywords that will trigger their ads to appear. As multiple advertisers will often bid on the same keywords, Google must determine which ads will show, and in what position on the page. To do this, it looks at both CPC bids and the quality of your keywords:
- Cost-per-click bids (Maximum CPCs) are the amount you are willing to pay when someone clicks on your ad
- Quality score relates to how relevant your ads and keywords are to searches on Google, which is determined by a number of things, including your CTR
Find out more about how keyword bidding and quality can affect your ads.
Are your ads as attractive to your prospective customers as they could be?
Your customers choose to go to your website over your competitors’ based only on what they see in your ads. If your ads don’t grab their attention, you could be missing out on valuable sales, leads or traffic.
I don’t know what to put in my ad. Help!
As a basic rule, use clear, well-written, and specific ad text to highlight the differentiating characteristics of your product or service. The idea is to attract the attention of those who are looking for your product or service.
Remember to think about your ads from your customer’s perspective, the video below will show you how!
Tips to create a compelling ad:
- Use a strong call-to-action (for example: ‘Buy now’, ‘Call today’)
- Include prices
- Include special offers and unique selling points
- Make sure the text is highly relevant to the keywords in each ad group
- Use your keywords in your ad
- Direct users to the most relevant landing page on your website with a specific destination URL for each ad
What does a good ad look like?
Here are examples of both a good and bad ad so you can learn what works.
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What’s right?
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What’s wrong?
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The good…
And the bad…Please note these examples are fictional and are intended for illustrational purposes only.
I’ve written a good ad, but is it attracting customers?
You can check your ad performance on the ‘Ads’ tab in your account. Look at the clickthrough rate (CTR) of each ad to see how many people clicked on your ad after they saw it. Ads that produce a relatively low CTR (e.g. less than 1% on the search network) can often be improved by implementing the tips above and learning from the example.
You can easily test multiple ads in each ad group, each with different offers and call-to-action phrases, to see which ads perform the best. Even subtle differences could have a big impact on your success.
We suggest testing 2 to 4 ads in an ad group at a time. This will help you assess what works, at no additional cost. AdWords will rotate your ads and automatically show the highest-performing ads more often. Then, you can edit or delete the ads with the lowest CTRs and repeat the test to get the most successful ads possible. Learn more about how to assess your ad performance.
Did you know that in addition to showing your AdWords ad on Google search, you can also show it on websites that your customers visit?
The Google content network is a large, diverse network of different kinds of websites that partner with Google. On this network, you can show your ad to potential customers when they’re looking at websites related to your product or services.
Why show my ads on websites as well as search pages?
Internet users spend the majority of their time online browsing websites. By advertising on both search and the content network, you can reach your target audience no matter what they’re doing online.
The content network is made up of thousands of websites, from big household names to small specialised websites, such as blogs or forums. This means AdWords can match your ad to websites that are relevant to your product or service and that your potential customers visit.
Want to know more about the content network? Take a look at the video below.
How do I make sure the content network works for me?
When your campaign is opted-in to the content network, AdWords automatically targets your ads to relevant content on websites. This means your message is matched to the right audience at the right time.
For example, if you’re selling digital cameras, our system may place your ad next to a news article that reviews the latest digital photographic technology. In this case, you know that a user who is looking at this web page is likely to be interested in buying from you.
The principles you apply to your search campaigns will also help your ads perform well on the content network:
- Follow ad best practices, like using a strong call to action in your ad
- Have clear themes in your ads that match your keywords
- Have a clear, relevant theme to your list of keywords
Together these basic actions allow our system to assess very clearly what your product or service is and match your ads to relevant websites.
Learn more about ad targeting on the content network.
How can I see how my ad is performing on websites?
You can review all of the websites your ad has shown on and see performance statistics on each site directly within your AdWords account. To do this simply select the ‘Networks’ tab within your campaign and click on ‘show details’ beside your content placements.
With this information, you then have the ability to focus your advertising on the sites that give you the greatest value for your money and get you the most sales or leads. Learn more about how to assess your ad performance on the content network.
Sounds great! How do I double check that my ad is eligible to show on websites?
To get your ads showing on relevant websites ensure that you are opted-in to the content network.
If you’d like more information about the content network, visit the online AdWords Beginner’s Guide.
Hello,
With Google AdWords, it’s all about results, and the best way to ensure you are getting value for your advertising spend is to monitor your account performance.
Take a look at this video to learn how to track and understand your AdWords results in order to fine tune your advertising.
How is my AdWords account performing?
The first, and easiest way to measure your success is to review your AdWords statistics. Success with AdWords will be different for every business and will depend on your business goals. However, there are a few things to look out for that will indicate your ads are running successfully:
Impressions
The number of impressions tells you how many times your ad has been displayed to your potential customers. A high number of impressions means your ad has been seen a lot but is not necessarily a measure of your account effectiveness. You need to review this in relation to your clicks (how many people have clicked on your ad) to understand your ad’s relevance to your audience. This is easily done by looking at your clickthrough rate (CTR).
Clickthrough Rate (CTR)
To get an immediate idea of how well a campaign is doing, check the CTR – how often people click on your ad after seeing it. As a rule of thumb, a CTR on Google under 1% indicates your ads are not targeted to a relevant audience. Look at this on the ‘Campaigns’ tab and view the CTR of your individual keywords and ads on the respective tabs.
Average Position
Check the Avg. Pos. column on the ‘Campaigns’ tab in your account to find out where your ad is appearing on the search results page. There are up to 11 ads shown on any search page so if your average position is 11 or more your ad is, on average, not appearing on the first page of search results. You should aim to show your ad on the first page of search results so your potential customers can more easily find your ad.
First Page Bids
If your ad is not appearing on the first page of search results, you will see first page bids on the ‘Keywords’ tab under the ‘Status’ column. High bid estimates can indicate that your keywords or ads are not as relevant as they could be.
Quality Score
Each of your keywords is given a quality score which can be found by clicking on the icon in the ‘Status’ column on the ‘Keywords’ tab. A keyword’s quality score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance.
In general, a high quality score of 9 or 10 means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC). Quality score looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad, and to a user’s search query.
If you would like to improve these metrics, we suggest optimizing your account using our Optimization Tips.
I know how many people clicked on my ad, but how many became my customers?
While the number of clicks tells you how many people visited your website, it doesn’t tell you how valuable those visitors are to your business. For this, you need to know how many of the people that clicked your ad went on to perform a desired action on your site (e.g. completed a purchase, signed up for a quote etc.). These actions are known as conversions.
AdWords Conversion Tracking is a free Google tool that lets you measure how many conversions are the direct result of clicks on your AdWords ads. Using this data, you can identify which ads and keywords are most successful in generating conversions and how much each conversion is costing you. You can then edit your campaigns accordingly to improve your return-on-investment.
If you’d like more information on how to track your AdWords success, check out our online AdWords Beginner’s Guide.
The online world moves very quickly, so what works for you today may not be as successful next week.
Because of this, we recommend that all our AdWords advertisers log in to their account on a regular basis. Even a quick check-in once a week can help you get the most out of your advertising budget.
Here’s a quick list of actions for you to follow every time you log in to your account. This will help you to get a great understanding of how your account is performing and whether you’re meeting your business goals.
What do I do when I log into my account?
When you log into your AdWords account, first check notifications and account alerts on the ‘Home’ tab.
Then, go to the ‘Campaigns’ tab and set the time range (in the top right-hand corner of your account) to a period of 1-4 weeks to get a good indication of recent performance.
How can I check my AdWords performance?
Performance will vary by account so focus on identifying your best and worst performing keywords and ads to help refine your account:
Under the ‘Keywords’ tab, review:
- Keyword clickthrough rate (CTR). Which keywords are receiving your highest and lowest CTR?
- Position of your keywords. Are your ads appearing on the first page i.e. avg. pos. of 1-11?
- Keyword status. Are your ads eligible to show?
- Quality score. You can see the quality score for each keyword by clicking on the icon in the status column.
Under the ‘Ads’ tab:
- Review your ad clickthrough rate (CTR). If you are testing multiple ads in each ad group check to see which are performing best.
If you have Conversion Tracking enabled, check which ads and keywords are converting into sales.
How do I manage my account for success?
Refine your keywords and ads:
- Look at the top performing keywords and ads – edit those that are not doing well, using your top performers as a guide to how they can be improved.
- Delete those that have consistently performed poorly.
- Use negative keywords to eliminate unwanted impressions.
Test new keywords and ads in your campaigns:
- Use the keyword tool to get keyword suggestions to add to your campaign.
- If you don’t have multiple ads in each ad group, you should create more ads and test them to see which works best for you.
This is the final email of the AdWords Welcome Pack. We hope you have found it useful and are now well equipped to run your AdWords advertising campaign successfully. If you have any questions in the future, we have a variety of educational resources to help you.
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