AdWords For Dummies

Howie Jacobson

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470152522
• eBook ISBN: 9781118051726
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

• AdWords lets every business-from eBay PowerSellers to Fortune 500 companies-create targeted, cost-efficient advertising campaigns on the Web, and accounts for the bulk of Google's $6 billion in annual revenues
• This all-new guide helps advertisers get a handle on AdWords complexities and nuances, adopt AdWords best practices, and turn clicks into ka-ching!
• Topics covered include conducting quick and cheap market research, crafting a message that cuts through the clutter, choosing AdWords settings, bidding on keywords, setting a maximum daily spend, improving the Web page that an ad points to, testing strategies, tracking results, and using Web analytics tools
• Includes an exclusive offer from Google-AdWords credits equivalent to the price of the book-plus a companion Web site with up-to-the-minute AdWords tips and tricks, narrated video walkthroughs, and free trials of the author's software

Part I

Becoming a Google Advertiser

In this part . . .

**IN a DROPCAP**

This part introduces Google AdWords and shows you how to get started. While almost everyone is familiar with the Google search engine, few people understand how easy it is to pay to display your ad listing on the coveted first page of search results — and how challenging it can be to do so profitably.

Chapter 1 discusses online search as a revolution in advertising and reveals the marketing-mindset shifts required for success. You’ll discover how to get into your customers’ minds and see through their eyes, so your advertising will be customer-centric and effective.

Chapters 2 and 3 take you through the mechanics of creating — and immediately pausing — a single campaign. (Patience, grasshopper.) Chapter 2 begins with the Starter Edition. (The Starter Edition was recently released, and it gives you a much simpler, though less powerful, way to use AdWords. It’s a good way for the hyper-nervous to begin.) Chapter 3 goes step-by-step through creating an account with the Standard Edition. These chapters provide the foundation upon which your AdWords success is built — customized campaigns whose settings support the achievement of your goals.

Chapter 1

Profiting from the Pay-Per-Click Revolution

In This Chapter

Introducing AdWords

Understanding the difference between AdWords and other forms of advertising

Getting an overview of direct marketing

Seeing AdWords through your prospects’ eyes

Have you ever bought an ad in the Yellow Pages? I remember my first time — I was terrified. I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t know how big an ad to buy. I wasn’t sure which phonebooks to advertise in. I had no idea what headings to list under. I had to pay thousands of dollars for an ad I wouldn’t be able to change for the next 12 months. And I had recurring nightmares that I mistyped the phone number and some baffled florist in Poughkeepsie got thousands of calls from my customers.

Why am I telling you this? (Aside from the fact that my therapist encourages me to release negative emotions?) Because I want you to appreciate the significance of Google AdWords as a revolution in advertising.

You can set up an AdWords account in about five minutes for five dollars. Your ads can be seen by thousands of people searching specifically for what you’ve got, and you don’t pay a cent until a searcher clicks your ad to visit your Web site. You can change your ad copy any time you want. You can cancel unprofitable ads with the click of a mouse. You can run multiple ads simultaneously and figure out to the penny which ad makes you the most money.

You can even send customers to specific aisles and shelves of your store, depending on what they’re searching for. And you can get smarter and smarter over time, writing better ads, showing under more appropriate headings, choosing certain geographic markets and avoiding others. When your ads do well, you can even get Google to serve them as online newspaper and magazine ads, put them next to Google Maps locations, and broadcast them to cell phones — automatically.

AdWords gives you the ability to conduct hundreds of thousands of dollars of market research for less than the cost of a one-way ticket from Chapel Hill to Madison. And in less time than it takes me to do five one-arm pushups (okay, so that’s not saying much).

AdWords can help you test and improve your Web site and e-mail strategy to squeeze additional profits out of every step in your sales process. It can provide a steady stream of qualified leads for predictable costs. One recent bestseller by Timothy Ferriss, The Four Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (Crown Publishers), teaches a very achievable AdWords-based system for becoming financially independent in just a few months.

But AdWords can also be a huge sinkhole of cash for the advertiser who doesn’t understand it. I’ve written this book to arm you with the mindsets, strategies, and tactics to keep you from ever becoming an AdWords victim.

Introducing AdWords

The Google search engine, found at www.google.com , processes hundreds of millions of searches per day. Every one of those searches represents a human being trying to solve a problem or satisfy an itch through finding the right information on the World Wide Web. The AdWords program allows advertisers to purchase text and links on the Google results page (the page the searcher sees after entering a word or phrase and clicking the Google Search button.

You pay for the ad only when someone clicks it and visits your Web site. The amount you pay for each visitor can be as low as one penny, or as high as $80, depending on the quality of your ad, your Web site, and the competitiveness of the market defined by the word or phase (known as a keyword even though it may be several words long) typed by the visitor.

Each text ad on the results page consists of four lines and up to 130 characters (see Figure 1-1 for an example ad):

Line 1: Blue underlined hyperlinked headline of up to 25 characters

Line 2: Description line 1 of up to 35 characters

Line 3: Description line 2 of up to 35 characters

Line 4: Green display URL (URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, the way the Internet assigns addresses to Web sites) of up to 35 characters

Figure 1-1: This AdWords ad targets parents whose children suffer from asthma.

The fourth line, the display URL, can differ from the Web page your visitor actually lands on. I cover this in detail in Chapter 6.

Where and When the Ads Show

You can choose to show your ads to the entire world, or limit their exposure by country, region, state, and even city. You can (for example) let them run 2 4/7 or turn them off nights and weekends. You also get to choose from AdWords’ three tiers of exposure, described in the following sections.

Google results

When someone searches for a particular keyword, your ad displays on the Google results page if you have selected that keyword (or a close variation) as a trigger for your ad. For the ad shown in Figure 1-1, if someone enters kids asthma prevention in Google, they can view the ad somewhere on the top or right of the results page (see Figure 1-2).

Search partners results

Your ads can also show on Google’s search partners’ network. Companies such as AOL and Earthlink incorporate Google’s results into their own search pages, as in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-2: AdWords results are labeled Sponsored Links at the top and right.

Figure 1-3: AdWords ads shown by Earthlink, a Google search partner.

A partial list of Google search partners includes

America Online (AOL): www.aol.com

AT&T Worldnet: www.att.net

Ask.com: www.ask.com

CompuServe: http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/menu

Earthlink: www.earthlink.net

Netscape Netcenter: www.netscape.com

Shopping.com: www.shopping.com

AdSense sites and Gmail

Additionally, hundreds of ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Becoming a Google Advertiser
• Chapter 1: Profiting from the Pay-Per-Click Revolution
• Chapter 2: Setting Up Your Starter Edition Account
• Chapter 3: Setting Up Your Standard Edition Account
• Part II : Launching Your AdWords Campaign
• Chapter 4: Discovering Your Online Market
• Chapter 5: Choosing the Right Keywords
• Chapter 6: Writing Magnetic Ads
• Part III : Managing Your AdWords Campaigns
• Chapter 7: Deciding Where and When to Show Your Ads
• Chapter 8: Improving Your Campaigns through Keyword Management
• Chapter 9: Getting It Done with AdWords Tools
• Part IV : Converting Clicks to Clink
• Chapter 10: Giving Your Customer a Soft Landing on Your Web Site
• Chapter 11: Following Up with Your Prospects
• Chapter 12: Building a “Climb the Ladder” Web Site
• Part V : Testing Your Strategies and Tracking Your Results
• Chapter 13: How You Can’t Help Becoming an Advertising Genius
• Chapter 14: Slashing Your Costs with Conversion Tracking
• Chapter 15: Making More Sales with Google Analytics
• Part VI : The Part of Tens
• Chapter 16: The Ten Most Serious AdWords Beginner’s Mistakes
• Chapter 17: Ten AdWords Case Studies