This course will teach you about PPC on Google or any other platforms as they use similar principles anyway. The focus is on google adwords however since they are the biggest platform on the planet in its category
All materials included here are everything that's needed to run a PPC campaign successfully including concepts and actual walk through inside Google adwords to see actual settings to be aware of and implement in real life business situations
Introduction to PPC
Concepts to Work With
Advantages of Paid Search compared to traditional media like tv, radio and outdoor banner ads in roads and highways are explained here.
The main reason why Paid search is superior is because you can measure how much money you spent and how much you get in return. Even better is the ability to see the data live and make changes as the campaign progress.
You don't need to wait for a certain period of time say a month in order to measure how effective your campaign was.
You can't do this with traditional media. They say its still good for branding purposes but aside from that, you have very little benefits aside from just getting your product out there using a shotgun approach firing blindly at anyone without any precision.
This is where the beauty of paid search comes in.
The three types of costing in paid search are
CPC - cost per click
CPM - cost per impression (1000 views)
CPA - cost per action/conversion
It is important to understand these three types of pricing because it covers different situations for different needs of any business owner.
Factors affecting how ads are displayed are listed and explained:
Quality score and your bids are the major ones but the quality score is broken down
into smaller factors since they are all interrelated:
Remember, a high quality score means cheaper bids and more clicks for you
Factors affecting quality score are as follows:
- relevance factors
- landing pages
Ad rank is computed as
your bid x quality score = ad rank
Remember:
You only need to have the smallest bid higher than that of your competitor in order to "remain"
on your established ad position
Things to Remember:
The keyword tool is just convenient for you to get a nice list of the initial keywords to use.
More profitable keyword combinations however can be found in the query search report tool AFTER
the campaign has gone live and acquired actual traffic
CONTRADICTIONS :
There are a lot of profitable keywords that are used in ACTUAL searches that will NOT show up
in the query report tool of the keyword planner simply because the traffic is too small
or the tool simply hasn't listed them yet....
Remember, google's keyword tool is INCOMPLETE ...
it does NOT show you all the possible keyword combinations there is...
you acquire that in LIVE campaigns only...as well as intensive research for more
profitable keywords
Also, having an indication of high level competition doesn't necessarily mean the kw
is profitable, it is though, most of the time only
On the reverse, a keyword without traffic can also be profitable
it simply means that google kw tool has no data for them yet
their potential has yet to be determined by you in actual situations...
Aside from the relevance factor...
There is no way to know the actual effect of the landing page's elements on your
adwords quality score except through actual experimentation...
If your budget permits, you simply have to experiment with two designs and use them in
your adwords campaign to see which one google gives a higher quality score and which one
performs better in terms of conversion....rinse and repeat until satisfied
Constant experimentation and testing is required in this aspect to acquire the most effective
combination of keywords, ad copy and landing pages
Of course, if you have no plans to spend that much on a designer,
then create the most informative and user friendly landing page at the very start
to gain a high quality score and ultimately, conversions and sales...
Elements that needs to be seen in your Ads:
-specific
-call to action
-features & benefits described clearly
PPC Vocabulary
Definitions of :
1. Click - when a visitor clicks you ads
2. Impression - number of visitors seeing your ads
3. Cost/Conversion - amount of money spent to generate one lead or sale
4. Cost per Click - actual amount of one click to show your ad at its position
Your actions should change according to what stage you are, in your campaign
Stages of an ADwords campaign:
Testing - set the daily budget small but the cpc for keywords at a moderate level to generate enough clicks
to gather sufficient data
Expanding - search potential ad group ideas inside the keywords query report since they are the ones actually being typed by potential visitors and with proven traffic
Optimizing - simply continue adding negative keywords where applicable and change the bids up or down
Remember : never let the bids permanently be on the low end if you experienced a bad week or month
because sales might pick up on the next week and you are missing out on traffic if you change
the bid too much on the low range of the spectrum.
Settings and Optimization
Important points to Remember:
1. Name your campaigns according to purpose - it is to make reporting easier for you to understand
use the ff: for names
product categories - when your business has multiple products but targeting only one location
geographical location - when the business has only one product like insurance but catering to multiple locations
both product & geo location - when the business has both multiple products targeting multiple locations
note: of course, you still need to factor in your convenience when creating campaign names, these are just strong suggestions, the end goal is simply to isolate related things within themselves so that you gain better understanding when you are generating the performance reports and trying to understand what is happening in your campaign
2. Never use AUTOMATIC bidding, USE MANUAL
you are not saving money nor improving your performance by using automatic
Google simply tries to get the most clicks possible,
NOT necessarily the cheapest or profitable cpc levels
use conversion optimizer later when you are allowed to do so, only after
you understand the concept of cost/conversion and you know what numbers to use
as the target CPA
3. Always separate display and search campaigns
It allows you to understand what is happening with both campaigns because if you
don't separate the two networks, the numbers would become almost useless for you
to understand because the two networks behave VERY DIFFERENTLY from each other
Part of the process to make your campaigns seamless and very targeted
You can either type the name of the place or input their longitude and latitude data
For situations where you are not sure of the exact coverage but rather just near within a center location
You should use radius targeting since it simply uses a specified diameter and covers a circle around
that target area you specified
Ignore the ff:
1. The need to acquire the top ad spot - the returns are not directly positive for you, positions 2-4 are cheaper
with more or less the same results
2. Recommendation by google to increase bid to enter first page - they show your ads anyway in most cases
and even if they don't it is better to understand your cost/conversion to know whether or not you
are in a winning position or not
Points to Remember:
1. Cost/conversion - the single most important concept of this entire course because you will use it as basis
on how much to bid for your keywords
2. Constant changes to the bidding is to be expected because the sales trend is also constantly changing.
You need to constantly monitor the campaign in order to know when to lower or increase CPC
self explanatory
simply paste the code in a page that confirms any action you want to track
Ideally:
1. After a purchase is confirmed
2. After an email subscription is confirmed or request for quotes are sent
The Difference between match types and their scope in terms of acquiring traffic
Note :
1. Always use the 3 different match types of ONE keyword in one ad group
to maximize you exposure while still making it very tight and focused
Negative keywords are more important than bidding management because
even if you don't lower or increase bids according to situation
you already lessen your costs, increase your clicks and visitors
all with a single addition of a negative keyword
This aspect of campaign optimizing should never be neglected
as it weeds out unwanted traffic that has no chance of converting to sales anyway
and makes good use of your limited marketing budget to traffic
that has more potential to convert to actual sales
How to Structure Your Campaigns
Benefits of Proper Structuring of Ad groups and Campaigns
1. Cheaper and targeted bids for keywords
2. Ease of reporting, you gain better understanding of the whole campaign
3. Allows you to find more keyword to expand because you covered each match type
for each keyword that is already generating traffic, which leads to more unique variations of the keyword
4. Better maneuverability in terms of making changes
Elements to always include in an AD copy
1.Benefits to the consumer
2. Prices and Features
3. Call to action
Note for using dynamic keywords:
Insert dynamic keyword where you think variation of the search term will take place
You will notice certain obvious set of patterns and qualities of your campaigns
BUT at the end of the day, they can all change entirely
the only real basis here without fault is the data created by the visitors
which determine what match type or keyword is performing well currently or not
Hold no popular rules too sacred as your exact business situation might be slightly different
1. Understanding trends is important in mastering adwords
watch out for changes that are small in scope only like a few days or couple of weeks long
in case you might mistake it as something permanent and make changes to your campaigns
that will be detrimental in the long run
2. Sometimes, even a well performing ad group or campaign will perform very poorly
evaluate trice whether you should lower bids or not
You can just say to your self that you had a bad week and the next one will have different results
and you can leave your campaigns at that without necessarily making changes
Of course, you need to judge this for yourself as the situation could always change
and reverse itself
3. It is also enlightening to compared different time frames in order to understand things better
example: Always compare 2 weeks or 30 days time frame with All time to see
what is the difference between the current situation and how the campaign has performed thus far