Researching Keywords for Your Google Adwords Campaign

Let's imagine you're selling weight loss products. This is a very competitive market. First, start out with market research for the product. You'll need to determine a few things before you start:

1. Top keywords that drive traffic to your product (weight loss plans, green tea weight loss, fast weight loss, etc)
2. Top bid prices for those keywords.
3. The number of competitors for the keywords.
4. Which keywords don't deliver sales/traffic.

Go to Google's keyword tool to start your keyword research.

Google shows 11,100,000 searches per month for "weight loss." As you can see, this word is very competitive. Please note that your list should be at least several hundred keywords, targeting broad and exact terms. You may want to come up with a few more keywords to target although I've found that entering your most basic keyword yields several hundred keywords that are very enlightening.  So this is a rather bad example to help you get started with Google AdWords:

weight loss plans
green tea weight loss
fast weight loss
free weight loss program
quick weight loss
weight loss supplements

To estimate keyword pricing use Google's Traffic Estimator Tool. Take your main keywords and put them into the tool. You can copy and paste them all in at once. Then plug in the maximum amount you're willing to pay-per-click and your maximum daily budget. Google will give approximate prices for the keywords in the first three spots (select a country that you want to target).

Google gave $1.27 - $1.55 as the average pricing for the keywords, which is pretty good.

Read more at http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Adwords-Guide/1/#L3YtZmepRgXDDiyG.99

Pay Per Click Terms to Use When Setting Up Your Google Adwords Campaign

CPC - Cost Per Click: This is the amount you pay each time someone clicks on your ad. Costs per click are driven by bids.

CTR - Click Through Rate. This is the relationship between the number of impressions your ad gets and the number of people who actually click on the ad. For example, if Google showed an ad 100 times, and 20 people clicked on it, then the Click Through Rate (CTR) is 20%. High click through rates are rewarded by Google with high Quality Scores.

Quality Score - This is an internal algorithm that assigns value to advertisements. Ads with high quality scores can hold higher positions while paying less than the competition.

CPM - Cost per 1000 impressions of an ad. This measurement is mostly used for banner ads.

ROI - Return on Investment. If you invested $1000 and got back $3000, then your ROI is 200%.

CR - Conversion Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who become customers. For example, if 100 people clicked on the ad and four became customers, then your conversion rate is 5%. Average Internet conversion rates are 2%- 3% and 7% is considered quite a high number.

Read more at http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Adwords-Guide/#soc4PHjkv2iVpeRQ.99

Choosing The Best Keywords for a Google Adwords Campaign

Excerpt from SEOChat.com:
Below are the most important objectives for a pay-per-click campaign:

1. Maximum click through rate by ad relevance and content relevance.
2. Maximum return on investment.
3. Best conversion rate for selected keywords

You probably noticed that using keywords that send massive traffic to your website are not among the objectives. Instead, you should be concerned with the keyword conversion rate and its direct relevance to your campaign's URL content and services.

The first objective is to be sure that the  text in your ads exactly matches your page content and services. Any mismatch increases the bounce rate and is costly for your campaign.

The second objective ensures that you are selecting keywords that could offer the best return on your investment.

The third objective ensures that since you are aiming for keywords that return the highest ROI, you should make sure that they give the best conversion rate. The conversion rate is defined as the total number of unique visitors making purchases or availing themselves of your services, divided by the total number of unique visitors to the website.

Let's walk through a sample computation of conversion rate. If you have a website with 300 monthly unique visitors, according to Google Analytics, then in one month, if 5 persons purchase your product or use your services, the conversion rate is around:

Conversion rate = 5/300 = 1.67%

Of course, if you have a new website, then you do not any conversion rate data. However, you can estimate the conversion rate based on how relevant or related the keyword is to your services and products.

Brainstorm targeted keywords. Start by writing keywords on a piece of paper that best describe your website/blog/service/products. Read more at http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Choose-the-Best-Keywords-for-Your-Google-AdWords-Campaign/3/#PWpzxEBMrOu2S9JK.99

Using Google Traffic Estimator to gather the financial data for all of the targeted keywords in the region you're targeting.

Conduct an ROI analysis of those keywords. This is where you factor in and assign the conversion rate of those keywords, estimate average sales per conversion, estimate sales per month from conversion, estimate monthly cost in AdWords, etc. After your analysis, you're ready to decide which keywords will give you the best return on investment.

Go to your AdWords account and setup a campaign for the keywords you've selected. You can find some AdWords help from another SEO Chat article at http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Adwords-Guide/

Monitor your ad's performance, track conversions, customer inquiries, etc.

For continuous improvement, you can use the performance data of your AdWords campaign to spot weak keywords and make changes in order to further refine your campaign.

Read more at http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Choose-the-Best-Keywords-for-Your-Google-AdWords-Campaign/3/#C1gH0BZqdsiBZFEF.99

Steps to Setting Up an Effective Google Adwords Campaign

Google Adwords Basic 5 Steps
To be honest, I don't understand even these basics but I wanted to keep these notes as they'll give me a place to start my research and I'll fill in as I get more detailed answers to the questions raised below.

1. Understand the economic fundamentals of your campaign

• What’s your conversion point? In other words, what is your goal? Are you trying to get someone to sign up for a newsletter, make an on-line purchase, pick up the phone ...? For instance with one of my businesses - an  Orange County babysitting service the conversion point would be when a visitor to our web page picks up the phone or sends us an email.
• How do you value that conversion? What is it worth to your business, and what can you afford to pay for it? That's a tough one for our babysitting service, since we don't know how many hours a parent will book a babysitter or if they'll be a repeat client. The lowest value would be $10, generally it would be $10/month and is often $40/month or more.
• Is your conversion tracking set up properly? Since we ask every new client how they found out about us I would say that serves as our conversion tracking? Maybe we need to be more detailed about it but at what point does maintaining spreadsheets become so time-consuming that it interferes with running your business?

2. Start Small, Repeat, and Expand
Pick a subset of the products you sell, the locations you can target, or the terms you can use within your campaign and start there. Repeat within that smaller subset, then start to apply your early findings to the creation of new parts of your campaign. Okay, big question - how do we determine the terms we can use within our campaign? Then how do we repeat within that subset, apply early findings ...? I'm lost at this point. Do we use the results from our Google keyword search tool findings that we used to help set up the posts on our blog? I'll answer these questions in another post.

3. Understand Campaign Settings
You don’t need to start splitting up all your groups into separate laptop/desktop and mobile campaigns but you do want to understand the levers available to you as you create campaigns from the start, or you might be setting up a messy campaign structure that will be hard to go back and alter later on.

4. Pay Attention to Campaign Basics
Start simple and focused, and become more refined over time. There are really five key areas where you want to be spending your time and optimization efforts early on:

• Search Query Mining - Pay close attention to placements and search queries and be aggressive with negatives.
• Account Structure - Keep your keywords tightly grouped within ad groups and understand the difference between search ad groups (really tightly relevant terms) and display ad groups (broader themes).
• Ad Creative - Write strong ads and test different types of variations.
• Landing Page Design - Create a strong landing page.
• Bid Management - Monitor your bids to be sure you’re spending your money in the right places.

Think About the Way Your Campaigns May Grow
With everything from campaign settings, as we mentioned above, to the structure of your ad groups to the way you’re creating display ads you want to try to think as much early on about how you might best scale your campaign later. If you’re starting small and focusing on a specific region, you might be best suited to start to think about a geographically driven account structure from the get-go. When you’re increasing budget and trying to target a wider variety of terms how will your account’s structure and your process need to change to help achieve scale?

By focusing on fundamentals and thinking proactively about how your campaign might best scale, you’ll be able to achieve success out of the gate with your campaign, and then when you make use of some of the more nuanced tools and settings and features within AdWords, you’ll be layering additional efficiency on top of an already profitable campaign, rather than trying to make small tweaks to a hopelessly flawed account.

About the Author: Tom Demers is co-founder and managing partner at Measured SEM, a boutique Boston SEO and PPC agency offering search marketing consulting services including pay-per-click account management, a comprehensive SEO audit, content marketing services, SEO reputation management and link building services for a variety of specific niches such as B2B SEO.

Article Source: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/30/google-adwords-basics