Transcript Making the best use of Google Adwords

Making the best use of Google Adwords
Shanfeng Cheng
FlashPeak Inc.
About FlashPeak Inc.
 FlashPeak Inc. specializes in web browser development.
 We have developed a few browsers over the years.
 Slimjet Web Browser (风之影浏览器, http://www.slimjet.com）
is a one-year-old product and our rising star (30000+ DAU
globally). It is built on top of the Chromium project, offering
more features and customizability out of the box than other bigname browsers.
Competition on Adwords is hotter than ever
 The time of making easy money with Adwords has
long gone.
 90% of the traffic goes to 10% of the advertisers.
 Big companies usually have dedicated teams which
optimize their Adwords campaigns everyday. They
also have much deeper pockets with startups or oneman workshops like us.
 Either stay away from Adwords completely or expect
to spend more time and work into more details than
the big guys.
Is Adwords for you?
 Start with a simple test campaign.
 Pick a few core keywords that is tightly related to
your business.
 Set a conversion goal and a reasonable bid amount.
 Let it run a week. Get the cost per conversion.
Compare it against your profit per conversion.
 If the cost is more than three times the profit you
make from each conversion, you need optimize other
sides of your business first before considering
adwords.
Find the right set of keywords to target
 Create an adwords account. You don’t have to run
any ads.
 Pull up keyword planner. Select “Find New
Keywords”
 Enter your product or service, your landing page,
targeted location and language.
 Select “Get Ideas”
Negative keywords
 Use negative keywords to screen out traffic you don’t
want.
 Excludes traffic that won’t convert to your target goal. For
example, if you are selling a product, you can use the word
“free” to exclude people who have no interest in paying.
We are making desktop browser only, I would add the
words “mobile”, “android” or “iOS” as negative keywords.
 Excludes keyword that you already rank on the top
positions organically to avoid unnecessary expense. Most
notably, exclude the name of your business and product.
For example, I would exclude “FlashPeak” and “Slimjet”.
How to pick good keywords
 The ideal goal is to pick keywords with high search volume
and low competition, i.e., suggested bids. However,
normally, you can find very few such ideal keywords.
 Focus on high relevancy keywords with moderate volume
and low competition.
 Bid on your competitor’s brand name before they claim it
as proprietary.
 Don’t completely believe the suggested bids from
Google. Google often gives ridiculous estimates. If you
spot a high quality keyword, always try it out despite high
suggested bid.
Type of matches
Match type
Special symbol
Example keyword
Ads may show on searches that
Example searches
Broad match
none
women's hats
include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and
other relevant variations
buy ladies hats
Broad match
modifier
+keyword
+women's +hats
contain the modified term (or close variations, but not
synonyms), in any order
hats for women
Phrase match
"keyword"
"women's hats"
are a phrase, and close variations of that phrase
buy women's hats
Exact match
[keyword]
[women's hats]
are an exact term and close variations of that exact term
women's hats
Negative match
-keyword
-women
are searches without the term
baseball hats
Examples of Good keywords and Bad keywords
 Opera (165000)
bad keyword since it doesn’t necessarily mean the opera
browser.
 Opera web browser (5400,$0.5)
good choice. Competitor’s brand name. $0.5 suggested bid
 Browser (7400).
Bad keyword, too generic. Doesn’t indicate exactly what
the user is searching for. Might result in low conversion.
 Fastest web browser (1600, $5).
High relevancy keyword. I tried it anyway and got some
conversions. Sometimes Google gives ridiculous estimates
on suggested bids.
Get more keywords based on your product features
 Slimjet offers the following features





Form filler
Ad blocker
Web page translation
High speed download manager
Social network integration
Keywords targeting specific features





Ad blocker, Adblock, Adblock Plus, uBlock
Password manager (estimate priced too high)
Download manager, Internet Download Manager.
Form filler, auto fill
Page translator, translate this page
How to dig more keywords
 Check what your competitors are bidding on
 Ask your customers
 Use some third-party keyword discovery tools (SpyFu,
AdGooroo, Wordstream, Wordtracker, etc)
 Use search terms report in Adwords system.
Writing the Perfect Ad Copy
Headline
Display URL
First line of your ad
Second line of your ad
Actual URL
Writing the Perfect Ad Copy
 Separate closely-related keywords into different ad
groups.
 Write an ad copy for each keyword group to
accurately target the set of keywords in the ad group.
 The headline of the ad copy should be closely related
to the keywords people are searching for.
 You can use the {Keyword} macro to exactly match
the keywords people are searching for. However, if
the keyword is a competitor’s brand name, make sure
you state it clearly that you are not distributing
competitor’s product. Otherwise, you might waste
money on people not open to alternative solutions.
Writing the Perfect Ad Copy
 On the first line of the description, mention a BENEFIT of
your product or service that is most appealing to your
customers.
 On the second line of the description, mention the most
relevant features of your product which help create the
above-mentioned benefit.
 In the display url, embed the keywords people are
searching for to maximize the relevancy and quality score
of the ad.
 In the destination url, if you are directing to a common
home page, add a unique tracking parameter so that you
can do conversion analysis on your side.
Write Creative Ads
 An ad should be first about your customer, then
about your product. Talk about their problems and
how you can solve them.
 You are not actually selling a product. You are selling
a better version of the customers themselves.
Texas Entrepreneurship School
Born. School. Job. Marriage. House
Kids. Retire. Want More out of Life?
Writing the Perfect Ad Copy – Example 1
Writing the Perfect Ad Copy – Example 2
Compare two ad copies
 Assume we are bidding on the keyword “ad blocker”,
which of the following two ad copies is better?
Efficient Ad Blocker
Block Annoying Ads with built-in
Ad Blocker in Slimjet Web Browser
Slimjet Web Browser
Download Slimjet Web Browser
Now to Block all the Annoying Ads
Optimize Ad Copy using automatic Ad Rotation
 Always run two ad copies in parallel in each ad group
with significant number of impressions.
 Let Google optimize for lowest conversion cost by
automatically rotating the two ad copies. Let it run for
about a week.
 After a week, delete the ad copy that is not receiving
the majority of the impressions as decided by Google.
 After that, create another ad copy trying to beat the
current ad copy. Repeat the same optimization
process.
The weight of history in the Adwords system
 Adwords performance and CPC depends a lot of the
running history of the campaign and ad group. It tries
to be smart but sometimes too smart for its own
good.
 You might get totally different CPC for the same
keywords and ad copy in two different campaigns
and ad groups.
 If you have a highly optimized campaign or ad group
that’s been running for a long time, don’t pause or
delete it carelessly. Instead, set it on a low daily
budget if you don’t spend money on it for a while.
Otherwise, you might lose the additional score
earned through the long running history.
Optimize your landing page
 Don’t direct all the ads to your home page.
 Design dedicated landing page with highly targeted
content for each keyword group with significant
impressions. This takes a lot of time but will be worth it
in the long term.
 When you design the landing page, design it for
human audience and maximum conversion rate. That’s
quite different from designing a page for best search
engine ranking.
 Do split testing on different versions of landing page
for best conversion.
Set up conversion goals
 Set up conversion goals on your websites by copying generated javascript from your
adwords account into your web pages.
 Set proper type of conversion, unique conversions or all conversions. If the goal is
download/installation, set it to unique. If it’s sales/order, set it to all conversions.
 Use your own tracking mechanism if necessary to track until the very last phase of the
sales transaction to get accurate cost per conversion. Compare it against conversion
cost estimated by Adwords system.
 Optimize your campaign/ad group for minimum cost per conversion instead of
minimum cost per clicks.
The principle of Separate and Optimize
 Separate different keyword groups into different ad
groups.
 Separate any high-impression keyword into a
different group for further optimization.
 Create different campaigns for different ad networks
(search, search partners and display network).
 Create different campaigns for different geographic
locations.
 Design separate optimized landing page for each
keyword group.
The Big Picture beyond Adwords
 Every loop of the customer acquisition chain should be
optimized to the bone so that you can afford to bid as
many keywords as possible to get maximum traffic without
constantly bleeding money.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Increase revenue per sale or download of your
product/service.
Improve the conversion ratio of your entire websites.
Optimize your landing page
Optimize your ad copy
Select the best keywords
 Compare your business vs. your competitors and find out
which loop you are lagging behind and find ways to
improve that.