Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi I'm Mark Irvin. I'm Senior Data Scientists at WordStream. WordStream helps small and medium businesses get started with their paid search and their paid social campaigns and optimize it every step of the way. So, the reason I'm here today is I'm going to help you guys get started in your paid search campaigns. Basically, if you believe that driving more traffic or driving more quality traffic to your website is going to help you grow your business, you should be excited about taking this class. At the end of the session, we're going to launch our first paid search campaign. For most of the class, I'm going to talk about just the concepts that are going on. We won't be doing a lot of work in AdWords until the very end. Instead, what I find particularly useful for people who are learning AdWords and honestly, for myself as well, is to plan out our campaigns step by step in a separate Excel spreadsheets. So we'll first focus on exactly which keywords we want to target. Then, we'll start talking about writing ads for those keywords and then creating ad groups around all of those. Then finally, when it's time, we'll bring these all into AdWords and launch our first campaign. To launch your first paid search campaign, you're going to need three things; you're going to need a website, you're going to need some kind of marketing budgets, and of course, you're going to need AdWords account. By the end of this class, you should have the skills to not only launch your first campaign but also understand every step and every piece along the way. The exercise itself, creating a campaign, may take a total of two hours and you'll likely be able to see results in a couple of days.
2. Getting Started with Search: So to start off, obviously, if we're talking about paid search, we should define exactly what that is. Before we start though, I have to warn everyone, WordStream is based out of Boston. I'm a Boston boy, tried and true, so I'm going to use an example that's close to my heart. I want to talk about if you want to go online to buy Boston Bruins tickets. So the first thing that you're going to likely do is you're going to find yourself on a search engine and you're likely going to find yourself on a website like google.com. When google.com loads, you're going to type in some kind of words into that text box. That text that you enter there, it's going to either be called the search term or the search query. The two mean the same thing. After you type in that search term, you're going to see Google load a page called the Search Engine Results Page. When Google loads the search engine results page or because it's marketing, we're going to abbreviate everything and call it the SERP. You're going to actually see different results across the Google SERP. At the very top and the very bottom of the Google SERP, you're going to find a paid search ads. That specifically what I'm talking about today and what we're going to focus on learning today. Of course, Google isn't all just paid search ads. There are the organic results in the middle. The organic results have no direct cost to show, whereas the paid search ads are obviously paid ads placed by advertisers. Although WordStream spends a lot of time focusing on paid search ads, we're not ignorant to the fact that SEO can bring a lot of results. If you looked at our website, we in fact derive a lot of our website traffic via organic. So when you're looking at the best performing SEO content, you'll very often find that the best performing SEO content is going to be that long form content that's about 2,000 words. The best paid search ad that you'll ever write is going to be a total of 140 characters at most, and that's something that you and I could write in a couple of minutes. So, although paid search has media cost associated with it, SEO has labor costs associated with it. You'll generally find that your paid search ads will show up a lot faster and will require a lot less work to get results out of paid search than your organic traffic. Also, because these paid search ads sit at the very top of Google, you'll find that particularly in searches when someone knows what they're looking to buy or that they're very clearly searching for a particular brand, or product, or service that a lot of times people are more likely to click on these ads than the organic results themselves. On a search like black strappy high heels shoes size five, you'll see that about two thirds of all traffic, all the clicks on this search are going to be to the paid search ads where they sit at the very top of the page. Whereas, the organic results may get appreciably less traffic. There's a downside to paid search ads and that's that they cost money and they do not necessarily cost a small amount of money. Eighty-nine percent of all Google's revenue comes from some kind of advertising and paid search was a major driver of that. The good news here is that in terms of how much money this costs can be flexible to you. Some advertisers may advertise for $10 or $100 a day, whereas others have multimillion dollar budgets. Whatever your budget is, there's a paid search solution for you. So this isn't necessarily a one or the other game. You can absolutely do both paid search and show up organically. So now that we know what paid search is, let's talk about how you target your ads online using keywords.
3. Choosing Keywords: Our keywords are our fundamentals of our paid search. So, before we launch a campaign in AdWords, before we write any ads, I want to make sure that we're thinking about what keywords we're going to put in all of that. I know when you go into AdWords, it's going to have you create your campaign, your ad groups, your ads first and your keywords last. But this is the most important part of your account. Keywords are what target your ads. So, every time I create a new campaign, I start off just by writing down the keywords I intend to use in a spreadsheet. So, that spreadsheet does not need to be anything fancy, just a place for you to keep all of your ideas. So, thinking about the fact that I'm going to want to include the keyword Boston Bruins Tickets or Bruins Tickets, and then maybe Boston Hockey Tickets or Hockey Tickets. You'll create a keyword for Bruins tickets, but you'll also need to assign a match type to that keyword. That match type is going to tell Google exactly what kinds of searches you want to show up for that relate to Bruins tickets. The simplest case of this is going to be the exact match keyword. The exact match keyword for Bruins tickets is going to show an ad anytime searches for that exact search, Bruins tickets. And that's great if that's your goal. But what exact match keywords won't do is they won't show ads to anyone who's searching for anything else that could be closely related to Bruins tickets but is not that exact search. So you will not serve an ad to things like Boston Bruins Tickets, or Bruins Hockey Tickets, or Bruins tickets and a date, or Bruins tickets versus another team. There's absolutely nothing wrong with just using exact match keywords in your account. However, when you think about Google and how many searches are performed on Google every single day, 3.5 billion searches happen every day on Google. Of those 3.5 billion searches that are going to happen today on Google, about 15 percent of those searches have never been searched for before. So, in terms of how you manage your paid search keywords, it would be a large task for you to think of 3.5 billion searches and then refresh that every day to include different searches that people are going to run today and then may not ever run again. So, when you talk about managing your keywords, understanding different match types is going to help get you different types of traffic. We could also create a phrase match keyword, which will serve an ad any time that that search contains the exact phrase of that keyword. So I could create the phrase match keyword Bruins tickets. And that will serve an ad any time someone is searching for anything that include those words together, Bruins tickets. So, if someone searched for Boston Bruins tickets with that word before Bruins tickets, we'd still serve an ad, even though it's not that exact search. Or if someone else is searching for Bruins tickets and a date, or Bruins tickets and a team, or Bruins tickets and the location, then we still serve an ad to them. There are other match types like modified broad match, which are going to relax those restrictions even more. The modified broad match type is going to serve an ad anytime that search contains parts of the keyword. So the modified broad match keyword Bruins tickets will serve an ad any time that that search includes both the word Bruins and the word tickets. Not necessarily in that order and not necessarily together. So this would serve an ad to things like Bruins hockey tickets, well, so long as both the words Bruins and tickets are in the search, even though the word hockey is in between, would still serve an ad to them. Finally, our last keyword match type is broad match. Broad match is going to serve an ad any time that that search is that all contextually similar to the keyword. So, the rules of semantics don't hang up on broad match. Here, the broad match for Bruins tickets will serve an Ad for anyone searching for Boston hockey tickets, even though it doesn't include the word Bruins in it, or will serve an ad for NHL Tickets or Boston sports events. So obviously, this is great. If your goal is to get a lot of traffic, there's a lot of different ways that keywords can get you different types of traffic to your sites. However, a major lesson of paid search is that not all traffic is worth paying for. So, let's think about the Bruins tickets again. So the phrase match keyword for Bruins tickets will serve an ad any time someone is searching for any kind of traffic that includes that phrase, Bruins tickets. What if someone were searching for the UCLA Bruins tickets or for Providence Bruins tickets? If that's not the type of traffic we want to our sites, then we don't want to pay for it because if we show an ad to this, someone clicks on it, we're still going to be charged for that traffic even if it's not our intent. So, that's a major problem that advertisers have when they first start launching their paid search campaigns. Luckily, to prevent this from happening, just like we can create keywords, decide what type of traffic we get to our site, we can also create negative keywords to prevent us from showing for different types of searches. So in this case, we may want to add in a negative keyword for things like UCLA or for Providence to prevent us from showing our Ads for those types of searches. Then moving forward, after we create that negative keyword, then we won't serve an ad for traffic like a UCLA Bruins tickets or for Providence Bruins tickets. That's great. If I know in advance that there are going to be these kinds of semantic searches, that aren't an exact match for us. So, I might go in and I might in advance create these negative keywords for traffic around UCLA, or for Providence, or unrelated words that I know are irrelevant. However, more often than not, we're going to discover this after our campaigns run. Luckily for us, Google records all the search terms that match out to our keywords in our accounts. So we can go in after our campaigns have been running and review what types of traffic are coming to our site via our paid search ads. If we learn that we're getting different semantic traffic to our site, that's irrelevant for us. We can go through the search queries and begin to identify this. So we may go in and identify different types of traffic coming to our sites and use that information to guide what kind of negative keywords to create in our account. So, to actually create keywords in your account, you're going to need to dive into AdWords. You just navigate to the campaign and the Ad Group that you want to add these keywords in and then dive into the keywords step. Everything in the AdWords is about finding a big red button and pressing it. So here, we'll hit the plus keywords button. That's going to open a prompt like this. In this box, we can add any keyboard we want. So, if I want to go in, I want to create the exact match keyword, Bruins tickets, I do so. As I type it in, as I put it in brackets, these symbols tell Google what type of keyword, what match type I'm trying to assign this keyword. So the Bruins tickets in brackets, that's our exact match keyword. If I also want to create the phrase match keyword for Bruins tickets, I'd put that within quote marks. The modified broad match, I'd include plus signs in here. If I want to use the broad match, I can actually do that without adding any symbols in. So, these four keywords, we have the exact match within brackets, the phrase match within quotes, the modified broad with plus signs, and the broad match without any symbols. If I was happy adding those four keywords to my account, I then just go here to save, and then we'd see those keywords automatically shown in our accounts. So, after you create your keywords, the next step is you're probably going to want to go and you're going to want to identify those negative keywords. If you have an idea in advance, what types of traffic you don't want to show up for, you're able to dive in here. Very similar to where you create your keywords, there's this tab for negative keywords, where if you want to go in and add negative keywords in, you're free to do so. Same process, we'd go in, hit that big red button for plus keywords, and we go in and we'd create our negative keywords. So, if we knew we didn't want to show up for UCLA or for Providence, we could go in, add those as negative keywords, and hit save, and prevent that from showing up in the future. If we didn't know in advance what types of searches we want to show up for, but instead we want to review what types of searches we were already showing up for, that's one tab over or under the search terms. This particular account is a med school. So we see the fact that they're showing up for a lot of traffic that is slightly unrelated to what they're trying to show up for. They're showing up for searches for medical students or for other types of med schools like UF Southwestern Medicine Center. If they want to go in and prevent themselves from showing up for this type of traffic, they could go in, check that traffic, and add that as a negative keyword. That would prevent them from showing up for that type of traffic in the future. If you're just getting started in AdWords for a first time, if you're creating a brand new AdWords account, then Google is going to have you create your campaign, then your Ad Group, and then your keywords in your ads. If you're watching these videos in succession, you're going to realize I'm doing the exact opposite order. So, what you should be thinking about now is what keywords you're going to ultimately end up creating within your campaign. Think right now and begin brainstorming and keep those ideas in an Excel spreadsheet. You may want to re-watch this after you understand everything to understand how to go and implement these. The important thing to remember about keywords is that they're completely free to add to your account. You can add as many keywords as you want in your account. However, every keyword you add in your account, you're going to pay for clicks off of that traffic. So, before you go nuts and think of thousands and millions of keywords that would be nice to have in your account, I recommend just starting with a small set. Think about 20 or 30 keywords in total and begin to get traffic off of those keywords. If you're happy with the amount of traffic those keywords are driving, then consider adding a few more. If not, you may choose to later on exclude some.
4. Understanding Conversion: So, now that we understand how paid search is working, the next questions are going to really be about, well, is it working for me. How you determine your success or your failure in paid search is going to depend on a number of different metrics. So let's take some time right now and talk about all the metrics that we look at when we look at a paid search account. The very first metric you'll see is called Impressions. Every single time that your ad shows, we'll count that as an impression. So, when you view your keywords or when you view your ads, the number of impressions that keyword your ad has, just how many times that you've showed an ad for that particular search. Obviously, the hope is that people click on that ad. We measure your ads click-through rate or your keyword's click-through rate, just as the likelihood of someone who's making that search ultimately clicking on your ad. So, your click-through rate is calculated just by taking the number of clicks on your ad and dividing by the number of impressions in your account. So if your ad showed a 1,000 times and 20 people clicked on it, we'd say you had a two percent click-through rates. So that two percent click-through rate, is that a good click-through rate? Well, that really depends on a lot of factors. But most importantly, it probably depends on where your ad was. Your ad's position is where on the page your ad's at. You'd expect an ad at the top of the page would have a very high click-through rate since it's the first thing people see on the Google Search result page, you'd expect an ad towards the bottom of the page to have much lower click-through rate. So Google is going to give us a lot of metrics in terms of how often your ad shows up and how often people engage with your ad and where it's at on Google. That's great if that's our sole job. If our sole job or our sole metric of success is whether or not people are coming to our site, then Google's going to give us all the metrics to tell us whether or not people are arriving on our site and where they're coming from. However, if you're trying to not just understand that people are coming to your site, or if you're not trying to just understand how many people are coming to your site, but you're interested in what people do after they arrive on your site, then we'd have to set up something called conversion tracking. conversion tracking is going to give us a clear picture in terms of whether or not people are completing certain actions we choose to track on our site. So, that could be a number of things for different kinds. Are you interested in someone filling out a form on your site and becoming a lead? Are you interested in someone buying something for your site and arriving on a checkout page? So you think about tracking conversions on your site, think about the pages a user sees after they complete the action working on your track. If that's a form, then you're likely going to be thinking about Thank You page. If it's an order or a sale, you'd likely think of an Order Confirmation page or a Checkout Complete page. Think of those list of pages on your site that a user is going to see after they complete the action you're interested in converting. So, use conversions to track whether or not people are clicking on our ads and becoming customers or whether or not people are just clicking on our ads and then leaving our site without doing anything. In order to track conversions, all we're going to need to do is add a pixel or small bit of code to the back end of that particular web page. So, I'll also show you how to set up conversion tracking. Know that Google is very sophisticated and can track a lot of things. This is going to be a very high level, but I'll follow up with resources below if you're interested in learning a lot more about this. But so if you will want to get started in tracking conversions within your AdWords account, you can simply start it off in your account and navigate over to tools, and it's the second dropdown under conversions. Next, every individual action that we're looking to track is going to be treated as a separate conversion. So if I want to track a new form on my site or new page that someone would look at after completing conversion, then I would just simply hit this big red button for conversions and I choose that this is a website visit for me. I'd name the conversion, so if this is a form fill, and then Google is going to ask me a couple of questions about this event on my website. How I answer these questions determines how Google generates this code. I can always go in and create different conversion events or I can generate different bits of code if these things change. But effectively, Google just wants to learn more about what it is that we're tracking. So it will ask us for a Value and that's going to basically mean when someone completes his action, is that worth a certain amount of money for us? Is every lead worth $100? Then I might want to sign $100 to this value. Or does every time this action happen, it has a different amount that it's worth to us. So, if every time someone completes an order, I expect them to have a different order amount and I want to track revenue from my ads. I could tell Google to track that here. The next question is about count and think about this. What if I were to click on your ad and then can complete this action five different times? Would you want to count me as one unique lead or would you be interested in counting every time I completed that action? This is going to depend a lot on what that action is. If I arrive at your site and I fill out a form with my contact information five times, then for you, you may only want to count me one. However, if I arrive at your site, I make five separate purchases, that might be worth five conversions to you in which case you want to count every. After we enter all of these pieces of information, we'd hit Save and Continue and then Google is going to use all that information we just provided it to generate some code to track these actions a little bit differently. The snippet of code, we would just copy and paste between the body tags of that particular Thank You page or that Order Confirmation page, if that's something we do, if we manage our website, then we can go in and we can do that, just copy and Paste all this information here. If it's not something that one of us is going to do, if instead we need to send this bit of code onto a web developer or onto our third party or onto our agency that's going to manage this for us, we also have the opportunity to email these instructions to anyone. So in this lesson we spent a lot of time, we learned about all the metrics that we're going to see when we're in AdWords and that's important because this is going to tell us whether or not our paid search ads are successful or they're doing poorly. All of these numbers are going to guide our decisions later on when we start talking about strategy. Specifically, they're going to influence a lot of our decisions when they come to bidding which I'm going to talk about next.
5. Bidding and Budgeting: So, we talked about paid search. The first thing we talked about, we talked about keywords, we talked about match types. That's good to decide what type of traffic I ultimately end up paying for. However, when we talk about paying for that traffic, the next question is how much am I going to pay for that? And that's all a question about how you choose to bid on these keywords. So in AdWords, every single time you create a keyword, you're also going to sign a bid towards it. So, that bid is the maximum amount that you're going to be willing to pay per click. You can set your bid at any amount. Bidding is important because Google ultimately is going to hold an auction for these keywords. Google is going to consider your bid, which you're in control of, and your quality score, which Google is in control of. It's going to multiply those two numbers together to get a metric called Ad rank. Google uses Ad rank in this auction to literally rank advertisers in order from top to bottom. Google takes your Ad rank and will assign the advertisers with the top Ad rank to the top spots of Google, the second best advertiser to the second spot on Google, and so on and so forth down the SERP. The auction not only determines where you sit on the Google search engine result page, but will also determine how much you pay for each click. Google holds what's called a Dutch auction or a second price auction. In which case, you're charged the minimum amount necessary that you would have need to have bid to have kept the same position. So, in this example, advertiser one took the top position, because they have an Ad rank of 56. They bid at $8. Their quality score is seven. Those two numbers multiplied together is 56, is the highest Ad rank so they are assigned the highest position on Google. However, advertiser one didn't need an Ad rank of 56 to get the top spot in Google. All they needed, was the need to get slightly higher than advertiser two. Advertiser two has an average of 35. So, all advertiser one needed was an Ad rank of 35.01. So, at the end of the day what Google does is it charges you the minimum amount that you would have need to have bid to outbid the next closest advertiser. In this case, advertiser one is going to be charged $5.01 which is the minimum that they would have need to bid, to have gotten an Ad Rank above advertiser two. And now that you start understand the auction, you can understand how important bidding is in determining whether or not your ad sits at the top of the Google search engine result page or at the bottom or not on it at all. So, the next question is going to be about how much should I be bidding for my keywords. So, if you're just getting started with paid search, you're looking to launch some new keywords and you're unsure how much you should be bidding for those keywords, there are a number of tools that are available to you to give you an estimate of ballpark of what you should expect to pay for this type of traffic. Within AdWords, we can dive in and use the keyword planner. The keyword planner lives underneath the toolbar and it's right here on keyword planner. From here, we can get a number of estimates in terms of how much different keywords will cost us in our account. So, if I'm interested in getting forecasts for a list of keywords, I could enter those keywords right here. So, let's go back to our Bruins tickets example. If I wanted to see how much Bruins tickets, or Red Sox tickets, or Celtics tickets, or Patriots tickets cost, I could see how much that cost us. I said a location if I'm interested in seeing this for the entire United States. I get forecasts. So, Google is going to load us an estimate of how much these keywords would cost us. So, we can see right now that Bruins tickets would cost us roughly $3 dollars per click, whereas Patriots tickets would cost us closer to 327 per quick or Red Sox tickets might cost us $5 per click. Now, that does not necessarily mean that at the end of the day I'm going to pay exactly 295 for Bruins tickets, but it gives me a good estimate in terms of what I should setting my bids at. So, we'd use these estimates from the keyword planner, to make sure that our ads even show up on Google. We have an estimate for how much this type of traffic generally costs. However, at any point in time, if after we're running our keywords for a while, we know we could go in and we could increase our bids. Increasing our bids is going to improve our Ad rank in the auction, which is going to help us get a better ad position, we're going to stay closer to the top of this SERP, which means we're going to get more traffic, and more traffic to our site should mean more conversions as well. However, with increasing our bids, there is a double edged sword. When we increase our bids, it also means we're likely going to pay more per click. We're going to spend more on this traffic and we're likely going to pay more per conversion on this traffic. So, understanding when we go in and we increase our bids or we decrease our bids, is an ongoing battle probably where you spend the most time managing a paid search account. So, at the core of bidding, we bid differently on keywords because we expect them to perform differently. I may want to have a number of keywords in my account, but I may bid more for certain keywords that I think are going to convert more often for me. So, for instance, I may have a lot of keywords in my account about Bruins. I might have the Bruins schedule as a keyword, Bruins home schedule, Bruins tickets, and Bruins tickets and a date in my account. Those are all possibly good keywords for me to have but there are certainly different keywords that are probably better keywords for me to have. I may choose to bid more on Bruins tickets or Bruins tickets in a particular date, because it's very likely that someone searching for that is more likely to convert on my site than someone who's necessarily searching for Bruins schedule who could just be honestly looking for a Bruins schedule. They might not be looking to buy tickets. So, I'd bid less for that type of traffic. I also might bid more for traffic that's more valuable to me. If I were selling Bruins tickets which make go for 100 $150 of seats, I know we're also selling Stanley Cup tickets which go for several thousand dollars, I might also bid more for the Stanley Cup ticket traffic knowing that that traffic is more valuable to me. When you first launch your keywords, you're going to be able to watch all the metrics come in in terms of clicks, costs, and conversions for each individual keyword. It's possible that on your first try, your account might not be profitable. So, let's say you knew that every single conversion was worth $25 at most to you, in this case, we see that we didn't hit that $25 cost per conversion goal. We came in just over $44 dollars per conversion. That doesn't necessarily mean we failed here, but we're able to use this data in our account to make some decisions in terms of how we adjust our bids for these keywords. What we'd likely do, is we'd go in and we'd look at certain keywords that performed well for us. Here keyword A has a very low cost per conversion. So, given the fact that it's got this $10 cost per conversion, relatively low in our account, and well below our goal, we would likely want to increase the bid for that one keyword. When we increase the bid for that keyword, we're going to improve its Ad rank and that keyword is going to serve ads closer toward the top of the SERP. Means we're going to spend more on that keyword, but it also means we're going to get more traffic and hopefully more conversions from that keyword moving forward. We could also do the exact opposite with keyword E. Keyword E has a cost per conversion closer to $80, that's considerably higher than our goal and appreciably higher than the average for the account. In this case, I may choose to the exact opposite. I may choose to bid down on that keyword. What that means, is that keyword is likely going to sit closer toward the bottom of the SERP, but over time it is going to spend less and consequently, its cost per conversion should also go down. So, just making these changes in our account, we're able to bring down our costs where it's high and we're able to scale keywords that are doing well, and we should be able to hit our goals in the long run. So, that directional approach is of course an acceptable one to take. It's how most people approach their bids. But as a data scientists, I'd be remiss to avoid the fact that there is some math that we could do on the back end as well. If you knew how much a lead was for you or if you knew your cost per conversion goal and your conversion rate, you can use those two numbers to back in into how much you should be paying per click. So, if I knew that a keyword had a 2% conversion rate and I wanted to spend at most $25 per conversion. Then I know that the product of those two $25 times 2% would come to the cost per click that I'd be willing to pay for that keyword, in this case 50 cents. But it's obviously important because it's going to determine whether or not you're successful and you're paid search campaigns it's going to ultimately determine how much you pay per click on each of your keywords. You're going to spend a lot of your time managing your bids and you're going to want to go back and adjust your bids as you see different performance come from different keywords. This is something that you're going to want to revisit almost on a weekly basis. However, bidding is only half the equation when it comes to calculating Ad rank, quality score is the other factor in the Ad rank and we'll talk about that next.
6. Creating Text Ads: So now that we've talked to keywords, about how we get traffic to our sites, we've talked about bidding, how much we pay for traffic to our site, let's talk to the meat of it, let's start writing ads. When we were right our paid search ads, we're often writing our ads with quality score in mind. Quality score is the second factor in ad rank. If you look at the AdWords auction again and think about not how we could increase our bids to get a better position, but instead increase our quality score. In this example, advertiser one happens to be bidding the least but because advertiser one has such a great quality score, they're able to take the top spot on Google without bidding more than anyone else. What this means for you and your business, is we can always throw more money at increasing our bids. But if you choose not to just solve your problems with money, we can also look at improving the quality of your ads. That's going to translate not just in your paid search account, but towards the bottom line of your marketing. So, when you're ready to launch your first ad, simply navigate over to the ads tab within AdWords and hit the "+ AD" button. The great thing about paid search ads is that they all follow the same format. They all have this 140 characters that we have to play with. The very first thing we're going to do when we start writing a paid search ad, is we're going to tell Google where we want to send our traffic, that's our final URL. Then, I've got two headlines, each of them 30 characters in length. I can write just about anything I can fit into this. Next, I have two 15-character path fields. As I type in the path fields here, I'm going to change exactly how my URL shows different searchers. When I type in my final URL, that's where Google is going to send traffic. Then, my ad is automatically going to show with my domain name in that URL. If I want my ad to read slightly different, if I don't want it just show my domain, I may choose to include these path fields to serve a different kind of vanity URL to people when they see my ad. When I change my path fields, although it's going to look different to searchers than necessarily the page they arrive on, we're just going to use this to make it a more attractive ad. Any changes I make to my path field, do not change where I'm sending traffic. Last but certainly not least, I've got full 80 characters to write whatever I want in my description. So, this is the bulk of your ad here I can call out any called actions any special promos, anything I want to write within my ad. Once I'm happy with this ad, I'll hit Save, Google will review that ad and it should go live soon. The first and most important factor that Google looks at in terms of determine your quality score, is your ads expected click-through rates. Google only makes money when people click on your ads. So, Google wants to make sure that you're writing these ads that are highly clickable. Now, how do you get people click on your ads? What kind of language make people click on your ads rather than just looking at them? You want to make sure that you're highlighting all your value props within your ad. That could be different offers, different sales, or different reasons why you're better than your competitors. Make sure that you're testing several different ads and you're going to be able to see what types of messaging works better in different ad copy. Your first ad may not be a perfect ad but if you're testing two or three different text ads, you'll see over time what types of messages, what types of offers, and what types of called actions performed better on the search for your particular business. Make sure that your most important messaging is in the headline. The headlines are of course shorter, but they appear more prominent, they're first things that people read. So, if you have a particularly valuable offer, or a particular reason why people should be clicking on your ad versus your competitors that, you want make sure people see that in your headlines. The second most important part of quality score is your ad relevance. Google wants to make sure that every ad it serves is a relevant one to users' search. So someone searching for Bruins tickets should be served a Bruins tickets ad, rather than a generic hockey ad or a Red Sox tickets ad. That we can see that this can be a very semantic game. So with ad relevance in mind, make sure that you're including a top keyword within the ad itself. That way, any time someone is searching for your keywords, it includes a keyword in your ad and then Google knows that your ad is a relevant match to the user's search. Finally, the third most important part of quality score is your landing page relevance. So effectively, this is just that Google wants to make sure that after someone clicks on your ad, they're going to a page related to their search. So, if you're again sellng Bruins tickets, after I click on this ad, that landing page, should be a page about Bruins tickets. Don't just send traffic to a more generic hockey page tickets, or sporting tickets, or your home page. That those would be less closely related to users search and also it's going to be a worse experience for the user. So, if you focus on just those three components: making sure your ads are highly clickable, highly relevant to users' search, and that your landing page is highly relevant to users' search, you're likely going to be fine in terms of quality score. Great, you've created your first ad, but there's a lot of ways to improve how your ad shows up on search. If you ever Google something, you'll very often see additional components next to ads such as phone numbers or additional text or links at the bottom. All of these things can show up alongside your ad if you create ad extensions. Ad extensions are very easy way to expand your ad, and offer more called actions, more language, and help you improve the relevance of your ad as well. All of these components also help you increase your click-through rate, as well as your quality score. Adding ad extensions is a very easy way to get more clicks on our ad, improve our click-through rate, and also be a little bit more relevant to users' search. Very simply, between these two ads, which are you more likely to click on? Without reading either ad, you're likely more likely to click on the ad on the left, simply because it's a larger ad and it includes additional things on it. Whereas the ad on the right, may be a successful ad but the one on the left is still going to attract more attention and take up more space on the search. Ad extensions can be created directly in the UI just immediately next to the Ads tab under Ad Extensions. There are a number of different types of extensions we could create. We could create callout extensions, which would give us these short 25-character callouts to extend our ad by an additional line. So, we may choose to add an additional keywords, or add in additional information about our business that would serve alongside our ads. We could include structured snippets, structured snippets provide an additional line of text that allow us to highlight different products, or different brands, or different types of services that people can buy from our ads. Site links, allow us to provide a number of links to other pages on our site. So, if you were to click on the headline, you would see that we would send traffic to that one final URL that we chose earlier. However, site links allow us to send traffic to different pages. So, if I wanted to offer a different checkout page, or if I wanted to promote a different product or a different service within my ad, I could use site links to allow people to choose that instead of the offer promoted by my headline. Price extensions will also add an additional line of text to us. They'll allow me to highlight different products and goods that people can buy on my site, as well as highlight the price point on which these things start at. Next, we could add in location extensions. Location extensions allow me to show my address to a local searcher. So, if I wasn't trying to necessarily drive people to my website but I want people to visit my local store, I could use location extensions to highlight that. I could also add in call extensions, which would allow users to call my site directly from the mobile app or on desktop devices. It will show my phone number alongside my ads so that people can call my business directly. Or alternatively, on mobile devices, I could include a message extension which would allow users to text my business. Finally, I could also include app extensions, so if I wanted users to download my app or open my app on their phone I could include an app extension with my ads to encourage them to do that. The best part of including all these ad extensions is that there's no additional cost to including any of these with our ads. We're still only going to be charged when someone clicks on our ad. So, we focused on writing your first high quality page search ad. The big things to focus on are making this a highly engaging ad that people are going to click on, making a highly relevant ad to users' search, and making sure we're sending traffic to a page that's highly relevant to the users' search as well. If we just focus on these three components, we're going to write ourselves a high quality ad, and that's going to help us edge our competition and do better on the search. Thinking about our ad and making sure that someone who is searching for the Bruins tickets, gets a Bruins tickets ad ad and he is taken to a Bruins ticket page is a very way to write one successful ad for one keyword. Of course your account, may have more than one keyword and more than one ad. So, how do those keywords in ads play together? We'll handle that in the next video about AdGroups.
7. Managing Your Ad Groups: We create ad groups to group together similar types of keywords that share a semantic theme alongside highly relevant ads. So, as we write different types of keywords about different things that we sell and as we write different ads about different things that we sell, we can group those ads and keywords together in an ad group so that we're always serving a highly relevant ad to a relevant keyword. So, for instance, if I wasn't just selling Bruins tickets, but I was selling Bruins tickets, Celtics tickets, and Red Sox tickets, and Patriots tickets, I would likely want to have all of those types of keywords in my account. I would also likely want to have all of those types of ads in my account. Having these ad groups structured this way prevents us from serving someone who is searching for Bruins tickets or Red Sox ad. In that way, we don't have to worry about serving an unrelevant ad that's going to lower our quality score in these ad groups. We want to make sure that we're writing very focused ad groups. So, be sure to include fewer than 30 keywords in each ad group. We see that the more keywords you try to put an ad group, particularly beyond 30, the less likely they're all going to be related to one another. And that you may find it easier to break out large ad groups into smaller ad groups, so that you can serve more appropriate ad to each of your keywords. So, it's a best practice to include multiple ads in each ad group. Including multiple ads allows Google to test different messages in different ads to different keywords into different searches. Over time, Google will optimize and always show the most relevant ad to a particular user. So, including multiple ads in every single ad group is going to help you find the more perfect message. So, you want to create as many ad groups as you need to to make sure that all of your keywords are closely focused to all of your ads. Depending on how many products or services you're trying to advertise for, you may end up creating one ad group per campaign or you may end up creating hundreds. The big focus here is that all of those keywords are focused with all of the ads in each ad group. So now that we've thought about ad groups, now is the time that we should go back and review those keywords we brainstormed a little bit earlier. So, I pulled up this list from earlier about Bruins tickets and I've added in a couple of additional things here. I've added in keywords for Red Sox tickets, for Celtics tickets, for Patriots tickets, etc. Likely, as you created your list of keywords, you came up with a bunch of different keywords for different products or services that you want to get in front of people for. And now, all I do is I'll just review this list of keywords and I try and create groups of highly focused keywords and organize them together, and this is where I'm going to get my ad group structure from. So here, I would organize my keywords into themes that are going to become my ad groups later. And so now, all of my ad groups are organized into tightly-knit themes around the different teams that I'm trying to sell tickets to. These are later going to translate into more targeted ads for these keywords. And so, also now that I have all of my ad groups laid out in front of me, this is going to help me in terms of writing ads for each of these ad groups. I know I want to be writing highly relevant ads to each of my keywords within these ad groups, so being able to visualize exactly which keywords are going to trigger which ads is going to help me write better ads as well. Ad groups primarily focus on making sure all of your keywords and ads match up correctly. Beyond that, campaigns control more of your strategic decisions, and that's where the fun really begins.
8. Create a Campaign: So, so far, we've talked about so many components of how AdWords works. We talked about how keywords map up to search terms. We talked about how much we bid for each keyword. We talked about writing highly relevant ads for each keyword. We talked about grouping those ads in keywords together in focused ad groups. So, so far, we should have all of these components together. We should have everything organized so that when someone searches for our product, when someone searches for Bruins tickets, there serve a highly relevant ad for Bruins tickets that they hopefully click on, and convert on your sites. All of that is the real nuts and bolts and fundamentals of paid search, and campaigns focus on the strategic aspects of your account, such as budgeting, location targeting, and ad scheduling. So, each campaign is going to have a daily budget and that's how much, at most, Google is going to spend on a given day. So, if I have a campaign and I only want to spend $3,000 a month on a particular idea, or a particular product, or a particular service, then I want to make sure that I was setting $100 daily budget. So, over the course of that month, I would only spend $3,000. Also, questions about where run my ads run? If I were selling Bruins tickets, I would have to think about whether or not I want my ads to run in just my home city of Boston, or if I'd want to target all of Massachusetts, or all of New England, or the United States, or the world. That's a strategic decision that we're going to manage at the campaign level. If I wanted to have my ads run in different places, let's say I want to have one campaign target Massachusetts and one campaign target New Hampshire, then I may choose to manage those in separate campaigns and assign a different budget to each location. Next, I choose when my ads will run. So, do I want my ads to run 24/7, or do I want them to run just certain hours of the day or certain days of the week? So when you create a campaign, Google is going to ask us a lot of these high-level strategic decisions. Once you create your campaign, you'll then be prompted to create your ad groups, and then create your keywords, and your ads afterwards. The reason we focus on learning the fundamentals of keywords in ads and ad groups before we really talked about creating campaigns, is because these aren't unique decisions you're going to be having at the campaign level. You all walked in here understanding exactly where your ads should run, when your ad should run, and about how much money you have to spend in AdWords. The big thing to think about when you're creating a campaign, and think about these strategy level decisions, relates to those small components about what you're advertising in these campaigns. So, by the time that you create your campaign, you should have a solid idea of exactly what you're getting out of this campaign, know exactly which keywords and which ads you intend to serve, what you're getting out of this particular budget. You can create as many campaigns and account as you think it's appropriate. Managing a successful paid search account comes down to understanding when is a good idea to break out different keywords into different ad groups, and when it's a good idea to break out different ad groups into a new campaign. You would likely create different ad groups if you had different focuses for your keywords. So, if you were going in and you were adding in new keywords to your account, and that was the only change, you'd likely do that in an ad group. However, if your strategy shifted, if you want to try a new market or if you want to try a different time of day, or if you want to assign budget to something more experimental, that's when you'd create a new campaign to test that. So, when you create your first campaign in AdWords, you're going to navigate to this plus campaign button, create a search network campaign, you're going to want to name it. Then here is where you're going to set up your targeting. Whether or not you want to target the United States, or Massachusetts, or Boston, you manage that targeting here. Finally, Google asks you for your budgets. So, if you know that you have $3,000 a month, $3,000 a month divided by 30 comes to $100 a day. If you've got a smaller budget, then obviously, you're going to want to have a smaller daily budget here. Once we hit Save, where we're prompted to create our first ad group, and then our keywords, and our ads. Google is going to prompt you to create your first ad group and the keywords and ads from scratch. At this point, rather than starting from scratch, this is when I go back and I reference that spreadsheet I've been working on up till now, that has all my keywords and has my ad groups already structured. From here, rather than thinking about it all over from scratch, I have a very clear game plan in terms of how I want to structure this from the top-down. I can honestly just copy and paste a lot of this information and then my campaign is complete.
9. Targeting & Demographics: So, now that your campaigns are live they're going to start serving to everyone who's searching for those particular keywords. You've thought a lot about where your ads are going to show, as well as when your ads are going to show. But a really interesting new feature within adwords and probably where search is going to go over the next couple of years is in terms of who sees those ads? Within the past 12 months, Google released demographic targeting within your search campaigns. So, you have a couple of additional buttons in terms of how you want your ads to reach different people. If you don't set any of this up, your ads will continue to serve to everyone. This is not a required thing for you to set up, but you'll see that depending on what you're advertising, you may have strategic goals and you might have better people to reach with your ads. We can specifically target people based off of four different demographics. We can reach people based off of their gender, their age, their parental status, and their household income. How we use this demographic targeting is going to vary a lot depending on the goals of our campaigns. So, for instance someone searching for Boston Little League, we may choose to use some demographic targeting to exclude people say non-parents. Given the fact that we know the fact that people who are going to be signing their kids up for a little league, likely have kids and that showing our ads people who are not parents, it's likely not going to do well for us. They're not going to convert on our sites. However, demographic targeting does not need to be that black and white. We can continue to serve serve our ads to everyone, but we might have more valuable users for us. So, it's something that we need to think about when we're thinking about targeting Little League. Is the father the more influential person in deciding whether or not their kids sign up for sports? Is the mother the more influential person when deciding to sign their kids up for sports? Do more affluent families send their kid off to Little League more than less affluent families? Do older parents send their kids off to Little League more often than younger parents? Those are all strategic decisions that we have to think about. We could continue targeting our ads to everyone, we could exclude certain demographics from senior ads or we could choose to bid more aggressively for more valuable audiences. So, we continue to serve ads to everyone but we bid more for audiences that we believe are more likely to convert. How we manage our demographic targeting is something that's going to change over the next couple of years. So, you might not know in advance which demographics are going to perform better on your paid search campaigns and that's very fine. As you run your campaigns, who is going to automatically collect your performance metrics across users of these different demographics? At any point in time you can go in, you can review your campaigns and see exactly how users of different demographics perform. Where this information lives is underneath the audience's tab and then underneath the demographics tab. We're able to go in and we're able to view exactly how many men, and how many women, and how many people of different ages, and different demographics click and convert on our ads. So, I can see in this example, that most of my conversions come from women and I have a cheaper cost per conversion for women than I have for men. Using this data, I can then make some strategic decisions. Do I want to exclude men from seeing my ads? I can do that here. Or maybe I don't want to exclude men from seeing my ads, but maybe I want to bid less for men. I can also create a bid adjustment for men and then pay less for that type of traffic moving forward. So, as you think about your search campaigns, we are always spending a lot of time about what people are searching for. But don't forget that these are people who are searching for things. Demographic targeting gives us a lot of options for our strategies for how we reach people on the search network.
10. Conclusion: So by now, your campaigns are live, your ads are running. Hopefully you're getting a lot of clicks and you're being able to see exactly what's successful in your campaigns. That's not the end of the road. Of course you're going to continue to go in, adjust your bids, adjust your keywords. You'll see that there are new things coming out all the time. One of the interesting things about working in this industry, is that each of your campaigns is going to perform completely different than each others. What I'd be really interested to see is anything that you were surprised with, in terms of either problems you came into or particular successes you saw. If you saw that a particular keyword performed amazingly for you, that was by surprise or an ad performed amazingly better than another ad in your account, I'd really like to see that. This class should've taught you the fundamentals and I'm really excited to see how you take that and apply some more advanced concepts later on. Finally, I want thank you for watching this class.
11. What's Next?:
Mark Irvine, Vice President of Search
