Top 5 tips for a Google Adwords newbie?

November 6, 2008 5:04 PM

I'm going to start offer my services in iPhone and Ruby on Rails development via online ads, and have pretty much decided on the Google AdWords program. Thought I'd ask the hive mind to come back to me with a few helpful tips.
posted by avocade to work & money (5 comments total)

Your biggest question at this point should not be the mechanics of running a successful AdWords campaign. Before you even touch the AdWords interface you should have a marketing plan thought out. For starters, what is you goal with this campaign? What are your ads directing the user to, and furthermore, what is the conversion goal once they get there? How much money are you willing to spend on a campaign and how many leads might you need (based on that budget) to make the campaign successful?

You can eat up a LOT of money in AdWords without a solid game plan in place. Google bases bid prices in part on the relevancy of your ads, so if you do not take this into account you can easily loose traction in the search results to another bidder who has fine-tuned their ads and landing pages to be keyword relevant. Rather than spell out the whole process in a post, I would suggest reading through the AdWords tutorials that Google provides. There are also quite a few training programs out there like the Black Ink Project and such, but these are mostly geared toward affiliate marketers.

If I can give you one tip it would be to track, track, track your results. Use something like Google Analytics or Prosper202 to track which ads and keywords are resulting in a positive ROI and which ones are just eating money.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 6:08 PM on November 6, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I guess another question I should ask is what kind of business are you running? Are you a small business with employees or a freelance coder looking to pick up work? If you are freelancing, I think I would argue against going the paid search marketing route. I think you would have better luck picking up projects on sites like eLance or RentaCoder. I say this because many of the developers running AdWords campaigns are larger development companies with a marketing budget. Chances are they're going to beat you out for placement in the results unless you a) have a large budget to sustain placement, or b) get creative with which keywords you bid on. Either way, you are likely to have a tough time making the results turn out positive for you.

Perhaps you are already active on the aforementioned freelance sites, if so, then maybe a more grassroots approach to marketing would work out in your favor. I'm thinking of things like developing your site for SEO and having an active role in link-building and social media. Perhaps expanding your portfolio (business site) to contain news about your industry or providing information to help companies navigate the issues of developing an application. Guest posting on relevant blogs can help immensely to promote your business and expertise.
posted by ISeemToBeAVerb at 6:51 PM on November 6, 2008

You can eat up a LOT of money in AdWords without a solid game plan in place.

This needs to be seconded. It's difficult to give really relevant advice without detail about what you're trying to do and some info on your business plan. General advice with adwords? This will be a bit all over the place.

The default settings in Adwords are designed to make it very easy to use for first-time advertisers. Broad match keywords, big ad groups, content network activated, etc. This is also an extremely effective way for Google to separate your money from your wallet.

The Ad Group is the main unit of advertising you'll be working with. Ad groups sit within your Campaigns, which sit within your Account. Ad Groups contain your keywords, default cost-per-click settings and your advertising creatives. These should be as granular as you can possibly make them without driving yourself completely mad.

The other big piece of advice is to track everything. Which keywords are performing best? In position 1? How about position 2? Is your ROI higher in position 3? What headline works best for CTR? Does the high CTR translate to high conversions on your site? Which headline converts best on your site? Does it affect your quality score and drive your costs up? Ad infinitum.

To avoid hemorrhaging money with adwords you have to be absolutely over-the-top obsessive about testing, tracking and analytics. Doing it right is a weird combination of right brain logic puzzles, bidding and testing; and left brain creative writing.

The Adwords tutorials are a good place to start. Just keep in mind that Google's interest is in getting you to spend more money, so take their suggestions with a grain of salt.
posted by generichuman at 1:46 AM on November 7, 2008

Thanks for all the insightful answers, especially on the "know your wallet" type stuff. For a nice overview and first bunch-a-tips I found an article over at akamarketing.com:

http://www.akamarketing.com/google-adwords-guide.html

... keep in mind that Google's interest is in getting you to spend more money ...

While true, Google is, on a higher more philosophical plane, equally interested in their service being perceived as the best advertising method. But of course you should always take any advice with a grain of salt. (Including yours ;))
posted by avocade at 11:30 AM on November 7, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

A related question would of course be how to "optimize" the click-through web site for best conversion rates. Though I usually deplore what "SEO" has become, I'm sure there are great tips out there for how to honestly improve the markup and layout of your site. Top 5 tips for this anyone?

Filling in "alt"- and "title"-tags and using the "meta keywords" and "description" tags properly are my own contributions.
posted by avocade at 12:33 PM on November 7, 2008