Google ads for absolute beginners
by Jane Harmon
[Disclaimer: I do not work for Google. I have, however, run numerous Google ads for my small business and have lived to tell the tale.]
You see them everywhere you surf these days - the little blocks of text ads headed "ads by Google". If you are on a page about cars, they will feature car-related businesses; move to a page on fashion and beauty and suddenly the ads are all about skin cream.
If you have a home business and are considering online ads but suspect that they are too expensive, take a look at Google ads. Their advantages are many, but these are the top two - you don't pay a thing until someone clicks on your link, and you set exactly how much you are willing to pay for each click. Yes, you can pay as little as you like! With print ads running to triple digits for a single appearance in your local newspaper, the tiniest business can afford to spend a couple quarters a day to gain a few more hits on their website.
Because the entry cost is so miniscule, you really have very little to lose by trying a few ad campaigns on Google to see if the business they bring is worth the very tiny costs. So go to any Google page and click on the 'advertising programs' link at the bottom of the page. Then go to AdWords and create an account. You will need to provide a credit card number to bill your costs to. Then you can immediately build your first ad.
Don't be discouraged by the intimidatingly geeky interface you will find yourself dealing with; once you've been through the process once, it will all start to make sense.
The first few screens are where you establish where you want your ad to run, and in what language. If you are only interested in your ad appearing on the computer screens of people in your own state or city, select 'regions and cities', otherwise pick 'global or nationwide' - you can narrow to a single country in the next screen. Save your picks to move on to the next screen. Here you either select a state/city for your ads to appear, or a country, if you are not interested in the global market.
Take some time to compose as succinct a description of your goods or services as you can. You don't have a lot of space to work in. Of course, it's a cheap medium, so if one ad doesn't provide the draw you want, you can always try another one. The first line will be the live link to your site. It should be the main attraction, with the other lines being supporting allure. If you're selling the champion Doberman puppies, put 'champion Doberman puppies' in this line. Don't try to include multiple exclamation points!!! - they will be disallowed in the automated approval process. Read the editorial guidelines; you are allowed only ONE exclamation point per ad (and it really adds no information so why bother?) and the one you are allowed cannot be in the title.
The next two lines should hook the customer. For the pups, you might put 'AKC parents on site' or 'world-class, health guaranteed', or whatever you think the selling points of your puppies are. Be careful with superlatives, like 'cutest ever'; the '-est' suffix may alert the automated editor to turn down your ad. Claims such as 'rated best' need third-party verification, so don't even tempt the fates by making claims that you may be asked to back up. Of course, if your puppies come from World Champions, say 'world champion parents'; as long as your site can support your claim, you are within the guidelines.
The display URL is what appears on the ad as seen on the screen; the destination URL is where the link will take the viewer if clicked. If you are advertising a product, the destination URL can take them directly to the product page, while the ad shows your main shop page, for instance.
Click 'continue' when you're satisfied with your ad text; now it's time to pick your keywords. These are important, since they will control what pages your ad appears on. If people are looking for baldness cures, your ad for puppies is probably not going to be of interest to them, at least not typically. But if they're searching for AKC Doberman breeders, this would be a good audience for your ad, so you want your ad to appear for them.
Keeping it simple, we'll pick these keyword phrases: doberman pup, doberman puppy, doberman puppies, AKC dobermans. You could use just 'AKC', but then your ad will potentially appear when people are searching for other breeds.
The next page is where you pick your maximum cost-per-click. The Google software calculates a number which is guaranteed to put you at the top of the heap of ads most of the time your ad appears. Ignore this number; you're not that desperate (or spendthrift). Click the 'calculate estimates' button to see what that 'cost-per-click' will yield in the way of clicks per day. In this example, and at this particular time (the figures change), a $.67-per-click price for your keywords will yield you less than 11 clicks a day. If you added the keyword 'doberman', you would see an additional 110 clicks, but these could protentially be from people who are looking for dog trainers, dog training videos, any number of things that are not 'doberman puppies'. You can see that your position in the ads will be at the top. Change the cost per click to a mere nickel and see what happens when you recalculate estimates. Now your daily clicks have dropped, and your ad is further down the page. Your clicks have dropped because you are bidding against other people who also want to appear on those keywords. If they're willing to pay more than a nickel a click, they're forcing you down the list until you drop off the page.
Whether or not it's worth it to your business to pay the price to get every possible click for your keywords and appear at the top of the column of ads is a judgment call only you can make. Once you've balanced your cost per click and your keywords to your satisfaction, move on to the last step, where you set a daily budget. With our doberman ad, at a nickel a click, you can spend less than a dollar a day. If you decide you want to get all the clicks on those keywords and are willing to spend 67 cents per click to do it, then it will cost you $3.00 a day. Why not $6.70? Because on some searches, the other maximum bidders will have already used their budget and that will allow your ad to appear without costing the entire 67 cents.
Once you've set your budget on how much you're willing to spend on this ad per day, save it. Now you can sit back and watch its effectiveness through your ad management screen. The main 'campaign summary' page tells you how much you've spent on your ad, and how well it's doing via the 'CTR', or 'click-through-ratio'. This is the number of people who click your ad divided by the number of times your ad appeared - this will always be a very low number, so don't be discouraged at CTRs of less than a percent.
If you click on a specific campaign, and further down into the individual 'ad group', you can see how well each individual keyword is doing. Everything about your ad is editable; the text of the ad itself, your budget per day, your cost per click and your keywords.
Developing successful online ads is an experimental art, but fortunately, it doesn't cost much to try a few things that don't pan out. So tinker around with all these variables, set up multiple ads focusing on different features of your business, and see what works best for you.
Jane Harmon co-owns Esoterica of Leesburg, an independent retail store in Virginia
She spends some time each week tweaking her ad keywords.
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