Merge

Get more out of your advertising dollars by optimizing your Google Adwords campaign. This webinar will take you beyond the basics of setting up an account, showing you how to use advanced features to optimize campaigns.

Transcription:

Male Speaker 1:    Thank you for attending. My name’s Adam Landrum with Merge and we are looking at the Optimizing Google Adwords webinar and on this Sunday, July 22nd. So let’s, let’s sort of dive in and look at some of the, the webinar guidelines if you will. First, first of all, I’m, I’m assuming that you’re familiar with Google Adwords. This isn’t necessarily a how-to on Google Adwords: how to set up a campaign or, or do anything like that.

I’m assuming you’ve had some experience in doing that and even, even if you, if you haven’t, I think you’ll be able to pick up or I think you’ll be able to learn quite a bit today if you aren’t all that familiar with it. But just want to reiterate that, that we’re talking about how to optimize Google Adwords and that you have, have some experience with using Google Adwords.

We should be, we should have about 30 minutes of presentation. And as I, as I said, you know, feel free to ask questions along the way and, and then I’ll try to stop and address any of those questions as I see them pop up—which, which, hopefully you’ve located the question box in your Go To Webinar controls by now. And at the end, we will, like I said, have a Q and A, answer any additional questions that you come up with or address any questions that I don’t get to throughout the presentation.
 
So jumping in, let’s look at the typical scenario. Merge is, we’re in our eighth year, I’m not sure exactly when Google Adwords came on the scene. Maybe it’s in early 2000s but so we’ve seen a lot of Google Adword campaigns. We’ve, actually done a lot, but we’ve also taken a lot over. And typically when we take a scenario over, this is what we see. We see that there’s, there’s one campaign that’s set up. Google Adwords and we’ll get into this, you know, gives you the ability to really target and instead of multiple campaigns. But, but what we see is one campaign that’s set up. There’s, there’s usually only one ad written for that campaign and they are, they’re either, that, we’ll they’re typically are, are just a ton of keyword. It’s sort of like we’re throwing everything at the wall and we’re seeing what sticks. And they are very targeted, they are very refined and it’s just a lot of keywords.

And then, and then typically the ad links to the homepage which you know, it’s intuitive and that’s the one we would suggest. So that’s, that’s typically what we see. Let’s see, so what I want to do is there’s a first set of a, an example today and so let’s pretend that, that we you know, we have a surfboard store and we’re setting up an Adword campaign for a surfboard website. So we sell premium surfboards and supplies. So we’re, we’re in the premium business if you will: We’re not selling just any an old surfboard. And we create, we’ll create a campaign that, that you know, again sort of what you’d expect but we’d, we create this campaign in Adwords called “surfboard and supplies” and then we fill it with keywords like surfboards, zinc oxide—of course—jams, those great shorts from the 80’s, Rayban sunglasses and etcetera. So it may look something like this when we run the ad. In a way, sort of a generic title “surfing supplies,” find all the surfing supplies on the website or on one website and you know it goes to our homepage.

So again, this would be somewhat typical of what we see and what companies do. So let’s look at sort of you know, some of the mistakes that happened here. First of all, we have one ad for all keywords. Secondly, you know, we just have a general or really generic title. Maybe more importantly is, you know, we have some relatively weak copy so there isn’t a call the action, there isn’t anything that you know, is really encouraging me to click on this ad. And we didn’t, we’re not discussing any features or benefits of what we have to offer.

So again, you know, overall it’s just, it’s pretty weak copy, and it’s directed to the homepage. So you know, if I’m coming and looking for something specific, say surfboards in particular then, then maybe we should direct them to a page that is all about surfboards. Or if it’s you know, sunglasses, maybe we should direct them to a page … but anyway, this is just directing to the homepage and telling the user more or less you know, I hope you can find what you’re looking for.

So let’s look at … before we jump in, let’s look at some basics of optimization and, you know, what we’re trying to accomplish. First of all, in … there are three main metrics though: we have impressions. Impression is how many times, how many times the ad is displayed. So this ad may be displayed 1000 times, it can be displayed 5000 times. That’s going to depend on your budget. It’s also going to depend on how competitive the keyword is that’s being displayed, but anyway, we have more or less a fixed set of impressions.
 
The next ad or the next metric that we’re really interested in is the click-through rate. What is the percentage of time the ad is clicked versus the impressions? And so, you know, if it’s displayed 100 times and you get one click, then you have a 1% click-through rate. And then lastly is conversions so this is, you know, a percentage of a goal accomplished. So this, for E-commerce that would be, you know, how many times that people did buy something. And for … or you could have, you know, a conversion being submitting aform requesting information for a non E-commerce site.