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BRIAN: Hey guys, thanks for joining us.
Last week, we hosted our first GOMC Learning Series to
discuss how to incorporate your Google+ business pages as
part of your team's overall online strategy.
And for those of you that aren't familiar with GOMC,
it's a Google online marketing challenge.
So essentially what that is, it's an opportunity for
students to kind of get engaged with online marketing
and utilize the Google AdWords platform and the Google+
platform to manage online campaigns and get some
experience there.
There's some pretty great prizes there, and last year we
had over 50,000 students from 100 countries participate.
And this week, we wanted to kind of, for those students
that are just kind of joining the competition or just
starting, to give a few quick tips on how to set up a good
campaign and go over that.
And just to introduce myself, my name is Brian.
And also joining us today is Andrea.
ANDREA: Hi, everyone.
As Brian said, my name is Andrea.
I'm happy to be here and to go over some account management
and campaign strategies.
BRIAN: And so just to start off with, if we go to the next
slide, we'll outline what we're going
to talk about today.
And first, we'll start off with just kind of an AdWords
overview, like how the AdWords system works, how you pick
keywords, how you structure your ad groups
and budget your campaigns.
We'll also talk a little bit about what that structure
means, like what are those best practices that we tend to
see work well.
We'll also go into kind of writing good ad text copy.
And there's a few quick tips on how this all
kind of works together.
And then by the end of it, hopefully we'll have a good
idea of how we can measure what's working and what's not.
Next slide.
And so we're looking here at the first--
how can I put it?
The top level of what makes an AdWords campaign successful or
how we set ourselves up for success.
As you see in the slide, you have your campaign which is at
the top level.
And at the campaign level, there's certain settings that
go along with that, certain bidding features that
go along with that.
And that's where the budget is set.
So for example, if you have a budget for a certain campaign
that's at $10, it can spend up to $12 hours in a given day.
But over a 30.4 day period, that campaign can spend $10 on
average per day.
So that's where you kind of mainly
structure everything out.
It may be a big theme like a product line, a certain
service that you provide, things like that.
Below the campaign level is the ad group.
And this is where you want to bucket your keywords according
to these different sub themes.
So let's say you have a product line that are shoes,
each ad group could be a different type of shoe because
then the key words in the ads can match up and be together
within a certain ad group.
And then you can strategically bid that way as well and
control your account from that level.
Next slide.
ANDREA: OK.
So now, we're going to be talking about best practices.
So as Brian was playing, at the campaign level, this is
where you have all of your settings.
So you can do the different locations that you want.
So you can select a city-- let's say New York City--
to target all of your ad groups in your ads and
keywords to that location.
Or you could even do a radius for New York City and have it
expand out to, let's say, New Jersey or Connecticut.
So that's something that you can also set at
the campaign level.
You can also do the bidding options that Brian mentioned.
So you can let the system decide your bid or you can
actually select the option to manually bid for your
different key words.
There's also going to be the language settings.
So this is a global challenge, right?
So for some of your businesses, they might be
located in multiple countries where people speak different
languages and read and
understand different languages.
So I can select, let's say, English, Spanish as the
languages I want to target.
And that's all going to be at the campaign settings level.
Next, as we said before, you can have multiple ad groups
within one campaign.
So I know we showed two on the previous screen, but you could
have, let's say, 10, 15, 20 different ad groups within the
different campaign.
And you want to make those very concise and very specific
to the focus and the topic area.
And then lastly, at the third level, this is where you're
going to choose the relevant and specific key words.
Next slide.
BRIAN: And I think this slide, Andrea did a really good job
of covering the major themes that you want to create a
campaign around.
So again, location, meaning geographic location--
New York versus California.
Those might be two different campaigns.
Language--
English versus Spanish.
You want to have your Spanish keywords in a different
campaign with their own budget versus an English campaign,
for example.
And then the budget, of course, is set again at the
campaign level.
Next slide.
And then this slide kind of talks a little bit about the
idea of where we want to create our ad groups.
How do we decide what should be an ad group and what should
be a campaign?
And essentially, when you're thinking about the business
that you're helping out, helping them market their
online strategy, what you want to do is either create a tree
or a Venn diagram depending on the types of products or
services that they offer.
And if certain products and services overlap, you might,
say, want to create one ad group that talks specifically
about how those two work together and pick keywords
that follow that group.
If the products are very different and they can be
easily organized--
so shoes, pants, shirts, hats, things like that, then it's
kind of a much simpler implementation.
But really, I think this is kind of the key way you can
set yourself up for success is organizing and thinking about
the business that you're working for and think about
all the things that they offer to give them good coverage and
kind of a good breakdown or how you approach those
different keywords.
Next slide.
ANDREA: OK, so here's an example.
So say you're a dentist.
There's three different ad groups that you want to have.
You want to have your cosmetic procedures in one ad group.
You want to have your dental implants in another ad group.
And then you can even market yourself
as a pediatric dentist.
So what type of keywords would you want to have in these
different ad groups?
So for the cosmetic dentist ad group, you would want to have
keywords that say cosmetic dental office, local, cosmetic
dentist, cosmetic dentists Mountain View.
And these are all examples of how you can make your keywords
very specific.
So you're calling out the different locations where
you're located.
You're calling out the specific service.
You're even calling out the procedures
and things like that.
Any of these is going to help your ad groups be more
specific and really focused in on that
targeting that you want.
BRIAN: I think tagging along on that point, there's also
another way to think of your different keywords and ad
group buckets.
One way to think of them is brand terms.
So for example, for this dentist, the brand term would
be the name that dentist's practice.
So if it's Doctor So-and-So, that would be a brand term of
his, right?
Or if he named his dental practice
something like Smile Free--
I just made that up-- but if that's the name of his dental
practice, that your brand term, right?
So you might want to create a specific ad group tailored to
just those brand terms, or maybe even a campaign
depending on how complex and big this brand is.
The kind of next level would be the specific products and
services that they offer.
So again, with dental implants, that's a product
that he offers that that might make sense
run on those things.
Then the last kind of level of keywords
are long tail keywords.
So those are the types of keywords that are more related
to the service but don't directly speak to what this
dentist does.
So for example, a keyword you could pick
there is my tooth hurts.
That doesn't necessarily connect with the dentist and
what he does, but someone who's saying my tooth hurts or
I have a cavity, those types of keywords could play into--
work well with the dentist, for example, because they
don't know the service or product they want yet, but
they have a need.
And thinking about your strategy carefully there to
target those different customer segments will help
set you up for success.
Next side.
And I think on this point, when it comes to choosing your
relevant and specific keywords, for example, if
you're a TV repair shop located in, say, Mountain
View, you can see kind of on the left and the right the
kind of differences that make a relevant
versus irrelevant keyword.
So for example, this particular advertisement may
have chosen LG TV repair, television
repair, Mountain View.
But he doesn't want to pick a keyword that's very general
like just the word TV because there's a lot of different
things that can go into that word.
For example, someone might be selling TVs, new TVs, used
TVs, old TVs.
Someone might be talking about that they're going
to appear on TV.
So depending on the search, you want to think a little bit
intuitively about, OK, what would a user search for that
would lead them to try my product or service?
And so, in this case again, for television repair, the
keywords on the right are more likely to speak to that.
ANDREA: Next slide.
OK, so a group of keywords that are also very, very
important for any account, any campaign, is going to be
negative keywords.
So these are keywords that you can add where we're going to
make sure that you're never going to show for these.
So using the previous example, if someone typed in free TV
repair, you wouldn't want your ad to show for that because
you want your users to pay for your service.
So you would want to add free as a negative keyword.
Also, an example could be, how to repair my TV.
You really don't want people who want to do it themselves.
You want them to pay you for your service.
So you would want to add how to job, career, et cetera,
class, course--
those as negative keywords that you make sure that you
don't show for those.
That just helps you save money on your budget and just makes
you more competitive in the marketplace.
And so, by using these negative keywords, like we
said, it reduces your spend and improves your clickthrough
rate, which you'll find out later is a key metric in
performance.
But basically, if I type in free TV and then I'm seeing an
ad that says television repair, I'm not going to click
on your ad.
So that's going to decrease your clickthrough rate.
Again, it makes your campaign more relevant.
It improves your quality score and it also
improves your ad position.
Next slide.
BRIAN: Great.
So now, we want to talk a little bit more about what
makes good ad copy on Google Search.
So essentially, the way to write effective ad text, the
way to start thinking about what makes a good ad, are to
make sure you cover the three best practices.
One is to state what you're offering clearly.
So once again, going back to that TV repair example,
whenever you're writing your ad text, make sure that the
idea that your business is a TV repair shop is conveyed.
When you read it, make sure that you get a sense that
that's what the service that you're offering for that
particular ad.
The next one is to have a unique selling point.
So if, for example, your TV repair shop gives a free
consultation or you get something in return or you get
a discount, something like that, you may want to make
sure that you advertise that in one of the
lines of your text.
And then the last thing, probably one of the most
important things when it comes to writing effective ad text
is to have a call to action.
So if you're, say, working for an NGO that's soliciting
donations and that's one of the metrics that you want to
measure for success, make sure you also include
that in your ad.
So you want to think of what you want the user to do once
they get to your site.
You presented them a good value proposition with the
selling point.
You've stated clearly what your business does.
And if you want them to take a specific action on the site,
whether it be donate, call now, order now, things like
that, you want to call that out so that the user who is
engaged with your product or service knows exactly what to
do once they get to your site.
ANDREA: So this side specifically focuses on
tracking the performance of your
campaign and your ad groups.
We do have a tool within your AdWords account.
It's called the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool.
So if you're seeing that your ads aren't showing or if you
just want to ensure that they are showing, you can go ahead
and use this tool.
It's located in the Tools and Analysis section, Ad Preview
and Diagnosis.
So that's where you would locate it.
You go ahead, click on that.
You are brought to a screen that stimulates
a google.com search.
And in here, you can type in the specific keywords, the
location, and then any other additional information.
So if you have a radius or if you have multiple cities or
languages, you can also enter those in.
You click Enter, and then it will give you a diagnosis of
how this particular ad campaign ad group is
performing.
So it'll say, yes, your ad is showing.
It's coming from this campaign, this ad group.
Or it'll say no and why.
No, your ad is disapproved.
No, it's actually for this location.
Or no, it's not showing for this language.
So it's very important to you use this tool just so you know
exactly how your ads are appearing.
And then if they're not appearing, what you need
to do to fix it.
The second performance metric is the CTR.
So this is the clickthrough rate.
And this is a simple formula of the number of times your ad
was shown and the number of times that your
ad was clicked on.
So using this metric, you can really see if users are
finding your ad to be relevant based on the search terms that
they're entering in online.
And then lastly, we have conversions.
So this is how you can track the performance from the
keyword, the click, the visit to your website, and then
having them complete that specific action that Brian was
talking about in the previous slide.
So I'm using the NGO example.
In your ad, you told them about what the nonprofit
organization was, what they do.
And then the call to action was to make a
donation, let's say.
So in your account, you're seeing that they searched on
the keyword, they clicked on it, they went to your site.
And then you can track within AdWords whether they made a
donation or not or if they did not make a donation.
So that's another way you can kind of track the performance
of the different campaigns and ads that you
have in your account.
Next slide.
BRIAN: And then just to go into a little bit more about
clickthrough rate, since that's one of the most
important metrics to measure how your campaigns are doing.
In order to see your clickthrough rate, in case
you're wondering, essentially if you hop into your AdWords
account and you, in the middle row of gray tabs, you click on
Keywords, one of the tab options, the third or fifth
column, depending on how you've set up your different
columns within AdWords, you should see
something that's a CTR.
That's what clickthrough rate gets abbreviated to.
So essentially, that's clicks over impressions.
So you have 1,000 impressions, you have 300 clicks.
Your clickthrough rate's 30%.
So that's how you can see how effective you've
written your ad text.
You can tell if the keywords you picked were relevant.
There's a lot you can tell from that clickthrough rate,
and it's important to kind of isolate those variables to see
at what point your clickthrough rate is showing
your success.
And you can see that clickthrough rate at the
different levels.
At the keyword level, you can see
individual words you picked.
You can see that at the ad group level to see if you've
bucketed everything well.
And then at the campaign level just to see how effective each
of your advertising campaigns are.
Same thing goes for conversions as well.
There's two things that go into conversions.
There's conversion volume which is
conversions, one per click.
So that's just how many actions users have taken on
the site, whether they bought 50 cell phones,
they made 50 donations.
Whenever they get to a thank you page or your order is now
shipping page, that will get reflected.
And then conversion rate means out of the people who clicked
and got to your site, how many people then took the action?
So a higher conversion rate tends to mean that you're
bringing in the right customers to your online
store, and the store is easy enough to navigate that they
can then buy.
So again, looking at all these different metrics, can look at
it in a lot of different ways.
And hopefully, we can give you some of those tools to make
good decisions on what to change what to keep.
Next slide.
ANDREA: I was going to add a little bit to that slide.
One of the things that you mentioned, Brian, is that you
can see it at every level.
When I talk to different advertisers, one of the things
that I might do to drill down into the performance is I'll
look at which campaign has, let's say, a lower
clickthrough rate.
And then I'll drill down to actually target it to which
specific ad group needs performance, which specific
keywords needs better performance.
Whether it's more specific keywords, adding negative
keywords, et cetera.
So it's really important to do a drill down approach to see
which areas are needed in more focus.
Next slide.
OK, so this slide is for quality score.
This is something that is very, very important because
it will also determine how high your bids are, and then
it also gives you a good measure to see how relevant
your keywords are to your ad text and to your landing page.
So the metrics that are listed here basically all fall into
the quality score and help determine what the actual
quality score is.
And if you notice, the keywords in your account, the
quality score will range from a 1 out of 10 to a 10 out of
10 with 10 out of 10 being, of course, the highest quality
score and what you kind of want to shoot for.
BRIAN: And just to add in a little bit to that, when it
comes to how ads are ranked, how Google decides what ads to
show at position one versus position, say, 10 or 2 versus
4, you have a formula that's called ad rank.
And the variables that go into it are your bid.
So if you bid, say, $1 on a particular keyword and then
you have a quality score of five, that
gets multiplied together.
Other advertisers bidding on the same keyword go through
the same process.
If they're bidding $0.50 but their quality score is 10,
they might appear higher in the auction simply because
their quality score is good.
So those are the two variables that you can kind of weigh
against each other and then hopefully reach a certain ad
rank within the option.
And I think that just kind of covers the main metrics of
success there and how you measure how your
performance is going.
And hopefully that was really helpful for every one, for
people who are just starting off or in the middle of the
competition, they give you the tools to build really
successful campaigns.
ANDREA: Did you want to go ahead and jump into the
questions now, Brian?
BRIAN: I think that makes sense.
ANDREA: OK.
The first question that we have here is can we promote a
business which does not sell products online?
BRIAN: Right.
So that's definitely an option I've seen a lot
of advertisers do.
If they don't sell a product online,
there's nothing to transact.
I've seen advertisers list their cell phone in the ad and
encourage people to call.
Or when they go--
let's say they click on the ad, and then the person goes
to that page.
So again, going back to the NGO example, maybe they don't
sell anything online, but they want for people to participate
in some kind of rally, for example, and they want you to
call for more information.
Taking them to that landing page with a unique phone
number that they know only AdWords customers see let's
them track how many people they're getting through
AdWords and how many people are going to call and
participate.
So definitely, it's a strategy that I've seen a lot of
advertisers pursue, even if they don't sell anything or do
anything online.
ANDREA: OK.
The next question is what is the difference between
right-side advertisements and top advertisements?
And second part of the question.
How can we specify where our
advertisements can be displayed.
BRIAN: So the way advertisements are ranked--
so going back to that ad rank formula we mentioned when we
were talking about quality score, the first thing you'll
see in the top--
so the top listed ad in the top part of the Google Search
when the ads are displayed.
That's position one.
And then position two kind of falls right under that.
And then position three falls right under that.
So those are called the top ads, so the ads that showed up
in either positions one, two, three.
On the side, then it goes sequentially as well.
So positions four through et cetera are the side ads.
We tend to see a little bit better conversion rates and
better clickthrough rates in the top ad, so that's why a
lot of advertisers kind of try to get in
the top three positions.
But we've also seen success for advertisers on the side.
It really depends on your strategy and the importance of
each of these keywords.
So kind of tying back into those long tail keywords we
discussed earlier in the presentation, if the keyword
is not necessarily going to--
isn't of a high priority--
if it's on the side, it's fine, and that
might do well for us.
And if it's a really important keyword that really speaks to
our business, we might want to try to make
sure it's on the top.
Touching on the second part of the question which was how do
we pick or ensure that we get to a certain position?
There's no way to really specify what position I want
my ad to be in.
What we can do is kind of set our bids for certain keywords,
ad groups, and campaigns and see what positions we land in.
And then if we want to appear higher or lower, we kind of
change the bid.
So that's one lever.
We can either bid more to appear higher, bid less to
appear lower.
The other way is to improve our quality score.
So we can take a variety of actions there.
Maybe make the landing page more relevant, change our ad
text, something like that to get a better clickthrough rate
and hopefully raise our quality score.
And then go up and down in the auction.
ANDREA: That was last question.
BRIAN: OK.
So did you have anything else to add?
ANDREA: Nope.
Good luck to the teams.
BRIAN: All right.