It’s been a couple of weeks since I created my Google AdWords account, and wanted to provide you my insights so far.
Firstly, I had noted that I wanted to start off with a small CPC maximum bid, so I went with $2.00 per day. This quickly proved unfruitful since my competitor ads had a higher budget. After a week of no display results I went to $3.00/day. Since then my Ad has shown 7 times. Not great by any means, but of course my goal is to keep my cost to less than $100/mo. and if I increased my budget much higher I could quickly find myself paying out far more than I wanted to spend. Of the 7 impressions (times the Ad was displayed and potentially viewed) there were no clicks so nothing by way of cost yet, which to me is free advertisement – at-least my ad was viewed, so possibly someone will remember me later when I come up in a search.
When I checked in with Google AdWords I noted an “alert and annoucements” banner which noted “Increase traffic by adding 100 potential new keywords”. I cliked the “View” link and there was the message:
“We’ve analyzed your budget, keywords, and campaign performance to create a list of automated ideas, customized for your account. These ideas can potentially improve your campaign performance. Click an idea listed below to see its estimated impact. If you like an idea, you can apply it directly to your account. Ideas are refreshed every few weeks, so check back regularly. Learn more.”
To be clear, I was very careful about the keywords I did select, so found myself a bit skeptical. I suppose it really depends upon one’s budget and target area. My target location was the neighboring cities only (excluding Sacramento) and while I might want to extend my cities a bit, the keyword phrases I selected were carefully chosen based upon their popularity. My initial concern was that the top 100 keyword suggestions would change my target locations – it didn’t!
Ok, so I looked at the top 100 listing which provides an “estimated monthly searches” number adjacent to it. The top 5 of the 100 were:
web designing services – 9,900
business web page design – 3,600
web designers portfolio – 3,600
best web development company – 880
sacramento web designer – 2,400
The first thing I noted was the listing was random, so for it to be effective I needed to group it by “estimated monthly searches”. As I expected when I clicked the title the listing did change to reflect high to low as follows:
web design – 1,830,000
web designer – 1,000,000
web site design – 450,000
web designers – 368,000
design company – 301,000
My suggestion is to keep a copy of the 100 keywords listing, and then go back to your campaign and compare their suggestions with what you have. The suggested listing will also change – see note above about listing changed every few weeks, so I would check back periodically to see if new, better suggestions become available. You can also use this keyword listing for SEO targeting of your website!
I compared my listing which consisted of approx 20 keyword phrases, and found some that were effective such as “web designing services”. The important thing here though is not to choose every suggestion unless you have a big budget for this. Let me explain. When someone searches for my business type, there will be those who are just looking for information, free templates, resources such as scripts and images, and so on. when I look at the suggested listing I see “design company”, “web design”, “web site design”, “design templates”, etc. which to me are all too “general”. I am looking for clients, not someone just searching to learn more about web design. When evaluating your own AdWords campaign you should do the same. This of course is the challenging part of Ad Marketing campaigns, and SEO keyword targeting in general since you only want a prospective client to click on an Ad, not everyone.
Ok, so I have to admit I was intrigued. Google AdWords has a checkbox with the text that reads: “Not ready? Run experiment”. You click the box and a start and end date appear, with the text “Apply ideas as an experiment to 50% of your traffic for a period of time of your choice.”. I selected today’s date to run until Oct. 1. There is another message that notes that once the experiment ends the changes will be applied to all traffic unless you deleted the experiment from the ideas page.
I attempted to run the “experiment” and was informed that the experiment won’t work with automatic bidding (I would need to change to a defined Per-click amount). I instead just want with 89 out of there 100 keyword suggestions since to be honest their listing was pretty much spot-on and my budget amount was still only $3.00/day so there was no real risk here. In short they utilized the keywords I had provided and found every variation that came up highly in a search (an effective tool).
In summation, Google AdWords is very effective, and while not always easy to make sense of, the tools available are definitely top-notch. My suggestion is to just start small, especially if you already get a lot of organic traffic as I do. The reality is that I typically have as much business I can handle from week to week, but there are those slow times of the year, and once my AdWords experiment is over I’ll just “pause” it and then restart it when there is a need.
If you need assistance with your own AdWords campaign feel free to contact me.
https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com
