Introduction

When I was quoted $5,000 to get a couple of my Google Adwords campaigns managed by a 'specialist' company, I made my excuses and hung the phone up very quickly. I had already been wondering just how hard it could be to produce effective Adwords campaigns and the aforementioned quote (and others like it) made me wonder even more.

Just what, I wondered, could be so hard about it? Were these secrets so hidden away that it would take teams of specialists on huge salaries to uncover them?

Fortunately, I found out that with a few basic pointers it isn't so hard after all.

Relevance

Google is unique amongst search engines in that your bid on a particular keyword is only part of what contributes to how high up in the listing a particular advert sits. Google wants to provide searchers with relevant results, because searchers who get relevant results are more likely to click on an advert and thus earn Google more money. It makes sense: if I want information about "Pork & Egg Pies", I won't be impressed if I get driven to adverts about "Scottish Kippers". If I'm not impressed I'll lose faith in Google's ability to find me relevant sites and I might go to a different search engine.

This is where Google's 'Quality Score' comes in. If I am advertising "Pork & Egg Pies" and I drive somebody to a site that is indeed about "Pork & Egg Pies", Google will reward me for that. I will be able to get a higher listing on Adwords than someone who advertises "Pork & Egg Pies" yet drives them to a site that is just related to food in general (or perhaps related to "Scottish Kippers"). What's more, the cost-per-click (CPC) of my advert will be much lower than my competitor's less relevant advert.

Google has recently updated their algorithm to take even more account of relevance, so the message is clear: if you want to pay less for a higher PPC position on Google, make the target site directly relevant to what is being advertised.

When I first started using these techniques I was amazed, sometimes dropping my CPC to 10% or less than it was originally.

Keywords

Having just told you the importance of relevance, I now have to back-peddle a bit and say that there is still of course an element of 'bid price' involved. If you bid on a popular keyword, you will pay more than if you bid on an unpopular one. You may bid significantly less than a competitor who hasn't grasped the relevancy aspects, but you will be battling on equal terms with a competitor who has.

So what a lot of marketing professionals do is to try and find keywords that are popular enough to be searched for, yet unpopular enough to eliminate the toughest competition.

Using my example from above, that would be like advertising "Pork & Egg Pies" instead of just "Pork Pies", the latter being a general phrase which would attract more competition and higher bids.

It is all about getting the balance right between popularity and exclusivity.

Ad Copy

Your ad copy will be what, ultimately, makes a user click through to your site. On Google you just have 95 characters to get your message across, so you have to be fairly direct.

Relevance is once again very important. Your ad copy needs to reflect the search phrase the user put into Google, but then you have to find a way to get a 'hook' into your copy; something to make the user click on it and buy. The 'and' is emphasized there for an important reason: clicks on your advert do not make you any money - in fact they cost you money - it is sales that make you money. An advert that gets 10 clicks and 1 sale is better than an advert that gets 100 clicks and no sales, no matter how good the click-through-rate is on either.

Relevancy is again important. It's like there's a 'flow' from relevant keyword pointing to relevant ad, then relevant ad pointing to relevant site. If you can 'hook' a customer somewhere in there, you'll do fine.

There are many ways one can try to work a 'hook' into the ad copy:

• Play on greed and fear, two very powerful motivational emotions,
• sell the benefits of the product instead of the product directly,
• sell from a position of authority,
• price can always play a part of course (can you sell cheaper or with added 'extras'?),
• use humour or 'strangeness' to intrigue a potential customer (be careful here though - it can easily backfire).

Yes, it is sometimes hard to get that into 95 characters!

Once, on a sales and marketing course, I was told a very interesting analogy about how advertising needs to communicate with its potential customers. People often listen on 'auto-pilot' and the words they hear aren't really connecting to them. The analogy is that one isn't really talking to the person but to a parrot perched on their shoulder. The parrot will process all incoming information until it hears something that might actually be useful to its owner, whereupon it'll peck the owner on the neck and make them sit up and listen. The best advertising will therefore try to talk to the person rather than the parrot on their shoulder.

Conclusion

In my opinion one doesn't need to pay a specialist extortionate fees as - with a little effort and lot less money - one can find plenty web sites, e-books and online courses that are just as effective. Better still, you are actually learning the so-called 'secrets' rather than paying someone else to use them but not tell you what they are.

It takes a bit of work, a bit of investigation and some testing but once one gets the correct pointers to start with, the rest seems to follow.

Good luck!