Adwords Help Part 1: Keywords
BONUS: WANT a FREE $75 Adwords Voucher? Shoot me an email and it’s yours – justin (at) mintedblogs.com
Another great way to get traffic to your blog is by buying it. This is the most direct way to get visitors to your website, though it is also fairly difficult to manage and optimize ad campaigns. I have a fair bit of experience running Adwords campaigns, in the past year alone I’ve purchased over $50,000 of ads through Google.
Since Adwords is a fairly complex advertising system I will break this guide out into several sections:
- Keywords
- Ad Copy
- Organization
- Budgeting
- Optimization
Before I get started, Google already has a bunch of PDF’s readily available to help you:
- Building successful Adwords Campaigns
- Insiders Guide to Adwords
- Getting Started with the New Adwords interface
- Adwords Editor Guide
I’ve decided to write an Adwords Guide as I feel that while there is sufficient information available, it is not always clearly presented. In this guide I will try to organize it in a different way, so that it’s easier to understand the development process which comes when creating Ad campaigns.
Part one: Keywords
AdWords is basically a keywords based bidding system. You pay per click (CPM also available) on only the keywords which you’re bidding on. To find out what Keywords you should bid on, take a look at your landing page and what you’re trying to sell or promote. Find about 5 keywords which you would like people to be searching for when they find your website.
Next go to Google’s Keyword tool and search one of your keywords.
You will be presented with a fairly large list of keywords (depending on what you’re searching for)
There are 2 columns to make note of:
- Advertiser competition: The higher it is, the more you should expect to pay per click. It’s not very easy to find low competition keywords which get decent monthly traffic.
- Local/Global Monthly search volume: If you’re doing local search, look at the local, global, global. Local volume is compiled from the last month of data, while Global is a monthly average from the last 12 months.
Compiling Keyword lists
When developing your campaign, you’ll want to organize it based on the keywords you’re running. Work on separating keywords by specific differences in the lists. For example if you’re trying to target bloggers looking to make money, try creating a list for “make money blogging” related keywords as well as “blog advertising” keywords.
When going through the keywords, click “Add” and they will be added to a list on the right hand toolbar.
Now you can either start a campaign with Adwords right now, or simply save them to a text file.
Organize yourself a keyword folder, and create several keyword lists, based on your organization. You will later use these keywords once you create a campaign.
Other Keyword Tools
While Google’s Keyword tool will help you with your Adwords campaign, you may also want to try one of the many alternatives available. Unlike Google, these are mostly paid products, but free versions are available online.
The benefits of using these paid tools is mostly because they’re grabbing keywords from many different sources and usually contain a larger variety in keyword phrases. The catch is that they may not actually improve your Google Adword campaigns.
Keyword Tracking/trending
There are a few other tools available to research more keywords as well as capture trends as they’re happening.
- Google Trends – Displays trending keywords for the Day, allows you to search for websites as well as keywords
- Google Insights – A more in depth version of Trends allowing more verticals as well as Countries, and time periods
- Google News search – Searches trends throughout news agencies
- Trendistic – Twitter trends and trending hashtags
- Facebook’s Lexicon – Lets you search users wall by displaying keyword volume
There are certainly more tools available out there, but the one’s I’ve listed are the most reputable ones available online.
Stay tuned for the second part of my Google Adwords guide. I will be covering Ad text and ways to create effective copy for your ads.
