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Web Podcast - Episode 10: Introduction to Google Adwords

Since 2007 Matt Reid has delved into the depths of web development and since then built over 400 websites for clients New Zealand wide. He has a deep understanding of business and web development therefore can deliver effective solutions that generate results.



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Hey everyone, episode 10 today and we are going to be talking about Google AdWords, what is Google AdWords, and what’s the difference between Google Ads and search engine optimisation? They’re pretty basic difference between them, but I’ll go into detail.

Google AdWords is like a newspaper I guess you could say, it’s where you pay money to get your business or your website up in front of people. The main benefit of Google AdWords is that your basically getting the exact target audience you want straight away, whereas with a newspaper, you’re getting a more generic audience that may not be specific to what your requirements are. Unless your putting an ad in a specific section that a specific person is going to read.

With Google AdWords we are basically paying per click, we’ll cover this shortly, but going back to that thing of targeting your demographic, it’s set up so that you can target keywords and those keywords will bring up your ads.

If somebody searches a keyword and it matches your business and what you’ve set up in Google Ads, that will then bring up your ad in the results, thus meaning, you’re getting people who are wanting your service seeing your ad. So you have a really specific audience seeing your ads and they’re ready to buy, they’re not just a random person who, say, doesn’t want to buy a car at all but they’ve got car ads coming up in front of them.

That’s the god thing about Google ads, they do cost a bit, but cost really depends on the industry and how much competition there is. You pay per click, so, if someone Googles a car dealer, and a car dealers Google Ad comes up and then you click on it, it charges that car dealers Google Ad account a certain amount of money. Now depending on how many other competitors are bidding for those clicks, that will determine the cost per click. It varies from a whole lot of other factors too, not just the persons bid. It also implements by things like the quality score of the ad and the content on the landing page of the website. 
So everything has to be very uniform, clean, and understandable to Google so that you get a very good quality score from them saying that once a persons searches, the ad that comes up is good quality, it matches and is relevant to the keyword. It’s not car dealers ads coming up for a keyword about second hand airplanes for example. So, if you’re searching used cars, the ad says used cars for sale. Then the website landing page is “We Have Quality Used Cars, our phone numbers here, here’s our stock”.

It’s like a three step system. There’s different steps and they all have to be accurate and match each other to get that good quality score.

That’s a big influence on what you pay, if you have a poor quality score you will have to pay more money because your ads are irrelevant. If your quality score is very good, but you’re in a competitive industry, you might pay on the lower side. Which is great, that’s what you want. You want to be getting as many clicks as you can for as little money as possible per click. Some companies will pay $10 a click, if not more. On the other hand you have companies that pay as little as 10 cents. I’ve had some companies pay 30-40 cents a click. It’s great, especially once you do the maths, lets say I’m a plumber and I pay 80 cents a click, I get ten people click on my ad. Let’s say that they're all 80 cents a click. That’s $8. If I get one of those people to convert into a job, would that $8 investment to get that one job be worth it?

You have to think about that in your own business, is that $8 investment to get that job worth it. The simple way to do that is work out how much that job is worth. If it’s a plumber job it could be $100-$200. It could even go as high as $10,000. Depends what it is. Is $8 worth it for a ten grand job? Hell Yeah!

It really is worth it. You have to think about it in that way.

If you’re selling a cap or some designer bloody jeans or something fancy, but you’re an online bargain shop and you sell them for $5. Then you have to consider spending $8 and selling a pair of $5 jeans. I lost $3 is that worth it? It’s definitely not.

You’ve got to really consider those things, you have to weigh up the options.

People say $3 a click is far too much, but, you have to ask yourself. Let’s do it again. 10 times $5 a click, that's $50. If I get one job out of that $50 and I’m a kitchen maker and it costs 10 grand for a kitchen, is a 0.5% investment worth it? I definitely think so.

Don’t get put off by price per click.Think about, whats is your average job, or sale worth. Then consider it. Also if you want to find out what you pay per click for different keywords use the Google Keyword Planner tool. If you look that up you can see how that works and you can see what the average clicks are and how many people a month search that keyword which makes it a great way of finding out what sort of keywords to put in your ads.

So, that’s the main background and functionality of Adwords. Now Google Adwords is free to use, you just have to pay for the advertising budget taht you set.

Google Ads is made up of three layers. There’s the campaign, the ad group and then it’s got ads within that.

The campaign, usually set up in your company name. That’s where we can set our daily budget. Let’s say you want to pay $20 a day, if you’re paying $2 a click then you can see that everyday you will get a maximum of ten clicks. You have to think if that’s enough or do you want to raise the budget? I suggest don’t have it too low as this means Google will not show your ad as often, the biggest complaint from people is that their ads are not coming up. But their budget is only $10 a day. Google staggers your ad and shows it off and on depending on your budget.

If you have a $1,000 budget a day, then you might show up everytime right at the top. Keep that in mind, you wont come up number one with every search, you’ll get staggered with other ads.

Ad groups are the next level down. With ad groups it’s best to set these up for the specific thing I’m targeting. Say if I’m a clothes shop, I’ll have a ad group for spring sale, I’ll have an ad group for beanies, an ad group for shoes, an ad group for a 50% off weekend sale.

Then within them ad groups I’ll set up each specific ad within them. I’ll make my ad copy specific to that 50% off deal. You don’t want all your ads in one basket because if someone searches for beanies, they only want to see the beanie ads.
You want to have ad groups targeted to specific keywords, that are going to get you those customers you want. Be specific, because if you’re ad is too generic then you’re less likely to have people buying or enquiring because they’re not finding exactly what they want when they click the ad.

Set up different ad groups for each area. You can pause them and activate them as you go. So you’re spring sale you do every year, copy and paste it run it again with maybe new links and new wording.

Another quick tip is on Google Ads, whenever you set up ad groups, make two copies of your ad. Always continuously improve them. Every week review your ads to see how they’re going.

I’ll try to do another episode on this soon guys, just about the specific terminology behind these ads as there’s lots of little acronyms like CTR and CPC. I’ll talk about those later.

If you're doing ads, set up two copies of the ad and slightly vary them. Then every week review them and see which has the best click through ratio. The percentage of people clicking the ads compared to the views. The click through ratio and also think about the cost per click too. The click through ratio (CTR) is a good one to go off, because the higher that is the more people are clicking that ad and finding it relevant.

Every week pause the ad that's doing the worst, copy your best ad then improve it further. Do that every week and hopefully you’ll get a very strong ad that gets a very good click through ratio.

Some ads I do can be as little as 0.5% click through ratio, I may be wrong but that’s five in 1000 people. Where as with some ads I’ve got them to 10% click through ratio. Ten percent, so every one in ten people seen that ad then clicked it. That’s very high. That’s the stuff that we want to do and achieve.

That’s a background behind Google AdWords. We set this up and we have partners who set this up too. Talk to us if you need a hand with it. You can do it yourself, I’ve talked about the main overview of it. So maybe re-read the post to get a firm grasp of it and I will try and do another one soon going into detail about the acronyms and the specifics of the workings of Google AdWords.

As I promised at the start of the episode, the difference between SEO and Google AdWords? Cost.
Google AdWords you pay per click, a natural organic ranking costs you nothing. If you’re number one on google, and you’re not paying for ads, then you are getting free advertising.

But, SEO comes at a cost if you use another web developer or an SEO company to do the SEO for you. Sometimes it’s better to pay for Google ads. Bear in mind, some people don't like clicking on ads, they prefer to click on the proper organic result.
It’s a hard one to decide on. There’s no harm in doing both. It’s just one takes longer than the other. That’s SEO.

Cool, that's RAZOR Web Design Wire Podcast guys, sorry I’ve taken up 12 minutes of your day.
I hope you found that informative. Join us next time and don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Cheers. See ya.