Tumgik
#we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers.
Text
#Buy Negative Google Reviews#Buy Negative Google Reviews: A Controversial Practice#In today’s digital age#businesses are highly dependent on online reviews to attract new customers and build a good reputation. However#not all reviews can be trusted#as some businesses resort to unethical practices like buying negative Google review. This controversial practice raises questions about the#consumers#and review platforms. In this article#we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers.#The Impact of Negative Reviews#Negative reviews can significantly impact a business#especially in today’s competitive market. A study by RevLocal found that 94% of consumers would avoid a business if they came across negati#Furthermore#Google is the most widely used search engine and integrates reviews into its search results. Negative reviews can lower a business’s overal#making it less likely to appear in top search results and attract potential customers.#The Controversy Surrounding Buying Negative Reviews#The practice of buying negative Google reviews is highly controversial. On one hand#businesses argue that it helps them stand out from their competitors who may be using similar tactics. They also believe that negative revi#However#on the other hand#this practice is seen as deceptive and unethical. It not only breaks Google’s terms of service but also deceives potential customers lookin#The Consequences of Buying Negative Reviews#Buying a negative Google review can have severe consequences for businesses despite the perceived benefits. Google has strict policies agai#or worse#removed from Google entirely.#Moreover#the negative impact on a business’s reputation and credibility cannot be ignored. Customers who come across manipulated reviews may feel de#leading to potential loss of customers and damage to the brand’s image.#The Importance of Ethical Practices#In the long run
0 notes
choppedtimetravelmoon · 7 months
Text
Buy Negative Google Reviews: A Controversial Practice
In today’s digital age, businesses are highly dependent on online reviews to attract new customers and build a good reputation. However, not all reviews can be trusted, as some businesses resort to unethical practices like buying negative Google review. This controversial practice raises questions about the credibility and authenticity of online reviews and has sparked debates among businesses, consumers, and review platforms. In this article, we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers. 
The Impact of Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can significantly impact a business, especially in today’s competitive market. A study by RevLocal found that 94% of consumers would avoid a business if they came across negative reviews. This shows the power and influence online reviews have on consumer decision-making.
Furthermore, Google is the most widely used search engine and integrates reviews into its search results. Negative reviews can lower a business’s overall rating, making it less likely to appear in top search results and attract potential customers.
The Controversy Surrounding Buying Negative Reviews
The practice of buying negative Google reviews is highly controversial. On one hand, businesses argue that it helps them stand out from their competitors who may be using similar tactics. They also believe that negative reviews can make positive reviews seem more authentic and believable.
The Consequences of Buying Negative Reviews
Buying a negative Google review can have severe consequences for businesses despite the perceived benefits. Google has strict policies against fake or paid reviews and actively takes steps to remove them. This can result in a business’s listing being suspended, or worse, removed from Google entirely.
Moreover, the negative impact on a business’s reputation and credibility cannot be ignored. Customers who come across manipulated reviews may feel deceived and lose trust in the business, leading to potential loss of customers and damage to the brand’s image.
The Importance of Ethical Practices
In the long run, it’s always better to focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer reviews and ethical practices. Providing excellent products or services and addressing any negative feedback can help businesses gain trust and loyalty from their customers.
Moreover, Google values authentic reviews and rewards businesses with higher rankings, making it easier for them to attract new customers. This further emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical practices and avoiding shortcuts like buying negative reviews.
The Role of Genuine Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is crucial for the growth and improvement of any business. Genuine, unbiased reviews help businesses understand their strengths and weaknesses from the customers’ perspective. They provide valuable insights that can guide the business toward making necessary improvements and adjustments to their products or services. This encourages a culture of transparency and integrity, which is key to building a loyal customer base and a strong reputation.
Alternatives to Buying Negative Reviews
There are numerous ethical strategies that businesses can adopt instead of resorting to buying negative reviews. For instance, businesses can invest in improving their customer service, which often plays a huge role in customer satisfaction and can significantly impact the reviews customers leave. On top of that, businesses should actively seek customer feedback through surveys or personal follow-ups, which can lead to more genuine, constructive reviews.  Additionally, working with reputable review platforms and encouraging satisfied customers to leave honest reviews can also help businesses build a positive online reputation.
The Market for Negative Reviews
There’s no denying the existence of a black market for negative Google reviews. These services are in demand, especially from businesses looking to tarnish their competitors’ reputations. Some businesses pursue this option as a quick fix, without fully understanding the long-term implications. While the initial effects might seem beneficial, the cost to a business’s reputation, customer trust, and potential legal implications far outweigh any perceived advantages.  Businesses must understand the gravity of such practices and steer clear of them.
Legal Implications of Buying Negative Reviews
Making the Right Choice
The temptation to buy negative Google reviews might be high, especially in competitive niches. However, the risks associated with this practice are far greater. Businesses should instead focus on delivering superior products and customer service, encouraging customers to share their positive experiences. This authentic approach nurtures trust and builds a loyal customer base, which is far more valuable and sustainable in the long run. In today’s digital landscape, ethical practices and genuine customer feedback are key to success and building a strong online reputation.  So, businesses should prioritize these aspects over short-term gains through unethical means.  No business wants to be known for buying negative reviews but rather for providing excellent products or services that customers genuinely appreciate. Let’s create a culture of honesty and authenticity in the world of online reviews.  This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and build trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. So, let’s prioritize ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for a healthier and more transparent business landscape. Let’s work towards building an honest, trustworthy, and credible online community. The power is in our hands to make the right choice. So, let’s choose transparency and integrity over manipulative tactics and reap the long-term benefits for our businesses.
Conclusion
In conclusion, buying negative Google reviews is a deceptive and unethical practice that can severely affect businesses. It not only violates Google’s terms of service but also damages a business’s reputation and credibility. Instead, businesses should focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer feedback and ethical practices. This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and builds trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. Let’s prioritize transparency, honesty, and integrity in online reviews for a healthier business landscape.  The choice is ours to make. Choose wisely.  So, let’s continue to uphold ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for the betterment of our businesses and society as a whole. Let’s create a sustainable and trustworthy online community. The future of our businesses depends on it.  Let’s make the right choice today for a brighter tomorrow.  Stay ethical, stay authentic, stay successful!
0 notes
craftydreamerwinner · 7 months
Text
Buy Negative Google Reviews
Buy Negative Google Reviews: A Controversial Practice
In today’s digital age, businesses are highly dependent on online reviews to attract new customers and build a good reputation. However, not all reviews can be trusted, as some businesses resort to unethical practices like buying negative Google review. This controversial practice raises questions about the credibility and authenticity of online reviews and has sparked debates among businesses, consumers, and review platforms. In this article, we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers. 
The Impact of Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can significantly impact a business, especially in today’s competitive market. A study by RevLocal found that 94% of consumers would avoid a business if they came across negative reviews. This shows the power and influence online reviews have on consumer decision-making.
Furthermore, Google is the most widely used search engine and integrates reviews into its search results. Negative reviews can lower a business’s overall rating, making it less likely to appear in top search results and attract potential customers.
The Controversy Surrounding Buying Negative Reviews
The practice of buying negative Google reviews is highly controversial. On one hand, businesses argue that it helps them stand out from their competitors who may be using similar tactics. They also believe that negative reviews can make positive reviews seem more authentic and believable.
The Consequences of Buying Negative Reviews
Buying a negative Google review can have severe consequences for businesses despite the perceived benefits. Google has strict policies against fake or paid reviews and actively takes steps to remove them. This can result in a business’s listing being suspended, or worse, removed from Google entirely.
Moreover, the negative impact on a business’s reputation and credibility cannot be ignored. Customers who come across manipulated reviews may feel deceived and lose trust in the business, leading to potential loss of customers and damage to the brand’s image.
The Importance of Ethical Practices
In the long run, it’s always better to focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer reviews and ethical practices. Providing excellent products or services and addressing any negative feedback can help businesses gain trust and loyalty from their customers.
Moreover, Google values authentic reviews and rewards businesses with higher rankings, making it easier for them to attract new customers. This further emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical practices and avoiding shortcuts like buying negative reviews.
The Role of Genuine Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is crucial for the growth and improvement of any business. Genuine, unbiased reviews help businesses understand their strengths and weaknesses from the customers’ perspective. They provide valuable insights that can guide the business toward making necessary improvements and adjustments to their products or services. This encourages a culture of transparency and integrity, which is key to building a loyal customer base and a strong reputation.
Alternatives to Buying Negative Reviews
There are numerous ethical strategies that businesses can adopt instead of resorting to buying negative reviews. For instance, businesses can invest in improving their customer service, which often plays a huge role in customer satisfaction and can significantly impact the reviews customers leave. On top of that, businesses should actively seek customer feedback through surveys or personal follow-ups, which can lead to more genuine, constructive reviews.  Additionally, working with reputable review platforms and encouraging satisfied customers to leave honest reviews can also help businesses build a positive online reputation.
The Market for Negative Reviews
There’s no denying the existence of a black market for negative Google reviews. These services are in demand, especially from businesses looking to tarnish their competitors’ reputations. Some businesses pursue this option as a quick fix, without fully understanding the long-term implications. While the initial effects might seem beneficial, the cost to a business’s reputation, customer trust, and potential legal implications far outweigh any perceived advantages.  Businesses must understand the gravity of such practices and steer clear of them.
Legal Implications of Buying Negative Reviews
Making the Right Choice
The temptation to buy negative Google reviews might be high, especially in competitive niches. However, the risks associated with this practice are far greater. Businesses should instead focus on delivering superior products and customer service, encouraging customers to share their positive experiences. This authentic approach nurtures trust and builds a loyal customer base, which is far more valuable and sustainable in the long run. In today’s digital landscape, ethical practices and genuine customer feedback are key to success and building a strong online reputation.  So, businesses should prioritize these aspects over short-term gains through unethical means.  No business wants to be known for buying negative reviews but rather for providing excellent products or services that customers genuinely appreciate. Let’s create a culture of honesty and authenticity in the world of online reviews.  This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and build trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. So, let’s prioritize ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for a healthier and more transparent business landscape. Let’s work towards building an honest, trustworthy, and credible online community. The power is in our hands to make the right choice. So, let’s choose transparency and integrity over manipulative tactics and reap the long-term benefits for our businesses.
Conclusion
In conclusion, buying negative Google reviews is a deceptive and unethical practice that can severely affect businesses. It not only violates Google’s terms of service but also damages a business’s reputation and credibility. Instead, businesses should focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer feedback and ethical practices. This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and builds trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. Let’s prioritize transparency, honesty, and integrity in online reviews for a healthier business landscape.  The choice is ours to make. Choose wisely.  So, let’s continue to uphold ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for the betterment of our businesses and society as a whole. Let’s create a sustainable and trustworthy online community. The future of our businesses depends on it.  Let’s make the right choice today for a brighter tomorrow.  Stay ethical, stay authentic, stay successful!
0 notes
strangesandwichartisan · 10 months
Text
Buy Negative Google Reviews
Buy Negative Google Reviews: A Controversial Practice
In today’s digital age, businesses are highly dependent on online reviews to attract new customers and build a good reputation. However, not all reviews can be trusted, as some businesses resort to unethical practices like buying negative Google review. This controversial practice raises questions about the credibility and authenticity of online reviews and has sparked debates among businesses, consumers, and review platforms. In this article, we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers. 
The Impact of Negative Reviews
Negative reviews can significantly impact a business, especially in today’s competitive market. A study by RevLocal found that 94% of consumers would avoid a business if they came across negative reviews. This shows the power and influence online reviews have on consumer decision-making.
Furthermore, Google is the most widely used search engine and integrates reviews into its search results. Negative reviews can lower a business’s overall rating, making it less likely to appear in top search results and attract potential customers.
The Controversy Surrounding Buying Negative Reviews
The practice of buying negative Google reviews is highly controversial. On one hand, businesses argue that it helps them stand out from their competitors who may be using similar tactics. They also believe that negative reviews can make positive reviews seem more authentic and believable.
Tumblr media
The Consequences of Buying Negative Reviews
Buying a negative Google review can have severe consequences for businesses despite the perceived benefits. Google has strict policies against fake or paid reviews and actively takes steps to remove them. This can result in a business’s listing being suspended, or worse, removed from Google entirely.
Moreover, the negative impact on a business’s reputation and credibility cannot be ignored. Customers who come across manipulated reviews may feel deceived and lose trust in the business, leading to potential loss of customers and damage to the brand’s image.
The Importance of Ethical Practices
In the long run, it’s always better to focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer reviews and ethical practices. Providing excellent products or services and addressing any negative feedback can help businesses gain trust and loyalty from their customers.
Moreover, Google values authentic reviews and rewards businesses with higher rankings, making it easier for them to attract new customers. This further emphasizes the importance of maintaining ethical practices and avoiding shortcuts like buying negative reviews.
The Role of Genuine Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is crucial for the growth and improvement of any business. Genuine, unbiased reviews help businesses understand their strengths and weaknesses from the customers’ perspective. They provide valuable insights that can guide the business toward making necessary improvements and adjustments to their products or services. This encourages a culture of transparency and integrity, which is key to building a loyal customer base and a strong reputation.
Alternatives to Buying Negative Reviews
There are numerous ethical strategies that businesses can adopt instead of resorting to buying negative reviews. For instance, businesses can invest in improving their customer service, which often plays a huge role in customer satisfaction and can significantly impact the reviews customers leave. On top of that, businesses should actively seek customer feedback through surveys or personal follow-ups, which can lead to more genuine, constructive reviews.  Additionally, working with reputable review platforms and encouraging satisfied customers to leave honest reviews can also help businesses build a positive online reputation.
The Market for Negative Reviews
There’s no denying the existence of a black market for negative Google reviews. These services are in demand, especially from businesses looking to tarnish their competitors’ reputations. Some businesses pursue this option as a quick fix, without fully understanding the long-term implications. While the initial effects might seem beneficial, the cost to a business’s reputation, customer trust, and potential legal implications far outweigh any perceived advantages.  Businesses must understand the gravity of such practices and steer clear of them.
Legal Implications of Buying Negative Reviews
Tumblr media
Making the Right Choice
The temptation to buy negative Google reviews might be high, especially in competitive niches. However, the risks associated with this practice are far greater. Businesses should instead focus on delivering superior products and customer service, encouraging customers to share their positive experiences. This authentic approach nurtures trust and builds a loyal customer base, which is far more valuable and sustainable in the long run. In today’s digital landscape, ethical practices and genuine customer feedback are key to success and building a strong online reputation.  So, businesses should prioritize these aspects over short-term gains through unethical means.  No business wants to be known for buying negative reviews but rather for providing excellent products or services that customers genuinely appreciate. Let’s create a culture of honesty and authenticity in the world of online reviews.  This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and build trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. So, let’s prioritize ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for a healthier and more transparent business landscape. Let’s work towards building an honest, trustworthy, and credible online community. The power is in our hands to make the right choice. So, let’s choose transparency and integrity over manipulative tactics and reap the long-term benefits for our businesses.
Conclusion
In conclusion, buying negative Google reviews is a deceptive and unethical practice that can severely affect businesses. It not only violates Google’s terms of service but also damages a business’s reputation and credibility. Instead, businesses should focus on building a positive reputation through genuine customer feedback and ethical practices. This not only benefits businesses but also empowers consumers to make informed decisions and builds trust in the products and services they choose to invest in. Let’s prioritize transparency, honesty, and integrity in online reviews for a healthier business landscape.  The choice is ours to make. Choose wisely.  So, let’s continue to uphold ethical practices and genuine customer feedback for the betterment of our businesses and society as a whole. Let’s create a sustainable and trustworthy online community. The future of our businesses depends on it.  Let’s make the right choice today for a brighter tomorrow.  Stay ethical, stay authentic, stay successful!
0 notes
Text
#Buy Negative Google Reviews#Buy Negative Google Reviews: A Controversial Practice#In today’s digital age#businesses are highly dependent on online reviews to attract new customers and build a good reputation. However#not all reviews can be trusted#as some businesses resort to unethical practices like buying negative Google review. This controversial practice raises questions about the#consumers#and review platforms. In this article#we will delve deeper into the concept of buying a negative Google review and its impact on businesses and consumers.#The Impact of Negative Reviews#Negative reviews can significantly impact a business#especially in today’s competitive market. A study by RevLocal found that 94% of consumers would avoid a business if they came across negati#Furthermore#Google is the most widely used search engine and integrates reviews into its search results. Negative reviews can lower a business’s overal#making it less likely to appear in top search results and attract potential customers.#The Controversy Surrounding Buying Negative Reviews#The practice of buying negative Google reviews is highly controversial. On one hand#businesses argue that it helps them stand out from their competitors who may be using similar tactics. They also believe that negative revi#However#on the other hand#this practice is seen as deceptive and unethical. It not only breaks Google’s terms of service but also deceives potential customers lookin#The Consequences of Buying Negative Reviews#Buying a negative Google review can have severe consequences for businesses despite the perceived benefits. Google has strict policies agai#or worse#removed from Google entirely.#Moreover#the negative impact on a business’s reputation and credibility cannot be ignored. Customers who come across manipulated reviews may feel de#leading to potential loss of customers and damage to the brand’s image.#The Importance of Ethical Practices#In the long run
0 notes
hotspreadpage · 7 years
Text
Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide
Google AdWords is a staple platform for the vast majority of digital marketing strategies. However, marketers need to get things right from the outset to avoid costly inefficiencies.
This guide will provide everything you need to know to get an AdWords account up and running, and set for success. 
The digital marketing industry has grown in tandem with Google AdWords, to the extent that the two are linked inextricably.
Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US 42 cents goes to Google, and the search giant brought in 96% of its revenues in 2016 from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
It is easy to see why the format has such enduring appeal. Any business can get started and making money on AdWords in a few simple steps, with Google providing plentiful support along the way.
The business model is beautifully crafted to fulfill a marketer’s needs; you only pay when a user takes out your desired action (normally a click, a call, or a purchase), so the return on investment is clear and controlled.
Moreover, consumers are explicitly stating their intent when they search. If I owned a sleepwear store, for example, (and it’ll always be the dream), I would love to be front and center when my target audience searches for [buy lounging pants online]. AdWords allows us to do just that.
There’s more to AdWords’ lure than that, of course. Google processes well over 1 trillion searches per year, all of which are saleable assets to data-hungry brands and marketers.
Factor in the increasingly granular audience targeting and remarketing options Google can offer and the potency of this offering becomes very clear.
Although Google didn’t invent pay-per-click advertising, they certainly refined it and developed the proposition into a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar industry.
Its slick interface (recently upgraded to make it even more user-friendly) can get brands spending very quickly, but there is a subtle blend of art and science behind a successful PPC campaign.
Getting the basics right from day one can be the difference between an underwhelming PPC account and a very profitable one.
This guide is written with that aim in mind; to get beginners up and running on AdWords through a combination of definitions, tips, and best practices.
Although AdWords offers options for Display, Shopping, App, and Video campaigns, we will narrow our focus to AdWords Search campaigns within this article.
Quick Links:
Keyword and audience research
Keyword match types
Creating PPC ads
Setting up ad groups and campaigns
The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
Reviewing and optimizing performance
Stage 1: Keyword and audience research
The first stage of setting up an AdWords campaign is to understand the level of consumer demand for your brand and products. We can approach this by defining which business objectives we wish to deliver on by using paid search marketing to provide some structure to the process.
AdWords can be expensive, so consider where it fits in alongside your other marketing efforts. PPC and SEO are typically included within the same keyword strategy, given the obvious interplay between the two on search results pages. Often, PPC can cover gaps in SEO visibility or help to strengthen good SEO performance by doubling a brand’s presence for high-priority keywords.
This will become a more significant factor at the later stages of AdWords account setup, but it is a good idea to start thinking about how PPC fits alongside other marketing channels as early as possible.
Furthermore, there is a lot of work that can be done outside of the AdWords interface to get your PPC campaign off to a great start.
Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool, no doubt, but it is not the only resource we should look to for audience research. Before delving into the AdWords interface, marketers should:
Survey current customers: Find out what customers see as the brand’s unique proposition and what keeps them coming back to purchase.
Speak to the customer service team: Customer service teams hold invaluable data on the most frequent areas of strengths and weakness cited by consumers about the business. Use this information either to accentuate positives or counteract negative perceptions.
Strategize with other departments: Brainstorm some ideas about the brand, its products, and what exactly the company is hoping to achieve by using AdWords. Every department can score the proposed keyword categories by their level of importance to their business function, which helps to create a wider view on the PPC strategy beyond the digital marketing team.
Research the competition: Third party tools can give a really good sense of how your competitors are approaching paid search. This will help you to understand the landscape and also gain some tips on which keywords might be valuable additions to your list.
This will naturally lead to some core product names and concepts, which can be used to generate a keyword list and to shape ad copy tests at a later stage.
From here, we can enter the Google ecosystem and plug in our keywords to see the search volumes and projected costs for our campaigns. The AdWords keyword planner will reveal how frequently a keyword is searched and how much it typically costs when a user clicks on a paid listing.
Google will also automatically suggest a variety of relevant, popular keywords that are semantically linked to your seed list of terms.
It can be easy to get carried away, but stay focused on the essential volume drivers for your business. The account can always be expanded later, so start with a smaller set of keywords to get a sense of the market and familiarize yourself with AdWords.
We are fortunate to have both the technology and the data at our disposal today to go deeper than just bidding on keywords. Another level of segmentation can be added by including audience data on consumer demographics, interests, past website behavior, or location.
These will be explored later; for now, we have our initial list of keywords that we know our brand wants to advertise for.
Stage 2: Keyword match types
Of course, people don’t always search for the same products in exactly the same way. An identical search intent (to get more information or to buy something, for example) can be expressed using myriad terminologies.
Someone hoping to purchase lounging pants from a sleepwear store may search [buy lounging pants online], but they could also type or say [where can i buy lounging pants nearby], or simply [lounging pants].
If my objective is to sell more of this product, I don’t want to restrict my visibility to just a few of these variations. I want to match my brand to this purchase intent in as many relevant situations as possible.
That’s where keyword match types come in. Match types can both restrict visibility and allow Google’s technology to make decisions on our behalf about which keywords are relevant enough to display our ad.
Broad match
This match type, as the name suggests, allows most room for interpretation. I can tell Google that I want to bid on, and have my ads shown for, any search queries related to lounging pants and it will do so for terms as varied as [red mens pants for lounging] and [tartan lounging pants store near me]. My ad could also show for synonyms of my defined terms and for different combinations that include both of the specified words.
Phrase match
Phrase match provides more control for the advertiser. This time if I say I want to bid on “lounging pants” (phrase match keywords are always written within quotation marks), my ad can show up when these two words appear in this order, but they can be accompanied by other modifiers. For example, [lounging pants for women] or [stripy lounging pants] would be valid within this match type.
Exact match
Exact match is something of a misnomer. It lets advertisers specify the exact terms they want to be displayed against, but it is not 100% accurate. Google made some controversial changes earlier this year to the format, meaning that keyword targets set as exact match can show up against close variants of the defined term.
To go back to our imaginary sleepwear store, if I set [lounging pants nyc] (exact match phrases are always written between square brackets) as my target, I could have an ad served against [lounging pants in nyc] or even [nyc lounging pants]. That can be problematic, of course, and there is a script to make exact match, well, exact, here.
To get our account up and running Google’s out-of-the-box solution is fine, but inspect your search query reports to see how exact this match type has been.
For more on the differences between broad match, exact match and phrase match keywords, check out Amanda DiSilvestro’s guide to common PPC keyword mistakes.
Negatives
Negatives are an essential part of keyword setup. Negative matches allow us to specify any queries or modifiers that we categorically do not want to show against. For example, I may not want to display an ad for any lounging pants terms that include “used” or “second hand”, for obvious reasons.
I also may not sell certain brands, colors, or styles, so I can add these to my negatives list and upload them to AdWords. This brings an essential element of control for brands, as most companies have a clear idea both of how they do and do not want to be perceived by customers.
A combination of the above is usually best and the optimal balance between them can be found through testing and optimisation. Exact match is great for targeting, but it restricts reach. Broad match will get impressions, but they won’t always be the ones you want.
Tweaking the negatives list and shifting the focus on a keyword level between exact, phrase, and broad will yield good results to advertisers that pay close attention and are prepared to change tack.
Stage 3: Creating PPC ads
Now that we have defined the keywords we want to target and the match type variations we plan to utilize, we can start to create our ad copy. This is a really crucial element of AdWords setup and the right ad copy can significantly improve the click-through rate (CTR) your ads receive.
Even with the right targeting and the right bid strategy, there is no guarantee of traffic. Always consider why a prospect would stop and choose your brand over everything else calling for their attention on a search results page.
Google introduced a new standard for PPC ads, known as Expanded Text Ads (ETA), last year. As the name implies, these provide more scope for advertisers to communicate with their audience and they are designed with mobile devices in mind.
Expanded Text Ads are comprised of the following elements:
Headline: Two 30 character headline fields, which can appear side by side or on separate lines, depending on the size of a user’s screen.
Description: One 80 character field, within which you should try to highlight the core reasons prospects should engage with your ad over others.
Destination URL: This is the landing page users will be sent through to, so it is worth spending time testing different landing pages to see which perform best for specific queries. The destination URL will be tied directly to your Quality Score, which we will get to in the next section.
These fields will be displayed as follows within the AdWords interface:
A best practice in this area is to create 2 or 3 ad copy variations and test the effectiveness of each in a controlled environment.
Google has also created a helpful walk-through to help users navigate the platform as they create their ads:
youtube
Ad extensions
Advertisers have access to a wide variety of extensions, allowing them to highlight offers, benefits, or unique selling points to their intended audience. These also bring the advantage of taking up more space on search results pages, which can have a positive effect on click-through rate.
As we can see in the example below for the query [car insurance], advertisers are making the most of these new formats to take up as much valuable real estate as possible.
We won’t go into detail on ad extensions within this guide, but it is worth knowing that some appear automatically while others require input from advertisers before they show. You can read more here about the list of possible extensions.
Stage 4: Setting up ad groups and campaigns
We are now ready to start categorizing our keywords and ads into ad groups.
This can be achieved by separating out your products and services and creating an ad group for each. If we go back to our sleepwear example, we can illustrate a clear and logical approach for achieving this.
Each of these ad groups will have 2-3 ad copy variations, which can be updated on an ongoing basis as performance data arrives in the account. Each keyword, of course, can be set to the match types outlined above.
After I have tested out this product, I may decide to branch out into the pajama market. This is where we need to introduce the concept of campaigns, which sit at a level above both keywords and ad groups.
In a nutshell: keywords make up ad groups, and ad groups make up campaigns.
There is no obvious reward for starting with a huge array of ad groups; in fact, this lessens your level of control over performance. When getting set up, it is best to begin with a smaller sub-set of core products as this will help performance and allow you to learn from the data much faster.
Some marketers even prefer to isolate keywords into their own ad groups, if they are particularly profitable. This strategy brings a lot more control, but it is labor-intensive and restricts the amount of data that can be used for optimization within the ad group.
Stage 5: The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
The AdWords auction dictates how much you pay for each action and in which position your ad will show for the selected keywords.
First of all, it is important to know that AdWords operates as a sealed, second-price auction. This is explained clearly by Cornell University:
“The auction is a sealed-bid auction because advertisers do not know what other advertisers are bidding. The highest bidder wins the auction and gets their advertisement placed on specific pages for specific users, but pays the price of the second highest bidder plus $0.01. The $0.01 is to differentiate the highest bidder from the second highest bidder and to allow the highest advertiser to outbid the next highest bid.  This type of auction awards the advertiser with the highest bid but sells the advertisement slot to the highest advertiser at the price of the second highest bid.”
Therefore, what you bid is not always what you pay. A second consideration is that budgets are set as a daily limit; however, Google has recently decided to allow accounts to spend up to double this amount each day as long as they are still hitting their campaign targets.
This is evened out over the course of a month, and Google will never charge advertisers more than 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) times their daily budget. So if your account spends double the daily limit on a frequent basis early in the month, you could max out the budget rather quickly.
Luckily, there is a very helpful script that will allow you to keep some control over this.
Now, when it comes to bidding, we can split out the two main options as automated or manual.
Automated Bidding
Google uses a range of advanced machine learning technologies and rule-based automation to deliver maximum value to advertisers in its auctions. We can therefore tell Google what our objective is, how much we are willing to pay to achieve it, and let the algorithms do the bidding on our behalf.
That makes automated bidding sound appealing, but there are enough cautionary tales in the industry to suggest it must be approached with some reservation.
Ceding control to Google altogether can lead to very costly campaigns and, while setting a sensible ceiling on maximum bids can help, automated bidding can still lead to inefficient spend. Machine learning systems feed off data and learn from feedback, which means budget can be spent in a wide range of areas to gain this knowledge.
Manual bidding
For a beginner, manual bidding is a great way to start. This option provides control, quick feedback, and the ability to adjust bids quickly based on performance. Although it gets more difficult to stick with manual bidding as an account increases in size and complexity, nascent accounts with a small set of ad groups will benefit from this approach.
Google has also added the option to adjust bids based on a user’s device type. This welcome feature means marketers can increase their bids for specific queries on a mobile device, for example, if they know that this device type typically converts better than desktop. This is reflective of user behavior, as people tend to use their mobile and desktop for different purposes.
Quality score
Quality Score is a fundamental aspect of Google AdWords bidding, as it will dictate how much a brand pays for clicks. The intention behind Quality Score is simple: Google wants to ensure that relevant ads show against its searches and also wants to deter low-quality websites from manipulating the system to gain high ranking positions.
AdWords depends on its high quantity of searches, after all, so Google needs to ensure users have a positive searching experience or they may take their business elsewhere.
The exact formula behind Quality Score is not publicly known, but we can make some safe assumptions. The score is on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being given to irrelevant ads and landing pages, and 10 awarded to brands that match the user’s intent with a relevant ad and a great landing page experience.
Quality Score is calculated at a keyword level, so you could even see different scores within the same ad group. Again, there is plenty of room for experimentation and it is worth the work, as a high Quality Score can make your budget go a lot further.
Wordstream created a helpful image to illustrate how this works:
Ad Rank is explained in more detail here, but suffice to say this metric determines which position your ads will appear in on search results pages.
Google recently added a long-awaited feature that allows advertisers to view historical Quality Score, which now allows us to view any positive or negative trends over time. There is plenty more information on Historical Quality Score in this thorough guide.
Stage 6: Reviewing and optimizing performance
To get the best possible results from Google AdWords, marketers need to keep a close eye on their performance and be prepared to make adjustments. There are four metrics in particular to keep abreast of, which can be segmented by dimensions such as device type, demographic factors, or location.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks/Impressions
Conversion rate (CVR): Conversions/Clicks
Cost-per-click (CPC): Spend/Clicks
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Spend/Conversions
The steps outlined above will get your AdWords campaign up and running with the right foundations in place. There is a huge amount more to this platform and advertisers are rewarded for investing the time in more advanced features.
However, this all starts with the basics and as long as marketers monitor performance and are open to new strategies, the more complex pieces will naturally fall into place over time.
Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm
0 notes
kellykperez · 7 years
Text
Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide
Google AdWords is a staple platform for the vast majority of digital marketing strategies. However, marketers need to get things right from the outset to avoid costly inefficiencies.
This guide will provide everything you need to know to get an AdWords account up and running, and set for success. 
The digital marketing industry has grown in tandem with Google AdWords, to the extent that the two are linked inextricably.
Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US 42 cents goes to Google, and the search giant brought in 96% of its revenues in 2016 from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
It is easy to see why the format has such enduring appeal. Any business can get started and making money on AdWords in a few simple steps, with Google providing plentiful support along the way.
The business model is beautifully crafted to fulfill a marketer’s needs; you only pay when a user takes out your desired action (normally a click, a call, or a purchase), so the return on investment is clear and controlled.
Moreover, consumers are explicitly stating their intent when they search. If I owned a sleepwear store, for example, (and it’ll always be the dream), I would love to be front and center when my target audience searches for [buy lounging pants online]. AdWords allows us to do just that.
There’s more to AdWords’ lure than that, of course. Google processes well over 1 trillion searches per year, all of which are saleable assets to data-hungry brands and marketers.
Factor in the increasingly granular audience targeting and remarketing options Google can offer and the potency of this offering becomes very clear.
Although Google didn’t invent pay-per-click advertising, they certainly refined it and developed the proposition into a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar industry.
Its slick interface (recently upgraded to make it even more user-friendly) can get brands spending very quickly, but there is a subtle blend of art and science behind a successful PPC campaign.
Getting the basics right from day one can be the difference between an underwhelming PPC account and a very profitable one.
This guide is written with that aim in mind; to get beginners up and running on AdWords through a combination of definitions, tips, and best practices.
Although AdWords offers options for Display, Shopping, App, and Video campaigns, we will narrow our focus to AdWords Search campaigns within this article.
Quick Links:
Keyword and audience research
Keyword match types
Creating PPC ads
Setting up ad groups and campaigns
The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
Reviewing and optimizing performance
Stage 1: Keyword and audience research
The first stage of setting up an AdWords campaign is to understand the level of consumer demand for your brand and products. We can approach this by defining which business objectives we wish to deliver on by using paid search marketing to provide some structure to the process.
AdWords can be expensive, so consider where it fits in alongside your other marketing efforts. PPC and SEO are typically included within the same keyword strategy, given the obvious interplay between the two on search results pages. Often, PPC can cover gaps in SEO visibility or help to strengthen good SEO performance by doubling a brand’s presence for high-priority keywords.
This will become a more significant factor at the later stages of AdWords account setup, but it is a good idea to start thinking about how PPC fits alongside other marketing channels as early as possible.
Furthermore, there is a lot of work that can be done outside of the AdWords interface to get your PPC campaign off to a great start.
Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool, no doubt, but it is not the only resource we should look to for audience research. Before delving into the AdWords interface, marketers should:
Survey current customers: Find out what customers see as the brand’s unique proposition and what keeps them coming back to purchase.
Speak to the customer service team: Customer service teams hold invaluable data on the most frequent areas of strengths and weakness cited by consumers about the business. Use this information either to accentuate positives or counteract negative perceptions.
Strategize with other departments: Brainstorm some ideas about the brand, its products, and what exactly the company is hoping to achieve by using AdWords. Every department can score the proposed keyword categories by their level of importance to their business function, which helps to create a wider view on the PPC strategy beyond the digital marketing team.
Research the competition: Third party tools can give a really good sense of how your competitors are approaching paid search. This will help you to understand the landscape and also gain some tips on which keywords might be valuable additions to your list.
This will naturally lead to some core product names and concepts, which can be used to generate a keyword list and to shape ad copy tests at a later stage.
From here, we can enter the Google ecosystem and plug in our keywords to see the search volumes and projected costs for our campaigns. The AdWords keyword planner will reveal how frequently a keyword is searched and how much it typically costs when a user clicks on a paid listing.
Google will also automatically suggest a variety of relevant, popular keywords that are semantically linked to your seed list of terms.
It can be easy to get carried away, but stay focused on the essential volume drivers for your business. The account can always be expanded later, so start with a smaller set of keywords to get a sense of the market and familiarize yourself with AdWords.
We are fortunate to have both the technology and the data at our disposal today to go deeper than just bidding on keywords. Another level of segmentation can be added by including audience data on consumer demographics, interests, past website behavior, or location.
These will be explored later; for now, we have our initial list of keywords that we know our brand wants to advertise for.
Stage 2: Keyword match types
Of course, people don’t always search for the same products in exactly the same way. An identical search intent (to get more information or to buy something, for example) can be expressed using myriad terminologies.
Someone hoping to purchase lounging pants from a sleepwear store may search [buy lounging pants online], but they could also type or say [where can i buy lounging pants nearby], or simply [lounging pants].
If my objective is to sell more of this product, I don’t want to restrict my visibility to just a few of these variations. I want to match my brand to this purchase intent in as many relevant situations as possible.
That’s where keyword match types come in. Match types can both restrict visibility and allow Google’s technology to make decisions on our behalf about which keywords are relevant enough to display our ad.
Broad match
This match type, as the name suggests, allows most room for interpretation. I can tell Google that I want to bid on, and have my ads shown for, any search queries related to lounging pants and it will do so for terms as varied as [red mens pants for lounging] and [tartan lounging pants store near me]. My ad could also show for synonyms of my defined terms and for different combinations that include both of the specified words.
Phrase match
Phrase match provides more control for the advertiser. This time if I say I want to bid on “lounging pants” (phrase match keywords are always written within quotation marks), my ad can show up when these two words appear in this order, but they can be accompanied by other modifiers. For example, [lounging pants for women] or [stripy lounging pants] would be valid within this match type.
Exact match
Exact match is something of a misnomer. It lets advertisers specify the exact terms they want to be displayed against, but it is not 100% accurate. Google made some controversial changes earlier this year to the format, meaning that keyword targets set as exact match can show up against close variants of the defined term.
To go back to our imaginary sleepwear store, if I set [lounging pants nyc] (exact match phrases are always written between square brackets) as my target, I could have an ad served against [lounging pants in nyc] or even [nyc lounging pants]. That can be problematic, of course, and there is a script to make exact match, well, exact, here.
To get our account up and running Google’s out-of-the-box solution is fine, but inspect your search query reports to see how exact this match type has been.
For more on the differences between broad match, exact match and phrase match keywords, check out Amanda DiSilvestro’s guide to common PPC keyword mistakes.
Negatives
Negatives are an essential part of keyword setup. Negative matches allow us to specify any queries or modifiers that we categorically do not want to show against. For example, I may not want to display an ad for any lounging pants terms that include “used” or “second hand”, for obvious reasons.
I also may not sell certain brands, colors, or styles, so I can add these to my negatives list and upload them to AdWords. This brings an essential element of control for brands, as most companies have a clear idea both of how they do and do not want to be perceived by customers.
A combination of the above is usually best and the optimal balance between them can be found through testing and optimisation. Exact match is great for targeting, but it restricts reach. Broad match will get impressions, but they won’t always be the ones you want.
Tweaking the negatives list and shifting the focus on a keyword level between exact, phrase, and broad will yield good results to advertisers that pay close attention and are prepared to change tack.
Stage 3: Creating PPC ads
Now that we have defined the keywords we want to target and the match type variations we plan to utilize, we can start to create our ad copy. This is a really crucial element of AdWords setup and the right ad copy can significantly improve the click-through rate (CTR) your ads receive.
Even with the right targeting and the right bid strategy, there is no guarantee of traffic. Always consider why a prospect would stop and choose your brand over everything else calling for their attention on a search results page.
Google introduced a new standard for PPC ads, known as Expanded Text Ads (ETA), last year. As the name implies, these provide more scope for advertisers to communicate with their audience and they are designed with mobile devices in mind.
Expanded Text Ads are comprised of the following elements:
Headline: Two 30 character headline fields, which can appear side by side or on separate lines, depending on the size of a user’s screen.
Description: One 80 character field, within which you should try to highlight the core reasons prospects should engage with your ad over others.
Destination URL: This is the landing page users will be sent through to, so it is worth spending time testing different landing pages to see which perform best for specific queries. The destination URL will be tied directly to your Quality Score, which we will get to in the next section.
These fields will be displayed as follows within the AdWords interface:
A best practice in this area is to create 2 or 3 ad copy variations and test the effectiveness of each in a controlled environment.
Google has also created a helpful walk-through to help users navigate the platform as they create their ads:
youtube
Ad extensions
Advertisers have access to a wide variety of extensions, allowing them to highlight offers, benefits, or unique selling points to their intended audience. These also bring the advantage of taking up more space on search results pages, which can have a positive effect on click-through rate.
As we can see in the example below for the query [car insurance], advertisers are making the most of these new formats to take up as much valuable real estate as possible.
We won’t go into detail on ad extensions within this guide, but it is worth knowing that some appear automatically while others require input from advertisers before they show. You can read more here about the list of possible extensions.
Stage 4: Setting up ad groups and campaigns
We are now ready to start categorizing our keywords and ads into ad groups.
This can be achieved by separating out your products and services and creating an ad group for each. If we go back to our sleepwear example, we can illustrate a clear and logical approach for achieving this.
Each of these ad groups will have 2-3 ad copy variations, which can be updated on an ongoing basis as performance data arrives in the account. Each keyword, of course, can be set to the match types outlined above.
After I have tested out this product, I may decide to branch out into the pajama market. This is where we need to introduce the concept of campaigns, which sit at a level above both keywords and ad groups.
In a nutshell: keywords make up ad groups, and ad groups make up campaigns.
There is no obvious reward for starting with a huge array of ad groups; in fact, this lessens your level of control over performance. When getting set up, it is best to begin with a smaller sub-set of core products as this will help performance and allow you to learn from the data much faster.
Some marketers even prefer to isolate keywords into their own ad groups, if they are particularly profitable. This strategy brings a lot more control, but it is labor-intensive and restricts the amount of data that can be used for optimization within the ad group.
Stage 5: The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
The AdWords auction dictates how much you pay for each action and in which position your ad will show for the selected keywords.
First of all, it is important to know that AdWords operates as a sealed, second-price auction. This is explained clearly by Cornell University:
“The auction is a sealed-bid auction because advertisers do not know what other advertisers are bidding. The highest bidder wins the auction and gets their advertisement placed on specific pages for specific users, but pays the price of the second highest bidder plus $0.01. The $0.01 is to differentiate the highest bidder from the second highest bidder and to allow the highest advertiser to outbid the next highest bid.  This type of auction awards the advertiser with the highest bid but sells the advertisement slot to the highest advertiser at the price of the second highest bid.”
Therefore, what you bid is not always what you pay. A second consideration is that budgets are set as a daily limit; however, Google has recently decided to allow accounts to spend up to double this amount each day as long as they are still hitting their campaign targets.
This is evened out over the course of a month, and Google will never charge advertisers more than 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) times their daily budget. So if your account spends double the daily limit on a frequent basis early in the month, you could max out the budget rather quickly.
Luckily, there is a very helpful script that will allow you to keep some control over this.
Now, when it comes to bidding, we can split out the two main options as automated or manual.
Automated Bidding
Google uses a range of advanced machine learning technologies and rule-based automation to deliver maximum value to advertisers in its auctions. We can therefore tell Google what our objective is, how much we are willing to pay to achieve it, and let the algorithms do the bidding on our behalf.
That makes automated bidding sound appealing, but there are enough cautionary tales in the industry to suggest it must be approached with some reservation.
Ceding control to Google altogether can lead to very costly campaigns and, while setting a sensible ceiling on maximum bids can help, automated bidding can still lead to inefficient spend. Machine learning systems feed off data and learn from feedback, which means budget can be spent in a wide range of areas to gain this knowledge.
Manual bidding
For a beginner, manual bidding is a great way to start. This option provides control, quick feedback, and the ability to adjust bids quickly based on performance. Although it gets more difficult to stick with manual bidding as an account increases in size and complexity, nascent accounts with a small set of ad groups will benefit from this approach.
Google has also added the option to adjust bids based on a user’s device type. This welcome feature means marketers can increase their bids for specific queries on a mobile device, for example, if they know that this device type typically converts better than desktop. This is reflective of user behavior, as people tend to use their mobile and desktop for different purposes.
Quality score
Quality Score is a fundamental aspect of Google AdWords bidding, as it will dictate how much a brand pays for clicks. The intention behind Quality Score is simple: Google wants to ensure that relevant ads show against its searches and also wants to deter low-quality websites from manipulating the system to gain high ranking positions.
AdWords depends on its high quantity of searches, after all, so Google needs to ensure users have a positive searching experience or they may take their business elsewhere.
The exact formula behind Quality Score is not publicly known, but we can make some safe assumptions. The score is on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being given to irrelevant ads and landing pages, and 10 awarded to brands that match the user’s intent with a relevant ad and a great landing page experience.
Quality Score is calculated at a keyword level, so you could even see different scores within the same ad group. Again, there is plenty of room for experimentation and it is worth the work, as a high Quality Score can make your budget go a lot further.
Wordstream created a helpful image to illustrate how this works:
Ad Rank is explained in more detail here, but suffice to say this metric determines which position your ads will appear in on search results pages.
Google recently added a long-awaited feature that allows advertisers to view historical Quality Score, which now allows us to view any positive or negative trends over time. There is plenty more information on Historical Quality Score in this thorough guide.
Stage 6: Reviewing and optimizing performance
To get the best possible results from Google AdWords, marketers need to keep a close eye on their performance and be prepared to make adjustments. There are four metrics in particular to keep abreast of, which can be segmented by dimensions such as device type, demographic factors, or location.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks/Impressions
Conversion rate (CVR): Conversions/Clicks
Cost-per-click (CPC): Spend/Clicks
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Spend/Conversions
The steps outlined above will get your AdWords campaign up and running with the right foundations in place. There is a huge amount more to this platform and advertisers are rewarded for investing the time in more advanced features.
However, this all starts with the basics and as long as marketers monitor performance and are open to new strategies, the more complex pieces will naturally fall into place over time.
source https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/10/17/google-adwords-the-beginners-guide/ from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2017/10/google-adwords-beginners-guide.html
0 notes
alanajacksontx · 7 years
Text
Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide
Google AdWords is a staple platform for the vast majority of digital marketing strategies. However, marketers need to get things right from the outset to avoid costly inefficiencies.
This guide will provide everything you need to know to get an AdWords account up and running, and set for success. 
The digital marketing industry has grown in tandem with Google AdWords, to the extent that the two are linked inextricably.
Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US 42 cents goes to Google, and the search giant brought in 96% of its revenues in 2016 from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
It is easy to see why the format has such enduring appeal. Any business can get started and making money on AdWords in a few simple steps, with Google providing plentiful support along the way.
The business model is beautifully crafted to fulfill a marketer’s needs; you only pay when a user takes out your desired action (normally a click, a call, or a purchase), so the return on investment is clear and controlled.
Moreover, consumers are explicitly stating their intent when they search. If I owned a sleepwear store, for example, (and it’ll always be the dream), I would love to be front and center when my target audience searches for [buy lounging pants online]. AdWords allows us to do just that.
There’s more to AdWords’ lure than that, of course. Google processes well over 1 trillion searches per year, all of which are saleable assets to data-hungry brands and marketers.
Factor in the increasingly granular audience targeting and remarketing options Google can offer and the potency of this offering becomes very clear.
Although Google didn’t invent pay-per-click advertising, they certainly refined it and developed the proposition into a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar industry.
Its slick interface (recently upgraded to make it even more user-friendly) can get brands spending very quickly, but there is a subtle blend of art and science behind a successful PPC campaign.
Getting the basics right from day one can be the difference between an underwhelming PPC account and a very profitable one.
This guide is written with that aim in mind; to get beginners up and running on AdWords through a combination of definitions, tips, and best practices.
Although AdWords offers options for Display, Shopping, App, and Video campaigns, we will narrow our focus to AdWords Search campaigns within this article.
Quick Links:
Keyword and audience research
Keyword match types
Creating PPC ads
Setting up ad groups and campaigns
The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
Reviewing and optimizing performance
Stage 1: Keyword and audience research
The first stage of setting up an AdWords campaign is to understand the level of consumer demand for your brand and products. We can approach this by defining which business objectives we wish to deliver on by using paid search marketing to provide some structure to the process.
AdWords can be expensive, so consider where it fits in alongside your other marketing efforts. PPC and SEO are typically included within the same keyword strategy, given the obvious interplay between the two on search results pages. Often, PPC can cover gaps in SEO visibility or help to strengthen good SEO performance by doubling a brand’s presence for high-priority keywords.
This will become a more significant factor at the later stages of AdWords account setup, but it is a good idea to start thinking about how PPC fits alongside other marketing channels as early as possible.
Furthermore, there is a lot of work that can be done outside of the AdWords interface to get your PPC campaign off to a great start.
Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool, no doubt, but it is not the only resource we should look to for audience research. Before delving into the AdWords interface, marketers should:
Survey current customers: Find out what customers see as the brand’s unique proposition and what keeps them coming back to purchase.
Speak to the customer service team: Customer service teams hold invaluable data on the most frequent areas of strengths and weakness cited by consumers about the business. Use this information either to accentuate positives or counteract negative perceptions.
Strategize with other departments: Brainstorm some ideas about the brand, its products, and what exactly the company is hoping to achieve by using AdWords. Every department can score the proposed keyword categories by their level of importance to their business function, which helps to create a wider view on the PPC strategy beyond the digital marketing team.
Research the competition: Third party tools can give a really good sense of how your competitors are approaching paid search. This will help you to understand the landscape and also gain some tips on which keywords might be valuable additions to your list.
This will naturally lead to some core product names and concepts, which can be used to generate a keyword list and to shape ad copy tests at a later stage.
From here, we can enter the Google ecosystem and plug in our keywords to see the search volumes and projected costs for our campaigns. The AdWords keyword planner will reveal how frequently a keyword is searched and how much it typically costs when a user clicks on a paid listing.
Google will also automatically suggest a variety of relevant, popular keywords that are semantically linked to your seed list of terms.
It can be easy to get carried away, but stay focused on the essential volume drivers for your business. The account can always be expanded later, so start with a smaller set of keywords to get a sense of the market and familiarize yourself with AdWords.
We are fortunate to have both the technology and the data at our disposal today to go deeper than just bidding on keywords. Another level of segmentation can be added by including audience data on consumer demographics, interests, past website behavior, or location.
These will be explored later; for now, we have our initial list of keywords that we know our brand wants to advertise for.
Stage 2: Keyword match types
Of course, people don’t always search for the same products in exactly the same way. An identical search intent (to get more information or to buy something, for example) can be expressed using myriad terminologies.
Someone hoping to purchase lounging pants from a sleepwear store may search [buy lounging pants online], but they could also type or say [where can i buy lounging pants nearby], or simply [lounging pants].
If my objective is to sell more of this product, I don’t want to restrict my visibility to just a few of these variations. I want to match my brand to this purchase intent in as many relevant situations as possible.
That’s where keyword match types come in. Match types can both restrict visibility and allow Google’s technology to make decisions on our behalf about which keywords are relevant enough to display our ad.
Broad match
This match type, as the name suggests, allows most room for interpretation. I can tell Google that I want to bid on, and have my ads shown for, any search queries related to lounging pants and it will do so for terms as varied as [red mens pants for lounging] and [tartan lounging pants store near me]. My ad could also show for synonyms of my defined terms and for different combinations that include both of the specified words.
Phrase match
Phrase match provides more control for the advertiser. This time if I say I want to bid on “lounging pants” (phrase match keywords are always written within quotation marks), my ad can show up when these two words appear in this order, but they can be accompanied by other modifiers. For example, [lounging pants for women] or [stripy lounging pants] would be valid within this match type.
Exact match
Exact match is something of a misnomer. It lets advertisers specify the exact terms they want to be displayed against, but it is not 100% accurate. Google made some controversial changes earlier this year to the format, meaning that keyword targets set as exact match can show up against close variants of the defined term.
To go back to our imaginary sleepwear store, if I set [lounging pants nyc] (exact match phrases are always written between square brackets) as my target, I could have an ad served against [lounging pants in nyc] or even [nyc lounging pants]. That can be problematic, of course, and there is a script to make exact match, well, exact, here.
To get our account up and running Google’s out-of-the-box solution is fine, but inspect your search query reports to see how exact this match type has been.
For more on the differences between broad match, exact match and phrase match keywords, check out Amanda DiSilvestro’s guide to common PPC keyword mistakes.
Negatives
Negatives are an essential part of keyword setup. Negative matches allow us to specify any queries or modifiers that we categorically do not want to show against. For example, I may not want to display an ad for any lounging pants terms that include “used” or “second hand”, for obvious reasons.
I also may not sell certain brands, colors, or styles, so I can add these to my negatives list and upload them to AdWords. This brings an essential element of control for brands, as most companies have a clear idea both of how they do and do not want to be perceived by customers.
A combination of the above is usually best and the optimal balance between them can be found through testing and optimisation. Exact match is great for targeting, but it restricts reach. Broad match will get impressions, but they won’t always be the ones you want.
Tweaking the negatives list and shifting the focus on a keyword level between exact, phrase, and broad will yield good results to advertisers that pay close attention and are prepared to change tack.
Stage 3: Creating PPC ads
Now that we have defined the keywords we want to target and the match type variations we plan to utilize, we can start to create our ad copy. This is a really crucial element of AdWords setup and the right ad copy can significantly improve the click-through rate (CTR) your ads receive.
Even with the right targeting and the right bid strategy, there is no guarantee of traffic. Always consider why a prospect would stop and choose your brand over everything else calling for their attention on a search results page.
Google introduced a new standard for PPC ads, known as Expanded Text Ads (ETA), last year. As the name implies, these provide more scope for advertisers to communicate with their audience and they are designed with mobile devices in mind.
Expanded Text Ads are comprised of the following elements:
Headline: Two 30 character headline fields, which can appear side by side or on separate lines, depending on the size of a user’s screen.
Description: One 80 character field, within which you should try to highlight the core reasons prospects should engage with your ad over others.
Destination URL: This is the landing page users will be sent through to, so it is worth spending time testing different landing pages to see which perform best for specific queries. The destination URL will be tied directly to your Quality Score, which we will get to in the next section.
These fields will be displayed as follows within the AdWords interface:
A best practice in this area is to create 2 or 3 ad copy variations and test the effectiveness of each in a controlled environment.
Google has also created a helpful walk-through to help users navigate the platform as they create their ads:
youtube
Ad extensions
Advertisers have access to a wide variety of extensions, allowing them to highlight offers, benefits, or unique selling points to their intended audience. These also bring the advantage of taking up more space on search results pages, which can have a positive effect on click-through rate.
As we can see in the example below for the query [car insurance], advertisers are making the most of these new formats to take up as much valuable real estate as possible.
We won’t go into detail on ad extensions within this guide, but it is worth knowing that some appear automatically while others require input from advertisers before they show. You can read more here about the list of possible extensions.
Stage 4: Setting up ad groups and campaigns
We are now ready to start categorizing our keywords and ads into ad groups.
This can be achieved by separating out your products and services and creating an ad group for each. If we go back to our sleepwear example, we can illustrate a clear and logical approach for achieving this.
Each of these ad groups will have 2-3 ad copy variations, which can be updated on an ongoing basis as performance data arrives in the account. Each keyword, of course, can be set to the match types outlined above.
After I have tested out this product, I may decide to branch out into the pajama market. This is where we need to introduce the concept of campaigns, which sit at a level above both keywords and ad groups.
In a nutshell: keywords make up ad groups, and ad groups make up campaigns.
There is no obvious reward for starting with a huge array of ad groups; in fact, this lessens your level of control over performance. When getting set up, it is best to begin with a smaller sub-set of core products as this will help performance and allow you to learn from the data much faster.
Some marketers even prefer to isolate keywords into their own ad groups, if they are particularly profitable. This strategy brings a lot more control, but it is labor-intensive and restricts the amount of data that can be used for optimization within the ad group.
Stage 5: The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
The AdWords auction dictates how much you pay for each action and in which position your ad will show for the selected keywords.
First of all, it is important to know that AdWords operates as a sealed, second-price auction. This is explained clearly by Cornell University:
“The auction is a sealed-bid auction because advertisers do not know what other advertisers are bidding. The highest bidder wins the auction and gets their advertisement placed on specific pages for specific users, but pays the price of the second highest bidder plus $0.01. The $0.01 is to differentiate the highest bidder from the second highest bidder and to allow the highest advertiser to outbid the next highest bid.  This type of auction awards the advertiser with the highest bid but sells the advertisement slot to the highest advertiser at the price of the second highest bid.”
Therefore, what you bid is not always what you pay. A second consideration is that budgets are set as a daily limit; however, Google has recently decided to allow accounts to spend up to double this amount each day as long as they are still hitting their campaign targets.
This is evened out over the course of a month, and Google will never charge advertisers more than 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) times their daily budget. So if your account spends double the daily limit on a frequent basis early in the month, you could max out the budget rather quickly.
Luckily, there is a very helpful script that will allow you to keep some control over this.
Now, when it comes to bidding, we can split out the two main options as automated or manual.
Automated Bidding
Google uses a range of advanced machine learning technologies and rule-based automation to deliver maximum value to advertisers in its auctions. We can therefore tell Google what our objective is, how much we are willing to pay to achieve it, and let the algorithms do the bidding on our behalf.
That makes automated bidding sound appealing, but there are enough cautionary tales in the industry to suggest it must be approached with some reservation.
Ceding control to Google altogether can lead to very costly campaigns and, while setting a sensible ceiling on maximum bids can help, automated bidding can still lead to inefficient spend. Machine learning systems feed off data and learn from feedback, which means budget can be spent in a wide range of areas to gain this knowledge.
Manual bidding
For a beginner, manual bidding is a great way to start. This option provides control, quick feedback, and the ability to adjust bids quickly based on performance. Although it gets more difficult to stick with manual bidding as an account increases in size and complexity, nascent accounts with a small set of ad groups will benefit from this approach.
Google has also added the option to adjust bids based on a user’s device type. This welcome feature means marketers can increase their bids for specific queries on a mobile device, for example, if they know that this device type typically converts better than desktop. This is reflective of user behavior, as people tend to use their mobile and desktop for different purposes.
Quality score
Quality Score is a fundamental aspect of Google AdWords bidding, as it will dictate how much a brand pays for clicks. The intention behind Quality Score is simple: Google wants to ensure that relevant ads show against its searches and also wants to deter low-quality websites from manipulating the system to gain high ranking positions.
AdWords depends on its high quantity of searches, after all, so Google needs to ensure users have a positive searching experience or they may take their business elsewhere.
The exact formula behind Quality Score is not publicly known, but we can make some safe assumptions. The score is on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being given to irrelevant ads and landing pages, and 10 awarded to brands that match the user’s intent with a relevant ad and a great landing page experience.
Quality Score is calculated at a keyword level, so you could even see different scores within the same ad group. Again, there is plenty of room for experimentation and it is worth the work, as a high Quality Score can make your budget go a lot further.
Wordstream created a helpful image to illustrate how this works:
Ad Rank is explained in more detail here, but suffice to say this metric determines which position your ads will appear in on search results pages.
Google recently added a long-awaited feature that allows advertisers to view historical Quality Score, which now allows us to view any positive or negative trends over time. There is plenty more information on Historical Quality Score in this thorough guide.
Stage 6: Reviewing and optimizing performance
To get the best possible results from Google AdWords, marketers need to keep a close eye on their performance and be prepared to make adjustments. There are four metrics in particular to keep abreast of, which can be segmented by dimensions such as device type, demographic factors, or location.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks/Impressions
Conversion rate (CVR): Conversions/Clicks
Cost-per-click (CPC): Spend/Clicks
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Spend/Conversions
The steps outlined above will get your AdWords campaign up and running with the right foundations in place. There is a huge amount more to this platform and advertisers are rewarded for investing the time in more advanced features.
However, this all starts with the basics and as long as marketers monitor performance and are open to new strategies, the more complex pieces will naturally fall into place over time.
from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/10/17/google-adwords-the-beginners-guide/ from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/166500444480
0 notes
sheilalmartinia · 7 years
Text
Google AdWords: The Beginner’s Guide
Google AdWords is a staple platform for the vast majority of digital marketing strategies. However, marketers need to get things right from the outset to avoid costly inefficiencies.
This guide will provide everything you need to know to get an AdWords account up and running, and set for success. 
The digital marketing industry has grown in tandem with Google AdWords, to the extent that the two are linked inextricably.
Of every dollar spent on digital advertising in the US 42 cents goes to Google, and the search giant brought in 96% of its revenues in 2016 from pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
It is easy to see why the format has such enduring appeal. Any business can get started and making money on AdWords in a few simple steps, with Google providing plentiful support along the way.
The business model is beautifully crafted to fulfill a marketer’s needs; you only pay when a user takes out your desired action (normally a click, a call, or a purchase), so the return on investment is clear and controlled.
Moreover, consumers are explicitly stating their intent when they search. If I owned a sleepwear store, for example, (and it’ll always be the dream), I would love to be front and center when my target audience searches for [buy lounging pants online]. AdWords allows us to do just that.
There’s more to AdWords’ lure than that, of course. Google processes well over 1 trillion searches per year, all of which are saleable assets to data-hungry brands and marketers.
Factor in the increasingly granular audience targeting and remarketing options Google can offer and the potency of this offering becomes very clear.
Although Google didn’t invent pay-per-click advertising, they certainly refined it and developed the proposition into a sophisticated, multi-billion dollar industry.
Its slick interface (recently upgraded to make it even more user-friendly) can get brands spending very quickly, but there is a subtle blend of art and science behind a successful PPC campaign.
Getting the basics right from day one can be the difference between an underwhelming PPC account and a very profitable one.
This guide is written with that aim in mind; to get beginners up and running on AdWords through a combination of definitions, tips, and best practices.
Although AdWords offers options for Display, Shopping, App, and Video campaigns, we will narrow our focus to AdWords Search campaigns within this article.
Quick Links:
Keyword and audience research
Keyword match types
Creating PPC ads
Setting up ad groups and campaigns
The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
Reviewing and optimizing performance
Stage 1: Keyword and audience research
The first stage of setting up an AdWords campaign is to understand the level of consumer demand for your brand and products. We can approach this by defining which business objectives we wish to deliver on by using paid search marketing to provide some structure to the process.
AdWords can be expensive, so consider where it fits in alongside your other marketing efforts. PPC and SEO are typically included within the same keyword strategy, given the obvious interplay between the two on search results pages. Often, PPC can cover gaps in SEO visibility or help to strengthen good SEO performance by doubling a brand’s presence for high-priority keywords.
This will become a more significant factor at the later stages of AdWords account setup, but it is a good idea to start thinking about how PPC fits alongside other marketing channels as early as possible.
Furthermore, there is a lot of work that can be done outside of the AdWords interface to get your PPC campaign off to a great start.
Google Keyword Planner is a useful tool, no doubt, but it is not the only resource we should look to for audience research. Before delving into the AdWords interface, marketers should:
Survey current customers: Find out what customers see as the brand’s unique proposition and what keeps them coming back to purchase.
Speak to the customer service team: Customer service teams hold invaluable data on the most frequent areas of strengths and weakness cited by consumers about the business. Use this information either to accentuate positives or counteract negative perceptions.
Strategize with other departments: Brainstorm some ideas about the brand, its products, and what exactly the company is hoping to achieve by using AdWords. Every department can score the proposed keyword categories by their level of importance to their business function, which helps to create a wider view on the PPC strategy beyond the digital marketing team.
Research the competition: Third party tools can give a really good sense of how your competitors are approaching paid search. This will help you to understand the landscape and also gain some tips on which keywords might be valuable additions to your list.
This will naturally lead to some core product names and concepts, which can be used to generate a keyword list and to shape ad copy tests at a later stage.
From here, we can enter the Google ecosystem and plug in our keywords to see the search volumes and projected costs for our campaigns. The AdWords keyword planner will reveal how frequently a keyword is searched and how much it typically costs when a user clicks on a paid listing.
Google will also automatically suggest a variety of relevant, popular keywords that are semantically linked to your seed list of terms.
It can be easy to get carried away, but stay focused on the essential volume drivers for your business. The account can always be expanded later, so start with a smaller set of keywords to get a sense of the market and familiarize yourself with AdWords.
We are fortunate to have both the technology and the data at our disposal today to go deeper than just bidding on keywords. Another level of segmentation can be added by including audience data on consumer demographics, interests, past website behavior, or location.
These will be explored later; for now, we have our initial list of keywords that we know our brand wants to advertise for.
Stage 2: Keyword match types
Of course, people don’t always search for the same products in exactly the same way. An identical search intent (to get more information or to buy something, for example) can be expressed using myriad terminologies.
Someone hoping to purchase lounging pants from a sleepwear store may search [buy lounging pants online], but they could also type or say [where can i buy lounging pants nearby], or simply [lounging pants].
If my objective is to sell more of this product, I don’t want to restrict my visibility to just a few of these variations. I want to match my brand to this purchase intent in as many relevant situations as possible.
That’s where keyword match types come in. Match types can both restrict visibility and allow Google’s technology to make decisions on our behalf about which keywords are relevant enough to display our ad.
Broad match
This match type, as the name suggests, allows most room for interpretation. I can tell Google that I want to bid on, and have my ads shown for, any search queries related to lounging pants and it will do so for terms as varied as [red mens pants for lounging] and [tartan lounging pants store near me]. My ad could also show for synonyms of my defined terms and for different combinations that include both of the specified words.
Phrase match
Phrase match provides more control for the advertiser. This time if I say I want to bid on “lounging pants” (phrase match keywords are always written within quotation marks), my ad can show up when these two words appear in this order, but they can be accompanied by other modifiers. For example, [lounging pants for women] or [stripy lounging pants] would be valid within this match type.
Exact match
Exact match is something of a misnomer. It lets advertisers specify the exact terms they want to be displayed against, but it is not 100% accurate. Google made some controversial changes earlier this year to the format, meaning that keyword targets set as exact match can show up against close variants of the defined term.
To go back to our imaginary sleepwear store, if I set [lounging pants nyc] (exact match phrases are always written between square brackets) as my target, I could have an ad served against [lounging pants in nyc] or even [nyc lounging pants]. That can be problematic, of course, and there is a script to make exact match, well, exact, here.
To get our account up and running Google’s out-of-the-box solution is fine, but inspect your search query reports to see how exact this match type has been.
For more on the differences between broad match, exact match and phrase match keywords, check out Amanda DiSilvestro’s guide to common PPC keyword mistakes.
Negatives
Negatives are an essential part of keyword setup. Negative matches allow us to specify any queries or modifiers that we categorically do not want to show against. For example, I may not want to display an ad for any lounging pants terms that include “used” or “second hand”, for obvious reasons.
I also may not sell certain brands, colors, or styles, so I can add these to my negatives list and upload them to AdWords. This brings an essential element of control for brands, as most companies have a clear idea both of how they do and do not want to be perceived by customers.
A combination of the above is usually best and the optimal balance between them can be found through testing and optimisation. Exact match is great for targeting, but it restricts reach. Broad match will get impressions, but they won’t always be the ones you want.
Tweaking the negatives list and shifting the focus on a keyword level between exact, phrase, and broad will yield good results to advertisers that pay close attention and are prepared to change tack.
Stage 3: Creating PPC ads
Now that we have defined the keywords we want to target and the match type variations we plan to utilize, we can start to create our ad copy. This is a really crucial element of AdWords setup and the right ad copy can significantly improve the click-through rate (CTR) your ads receive.
Even with the right targeting and the right bid strategy, there is no guarantee of traffic. Always consider why a prospect would stop and choose your brand over everything else calling for their attention on a search results page.
Google introduced a new standard for PPC ads, known as Expanded Text Ads (ETA), last year. As the name implies, these provide more scope for advertisers to communicate with their audience and they are designed with mobile devices in mind.
Expanded Text Ads are comprised of the following elements:
Headline: Two 30 character headline fields, which can appear side by side or on separate lines, depending on the size of a user’s screen.
Description: One 80 character field, within which you should try to highlight the core reasons prospects should engage with your ad over others.
Destination URL: This is the landing page users will be sent through to, so it is worth spending time testing different landing pages to see which perform best for specific queries. The destination URL will be tied directly to your Quality Score, which we will get to in the next section.
These fields will be displayed as follows within the AdWords interface:
A best practice in this area is to create 2 or 3 ad copy variations and test the effectiveness of each in a controlled environment.
Google has also created a helpful walk-through to help users navigate the platform as they create their ads:
youtube
Ad extensions
Advertisers have access to a wide variety of extensions, allowing them to highlight offers, benefits, or unique selling points to their intended audience. These also bring the advantage of taking up more space on search results pages, which can have a positive effect on click-through rate.
As we can see in the example below for the query [car insurance], advertisers are making the most of these new formats to take up as much valuable real estate as possible.
We won’t go into detail on ad extensions within this guide, but it is worth knowing that some appear automatically while others require input from advertisers before they show. You can read more here about the list of possible extensions.
Stage 4: Setting up ad groups and campaigns
We are now ready to start categorizing our keywords and ads into ad groups.
This can be achieved by separating out your products and services and creating an ad group for each. If we go back to our sleepwear example, we can illustrate a clear and logical approach for achieving this.
Each of these ad groups will have 2-3 ad copy variations, which can be updated on an ongoing basis as performance data arrives in the account. Each keyword, of course, can be set to the match types outlined above.
After I have tested out this product, I may decide to branch out into the pajama market. This is where we need to introduce the concept of campaigns, which sit at a level above both keywords and ad groups.
In a nutshell: keywords make up ad groups, and ad groups make up campaigns.
There is no obvious reward for starting with a huge array of ad groups; in fact, this lessens your level of control over performance. When getting set up, it is best to begin with a smaller sub-set of core products as this will help performance and allow you to learn from the data much faster.
Some marketers even prefer to isolate keywords into their own ad groups, if they are particularly profitable. This strategy brings a lot more control, but it is labor-intensive and restricts the amount of data that can be used for optimization within the ad group.
Stage 5: The fundamentals of AdWords bidding
The AdWords auction dictates how much you pay for each action and in which position your ad will show for the selected keywords.
First of all, it is important to know that AdWords operates as a sealed, second-price auction. This is explained clearly by Cornell University:
“The auction is a sealed-bid auction because advertisers do not know what other advertisers are bidding. The highest bidder wins the auction and gets their advertisement placed on specific pages for specific users, but pays the price of the second highest bidder plus $0.01. The $0.01 is to differentiate the highest bidder from the second highest bidder and to allow the highest advertiser to outbid the next highest bid.  This type of auction awards the advertiser with the highest bid but sells the advertisement slot to the highest advertiser at the price of the second highest bid.”
Therefore, what you bid is not always what you pay. A second consideration is that budgets are set as a daily limit; however, Google has recently decided to allow accounts to spend up to double this amount each day as long as they are still hitting their campaign targets.
This is evened out over the course of a month, and Google will never charge advertisers more than 30.4 (the average number of days in a month) times their daily budget. So if your account spends double the daily limit on a frequent basis early in the month, you could max out the budget rather quickly.
Luckily, there is a very helpful script that will allow you to keep some control over this.
Now, when it comes to bidding, we can split out the two main options as automated or manual.
Automated Bidding
Google uses a range of advanced machine learning technologies and rule-based automation to deliver maximum value to advertisers in its auctions. We can therefore tell Google what our objective is, how much we are willing to pay to achieve it, and let the algorithms do the bidding on our behalf.
That makes automated bidding sound appealing, but there are enough cautionary tales in the industry to suggest it must be approached with some reservation.
Ceding control to Google altogether can lead to very costly campaigns and, while setting a sensible ceiling on maximum bids can help, automated bidding can still lead to inefficient spend. Machine learning systems feed off data and learn from feedback, which means budget can be spent in a wide range of areas to gain this knowledge.
Manual bidding
For a beginner, manual bidding is a great way to start. This option provides control, quick feedback, and the ability to adjust bids quickly based on performance. Although it gets more difficult to stick with manual bidding as an account increases in size and complexity, nascent accounts with a small set of ad groups will benefit from this approach.
Google has also added the option to adjust bids based on a user’s device type. This welcome feature means marketers can increase their bids for specific queries on a mobile device, for example, if they know that this device type typically converts better than desktop. This is reflective of user behavior, as people tend to use their mobile and desktop for different purposes.
Quality score
Quality Score is a fundamental aspect of Google AdWords bidding, as it will dictate how much a brand pays for clicks. The intention behind Quality Score is simple: Google wants to ensure that relevant ads show against its searches and also wants to deter low-quality websites from manipulating the system to gain high ranking positions.
AdWords depends on its high quantity of searches, after all, so Google needs to ensure users have a positive searching experience or they may take their business elsewhere.
The exact formula behind Quality Score is not publicly known, but we can make some safe assumptions. The score is on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being given to irrelevant ads and landing pages, and 10 awarded to brands that match the user’s intent with a relevant ad and a great landing page experience.
Quality Score is calculated at a keyword level, so you could even see different scores within the same ad group. Again, there is plenty of room for experimentation and it is worth the work, as a high Quality Score can make your budget go a lot further.
Wordstream created a helpful image to illustrate how this works:
Ad Rank is explained in more detail here, but suffice to say this metric determines which position your ads will appear in on search results pages.
Google recently added a long-awaited feature that allows advertisers to view historical Quality Score, which now allows us to view any positive or negative trends over time. There is plenty more information on Historical Quality Score in this thorough guide.
Stage 6: Reviewing and optimizing performance
To get the best possible results from Google AdWords, marketers need to keep a close eye on their performance and be prepared to make adjustments. There are four metrics in particular to keep abreast of, which can be segmented by dimensions such as device type, demographic factors, or location.
Click-through rate (CTR): Clicks/Impressions
Conversion rate (CVR): Conversions/Clicks
Cost-per-click (CPC): Spend/Clicks
Cost-per-acquisition (CPA): Spend/Conversions
The steps outlined above will get your AdWords campaign up and running with the right foundations in place. There is a huge amount more to this platform and advertisers are rewarded for investing the time in more advanced features.
However, this all starts with the basics and as long as marketers monitor performance and are open to new strategies, the more complex pieces will naturally fall into place over time.
from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/10/17/google-adwords-the-beginners-guide/
0 notes