This introduction is meant to give you a quick and dirty understanding of Google Adwords. For those who have heard the hype but maybe lack a bit of fundamental understanding this should get you started.

Primarily after reading the article you will know:

• What it is
• Why you should use pay per click marketing
• How it works
• How to begin using Adwords
• How to measure results
• What the Google Adwords learning centre is
• How to avoid common mistakes made by new users

What is Pay Per Click Advertising?

Essentially as it sounds pay per click advertising is where you pay X amount of money for each visitor (click) through to your website. In an ideal situation you can get visitors for as low as $0.01 cent and the upper limit really is the sky. Your listing will appear when and where you chose. These days there is a great level of control you can have over when and where your listings appear, but for the sake of brevity and keeping it simple we won’t go into that here.

As you can see the ads are in the areas highlighted in red. These are also known as sponsored links. You have no doubt seen this several times viewing websites on the web. This is important for several reasons, but primarily its important because it shows you can appear on the first page of results. The results pages are often referred to by those in the industry as SERPS or search engine results pages.

There have been many independent research studies that show a majority of visits to websites are generated by links appearing in the top 10 results or on the first page. This brings us to our next topic.

Why should I use Pay Per Click Marketing?

Using Pay Per Click marketing is an excellent way to start bringing more visitors to your website, in fact it can be almost instant. This is particularly useful if your website is relatively new or if you are not showing in the first couple of pages of results (search engine results). If you are selling your products online this is a great way to start making sales from your website.

Perhaps one of the most important things to remember here is that unlike traditional media advertising such as television, radio, leaflets or free giveaways, all of which are often referred to as push marketing techniques. Pay per click advertising also known as pull marketing targets people who are actively seeking your product and or service.

This way you don’t waste money trying to target people who are not interested in your product or service. In fact there are many techniques to ensure you only appeal to those who are your target market. You can for example exclude certain visitors depending on the time of day, or you can exclude people looking for Free products or services.

You can customise your message!

You can customise the message users see in Google’s results page. This is good because you can provide users with a call to action (give them a goal to reach before visiting your site). A call to action could be &quote; buy it now! ” or &quote; learn more! ” or “contact us”. You can pre-program your visitors to carry out specific actions when they get to your site. You can also give users a reason to visit you over your competitors.

Use your bragging rights such as:

• Cheapest rates in town!
• In business since 1920
• Dublin’s Oldest Hostel

So how does pay per click marketing work?

Explaining all the ins and outs of pay per click marketing here would be beyond the scope of an introduction. In fact as you will see later on there is an entire learning centre dedicated to helping you with running a pay per click campaign.

At the simplest level you research keywords and keyphrases that you feel relate to your website. A keyword /keyphrase is a word or two or more words put together to form a search query. Lets say you are looking for &quote;cheap accommodation in dublin” that search query is your keyphrase. You can select as many or little as you like.

You can also select the type of match you wish to associate with a keyword / keyphrase. This is extremely important because sometimes we might only want to visitors to come to our website for combinations of words we assume will result in sales, inquiries or whatever the goal of your business is.

Lets take a quick look at the various match types available.

1. Broad Match
2. “Phrase Match”
3. [Exact Match]
4. -Negative Match
5. There is one more for the record -[Embedded Match] but we can ignore this for now.

Lets look at the term dublin accommodation and see how it applies with the following match options.

Broad Match

Your listing will display for many combinations including reversing the order of the words. Here is a short list of possibilities. Remember there are many more combinations.

1. accommodation dublin
2. accommodation county dublin
3. budget accommodation in dublin
4. low price accommodation in and around dublin
5. hostel accommodation dublin

Basically you can appear with any term or search query that uses the words “dublin” and “accommodation”.

Phrase Match

Phrase match means you will only appear if the words are typed in a specific order and with no other words in between them. Here are some examples.

1. dublin accommodation
2. cheap dublin accommodation
3. dublin accommodation near temple bar

Exact Match

An exact match means your listing will only appear if a word or words are typed into a search engine query in a specific order and only those words. That means nothing before or after can be included in the term. This is a good way to exclude visitors you do not want. Say those looking for free or cheap related specifics.

1. dublin accommodation

Negative Match

Negative match is another way to exclude certain visitors without having to include every combination of exact match you can find. Another words you may wish to use a broad match for dublin accommodation, but you may wish to still exclude the cheap, budget and free related visitors.
To do this you just include a hyphen in front of the term or terms.

1. -cheap
2. -budget
3. -free

Embedded Match

As I mentioned above we need not worry too much about this one. I myself have used it a total of 1 time when managing accounts for many clients. To keep it simple we can ignore it for now, its good to know it exists though. You can read more about match types here in the learning centre.

How do I get started?

Getting started is relatively easy. First you will need a Google account, if you already have a gmail account you won’t need to stat a new one. If you don’t you can sign up here Google Adwords Sign Up. You can use two payment options (as of this writing). Direct debit and Credit Card. I would recommend credit card as direct debit can take a few days to clear which means your ads won’t run if you run out of money. This is no good if you are making sales and want your listing appearing every day and every hour.

Google makes it relatively simple to get started. You can create a couple of different account types. You can create a starter account or standard account. The problem with a starter account however is that you can only see limited functions. It is intended to not overwhelm you with too much at once. The limited functionality though can mean you don’t get the performance you were after before starting. For this reason I’d recommend going through the learning centre basics before getting started.

Note: You should be prepared to spend at least 30 mins a day looking at your account and monitoring its performance. It is also a good idea to view the account throughout the day, this will let you see when and where your money is getting spent.

How do I measure results from Pay Per Click Marketing?

This is a very good question and unfortunately many businesses jump right in and do not measure results. It is important to monitor your websites visitors and how they use your website. This can be done by using what’s known as Web Analytics. Several years ago these were prohibitively expensive for most small businesses but luckily Google now provides us with a free webstats program called Google Analytics. Installation can require some assistance from your web master / designer or whoever looks after your website.

You can set up some really great features using Web Analytics, but that is another topic for another time. For now you should try and keep track of sales, inquiries, user activity on your website. Compare this with when you are not running your Pay Per Click campaigns to see the difference. Remember to start small with your account and as you increase the size of your account and spend see if the results continue to improve.

There are many forms of measurement you can implement but this is a more advanced topic for another post. For now just remember you can measure almost anything if you do the right research and spent time setting it up.

What is the Google Adwords Learning Centre?

The Google Adwords learning centre is an excellent resource for understanding the concepts behind Pay Per Click marketing and more specifically how it applies to Google. All topics are explained in detail and you can take mini quiz’s as you go to ensure you are understanding the concepts. Once you have covered all the material and feel you have a good understanding of the material. You can apply to sit the Google Adwords exam.

This will assist you with obtaining Google Adwords Qualified Status. You will also need to meet a minimum spend requirement as set by Google and this amount will depend on your locality.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

To summarise our brief introduction, I’ll leave you with some dot points to help you avoid common mistakes made by Google Adwords beginners.

1. Start Small – Test the waters first. Don’t spend large amounts of money straight up. Get a feel for how the system works.
2. Measure from the start – Measure your campaign from the beginning. This is really really important. This will let you know how and where you are spending your money, as well as what’s working now and what needs more work to work better in future.
3. Use the Adwords learning centre. It might not be the most exciting stuff to begin with and it might looks like a lot to go through, but if you don’t have the time to cover the basics, you probably don’t have the time to properly manage an account. If this is the case you can get someone else to manage it for you. Someone with experience. You could always contact me contact me – a shameless plug.
4. Compare your results against established existing measurements. Eg: Compare you sales results before and after using Adwords.
5. Avoid very generic terms like that can be interpreted multiple ways. Eg: If you were selling cars don’t use the term cars as a broad match. Think about the cars you sell (if you sell cars). A better term might be &quote; used honda’s “
6. Test different messages – Google Adwords and other Pay Per Click search engines allow you to test the effectiveness of different messages to users. Test these and see which works best. This will be covered in future posts in more detail.

Final Word

So how did I do? Did I answer all your questions? Have I left you more confused than ever? Is there more you would like to know?
Feel free to respond to this post, or you can contact me directly. I will try and respond within 24 – 48 hours.

Filed under: Pay Per Click Marketing - Beginner by Gavin Doolan