














Table of Content
* Introduction 
* Chapter: 1 Getting started with Google Ads
* Chapter: 2 Create your Google Ads  - Step by Step
* Chapter: 3 Ingredients to Build a successful Adwords Campaign
* Chapter: 4 Google Ad-words Mistakes to be avoided
* Chapter: 5 Google Ad-Words Audit & Optimization Guide
* Chapter: 6 Improving quality Score in Google Adwords
* Chapter: 7 Ad-Words Display Advertising
* Chapter: 8 Turbocharger Ad-words for breakthrough performance
* Chapter: 9 Content Remarketing strategies with Google Display network
* Chapter: 10 Ad-words Bidding Strategies your competitor’s don’t know
* Chapter: 11 Using Google Ad-words for small businesses
* Chapter: 12 How to reduce wasted Adwords Spend in 2017
* Chapter: 13 Google Ad-words Features Update for 2017
* Chapter: 14 Tracking Google Ads:  Analytics
* Chapter: 15  Case Studies



Introduction
The marketing world has changed dramatically in recent years and Google AdWords is one of the platforms creating this change. It’s one of the most effective methods of paid online advertising available.
This advertising system is used by thousands of small, medium and large organizations. All of these organizations have one thing in common.
They want to tap into the huge numbers of people who search for information, products and services online. When used properly, Google AdWords has the potential to send large numbers of people to you who want exactly what you have to offer.
Unlike other marketing strategies, you only pay for ads people click on. Once you optimize Google AdWords campaigns, you can get a high return on investment which may not be possible to achieve with other marketing strategies.
If you don’t currently use Google AdWords or don’t use it to its full potential, you should seriously reconsider this stance.
Paying for online advertising like Google AdWords turns off a lot of people, especially if they are unfamiliar with how this platform works. However, if you do know how it operates or get help from Google AdWords experts, the rewards from Google AdWords can be huge. This guide will show you how to: 
• Leverage PPC to maximize your inbound marketing efforts
• Create highly relevant keywords, ads, and landing pages
• Recognize keyword match types and when to use them
• Structure your account and set budgets
• Optimize ad copy to maximize clicks
• Calculate essential metrics for measuring success
Go ahead and make the best use of it!
Chapter 1
Getting started with Google Ads
Google Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising using AdWords is perhaps the most popular form of advertising among small businesses. This is partly because of Google's reputation and partly because it allows the small business owner to control costs. There are various ways Google AdWords can help you as a small business owner, but it takes some basic instruction to get started and tap ultimately tap into its full potential as an advertising tool.
What is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords is an online advertising service that allows businesses to have their ads run on Google’s search results page. The ads look almost identical to the normal search results, with the only difference being the small word “Ad” in green. Google ads will show at the top and bottom of a search results page. 


How Advertising on Google Works
When a consumer searches for a term or phrase, Google will show the consumer relevant ads based on the keywords used in the search. Websites that want their ads to show on the results page bid on keywords that they believe people will use when looking for their type of business. For example, a plumber located in Atlanta might bid on the keywords “plumbing Atlanta,” “plumber,” or “broken toilet.”  

Depending on how much you bid compared to other plumbers in the area, your ad may show up on the results page when people search for the terms you bid on. In addition to how much you bid, Google also takes into account the relevance and quality of your ad and website. So even if you have the highest bid, the ad for your plumbing company will never show when someone searches “flower store.” How PPC Advertising Works?
How Does Google Determine If Your Ad Will Show on the Results Page?
Google uses a combination of three primary factors to determine when an ad shows on the results page:
•Bid – The bid is the price you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. You bid against other websites on keywords that you believe people search for if they are interested in your product. A flower store might bid on the terms “roses” “cheap bouquet” or “wedding flowers.”
•Quality and relevance of the ad – Your ad needs to be relevant to the search being made in order to show on the search results page. If someone searches “wedding flowers” it wouldn’t make sense for Google to show an ad for a nail salon. You want to make sure you have a lot of the same keywords that you are bidding on in the ad itself, so Google can tell your ad is relevant to the search.
•Landing page experience – When someone clicks on your ad, the landing page that they are sent to should have similar content as the ad itself and the keywords used in the search.  If you own a salon and are advertising manicures, you’ll want to link directly to a page that has more information on manicures, instead of to the homepage which includes all of your services.
Differences between Mobile and Desktop Advertising
Mobile and desktop ads on Google are very similar. They both display ads at the top and bottom of the search results page, and you bid on keywords the same way with both. Though some business owners overlook mobile, it is something you definitely want to think about when advertising on Google. More than half of Google’s searches are done from mobile devices, and people searching on their phone often have local intent. 

The key differences between desktop and mobile advertising are:
1.There is less space on a mobile device, so you need to make sure your message is straight to the point. 
2.People on their phones are on the go, so you want to tailor your message depending on if it’s for desktop or mobile.
When setting up your account, you can decide whether you want your ad to show on desktop, mobile, or both. We suggest setting up separate campaigns for desktop and mobile in order to track how your ads perform across different devices. 
You will notice that the cost for the same keyword will be different depending on if you are bidding for search terms being used on mobile or desktop. Experiment with different bids in order to see which keywords perform best on mobile versus desktop. Your goal is to have the highest click through rate on your ad with the lowest cost per click possible.
How Much Does Advertising on Google Cost?
In pay per click advertising, you only pay if someone clicks on your ad. The cost per click of an ad depends on how much you bid on certain keywords. The cost ranges greatly depending on if you are in a market where a lot of other businesses are willing to pay a high price to rank on a certain keyword.  
For example, if you are a realtor in a small town you might be able to bid less than $1 per click on a keyword and still have your ad show in this section. However, if you own a medical malpractice law firm in a big city, the cost per click will be much more expensive.
You can use Google’s keyword planner to see how much the suggested bids are for your ad to show up when someone searches for specific key terms. However, instead of focusing on the cost of advertising, you will want to think about how much you stand to earn from advertising on Google, and whether this will yield a substantial profit for your business.
How can you save 33.5% on the Adwords cost per click?
The simple answer is to advertise on Bing. In many ways, Bing provides a very similar service to Google AdWords. The only big disadvantage of Bing is that there are fewer clicks available for purchase. As a result, many advertisers focus on Google AdWords and ignore Bing. The lower competition means less fierce bidding, which in turn lowers the cost per click. According to an article by Wordstream, Bing is typically 33.5% cheaper than AdWords for the same term. If you have not tried Bing, get started with a free $50 advertising credit.
How to Create an Effective Google Ad
•Use your keywords in your ad – You need to use the same keywords that you are bidding on are in your ad so that Google will be able to tell that the ad is relevant to the search. 
•Use local identifiers – If you are a local business, you want to consider using location terms in your search. If someone is searching for “bbqdallas” then your ad with the headline “Best BBQ in Dallas” will be more likely to show in the results and be highly relevant for theperson looking for a restaurant in your area.
•Clearly state who you are and what you offer – The user should know immediately what your business is and how you can help with what they’re looking for. If you own a store that offers many different products, make sure you are matching your ad to the keywords being searched. 
•Tell the user what makes your business unique – There are tons of results on the first page of a Google search. You need to tell them why they should choose your business. Are you more affordable, dependable, or reliable? Do you have awesome reviews and ratings? Share that information in your ad. 
•Have a clear call to action – Users are more likely to click on an ad if they are being instructed on next steps. Examples of this are “Call today for a free quote,” or “Enter zip to find store closest to you”.  
•Include a promotion – You may want to include an offer such as “20% off shoes today!” or “Free shipping!”. It’s understandable if you don’t want to offer a discount on top of the advertising cost, but even a small offer can be the difference between attracting a new customer to your site, and having them click on the website next to yours.
•Enhance your ad with extensions – Extensions show additional information about your business, such as your phone numbers, store rating or address, as links extending from your ad. Including extensions will increase the amount of space you take up on the results page, and they tend to have a high click through rates (both huge benefits). Plus there is no additional cost for including extensions.
A simple step you can take before writing your ads is to search for your type of business and see what type of ads come up. You don’t want to copy other businesses ads exactly, but you can get an idea of what works and what is out there.
Sample of a good ad on Google

This ad hits all of the things on our checklist. It is packed with keywords, offers $40 off, boasts being open 24/7, has a clear message to call, notes that they are located in NYC, and has ad extensions that are tempting to click on. Next, take a look at this ad:

This ad is a little weaker because although it is clear that they are offering plumbing services in NYC, there are not many keywords, and nothing in the ad makes them stand out against the other ads listed. 
Google gives you a certain amount of characters to use, and in most cases you want to take advantage of all possible characters. The bigger your ad, the more it will stand out and the more keywords you can use within your ad.
Benefits of using Google Ads for your business:
These are the main reasons you should be using Google AdWords.
1. Google AdWords Increases Leads and Customers
Google Analytics is one of the best tools for lead generation. If your campaigns are set up properly, it has the potential to send extremely targeted leads to your website, E-commerce website, opt-in form or other online property. Google AdWords allows you to focus on people who are searching for what you have to offer.
2. It’s a Flexible Marketing Platform
Anyone who uses Google AdWords regularly will immediately tell you that it’s an extremely flexible marketing platform. It’s suitable for all kinds and sizes of organizations. You can literally turn Internet traffic on and off using this system.
This platform is also compatible with a wide range of other marketing platforms and software systems.
3. Businesses Get a High Return on Investment
Unlike other marketing strategies, you only pay for ads people click on. Once you optimize Google AdWords campaigns, you can get a high return on investment which may not be possible to achieve with other marketing strategies. However, this takes time and you have to find out what approach suits you and your business.
4.  You See Fast, Transparent Results
This platform shows you easy-to-understand results and reports of your campaigns extremely quickly after it goes live.
It’s easy to analyse the progress of your AdWords campaigns because its dashboard gives you all the information related to each campaign such as the ads clicked, keywords entered by website visitors, cost of clicks and much more.
5. It Taps Into Huge, High Quality Traffic Sources
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world. Millions of people search and click Google ads every day. This means it can send a business a huge amount of traffic every day, if they have the budget to pay for this traffic.
Google prides itself on displaying relevant content and ads when people search through its search engine or view content that features Google ads.
Conclusion
Using Google AdWords is a great learning experience. Because of the easy to use tracking features, you can even learn from your Google AdWords mistakes by seeing which targeted keywords result in conversions and which do not.



Chapter 2
Creating Google Ads – Step by Step
Did you know that every day Google processes over 40k search queries every second? This equals to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. What if this Google Adwords tutorial could help you attract a small part of the billions of searches done every day to your store? Imagine all the millions of people that could be interested in what you have to sell from all around the world, ready to buy from you.
It turns out that it’s not that hard to get all these millions of people to your store. You only need to follow the right steps.
In this Google Adwords tutorial, you will find all the steps you need to take to create your first Google Adwords campaign so you can start getting visitors and increase your sales.
Step #1: Set up your account
Before we get started setting up a campaign, you need to have an Adwords account. If you have already opened an account, you can skip this step and go straight to the step #2 of this Google Adwords tutorial.
In case you haven’t, the first thing you need to do is to go to the Adwords Get Started page and click the “Start Now” button.

Once you do that, you will be taken to a page where you will have to add your email address and website. You can also let Google send you personalized tips and recommendations to help you improve your performance.


Then, you will be taken to the most important page of the account setup process. Since you don’t have your keyword list or your max CPC (something you will learn in the next few steps), at first it may seem like you are stretching yourself too thin. 

This page is separated into four parts. The first one lets you define your daily budget. It’s highly recommended you set up a minimum of $5 per day. Just think that if your average cost per click is going to be $0.88, which is the industry’s benchmark, you will get less than 5 clicks per day (or ~150 monthly visits). That’s too little to make any impact on your store.

Now you need to choose your target audience. First, you need to choose the country (or countries) you will be targeting. It’s the best practice to segment each campaign by country. Then, under “Networks”, to untick the “Display” option. You only want to focus on search ads.  Finally, add 15-20 keywords related to your industry. 

Leave the default setting for the “Set your bid” tab. Manual bidding is too advanced for your skill level, and to be honest you don’t want to play with this just yet.
Finally, you will have to create a dummy ad for your campaign. Again, add some dummy text (like the one I used in the image below), and keep moving. Once you are ready, click the “Save and continue” button.

Last but not least, you need to add your payment information.


Step #2: Do keyword research

Keyword research is an essential step to any successful Google Adwords campaign. This step is so important that Google created a tool specifically for this: Google Keyword Planner.
If you are signed up, you will be taken to this page:


Before we move on, we need to stop and do an important exercise: brainstorming.
If you have ever read anything about marketing, you probably know what a brainstorming session is all about. If you don’t know, it’s simple: you sit down for 15 minutes with nothing than a pen and paper, and you try to come up with as many keywords as possible related to your e-commerce store.
Say we have a store that sells sneakers. If you had to think keywords related to that niche, you would come up with the follow keywords:
1. Sneakers
2. Urban shoes
3. Casual shoes
4. Men’s sneakers
5. Women sneakers
6. Cheap sneakers
7. Luxury sneakers
8. Athletic shoes
9. Comfortable shoes
10. Leather sneakers
11. Street shoes
12. Slip on
13. Suede sneakers
14. Canvas sneakers
15. Skate shoes
Once you are finished with your brainstorming session, what you will have to do then is go to the Google Keyword Planner and click the tab as it shows in the previous image. Then, you will have to add your keywords.
Then, leave everything as it is, and click the “Get Ideas” button.

The ad groups can help you find patterns and ideas of what are the groups of keywords that most people search for, and which have the most searches.
In our example, it seems to be that people are interested in running shoes, men’s casual shoes, women comfort shoes, comfortable shoes and women’s shoes.

Now, what you will do is click the “Keyword ideas” tab, then click the “Add all” button, and finally, click the “Download” button. Choose whether you want to download the list in CSV or if you want to use the AdWords Editor. Choose the former.

Once you open Microsoft Excel, you will analyze what keywords have the most searches, and which ones have the best-suggested bids.
The number of searches helps you see the demand for a particular keyword. The suggested bid shows you how much other companies are willing to spend per click. If the CPC is high, it means it’s profitable, which is a good signal (even if you can’t pay for it just yet).

You want to pick the keywords that have a good mix of high to medium demand and high to medium CPC. Too much demand probably means it’s not transactional, which will make your marketing much less effective (because few people will be ready to buy from you for that particular keyword). On the other hand, a high CPC can make your campaign unprofitable.


There’s no “right” demand or CPC, as it depends on your niche. Just remember the industry benchmark is $0.88, so if your keywords are over this value, it may mean you are going after highly competitive keywords.
You want at least 15 keywords, but no more than 50. If you choose just a few keywords, it can make your campaign too narrow, and too many can make it too complex.
Step #3: Define your budget
Now you have your account opened and keywords chosen, you need to know how much you can spend for each keyword. There’s a metric called “maximum CPC” that tells you exactly this.
First, to get your maximum CPC you need to know two things:
* Your average gross profit
* Your conversion rate
For the sake of this article, we will assume a 50% net profit and a 1% conversion rate. You also need to make your maximum CPC a bit lower to factor in your profit. Otherwise, you’d just be calculating your breakeven CPC. In this case, we will take a 10% lower value to the maximum CPC.
If you have a list of all your products and their respective prices, you would add a column called “Max CPC”, and add the following formula (B2 is where the final price would go, make sure to adapt it to your own sheet):
=B2*0.5*0.01*0.9
That formula will give you a good ballpark on how much your max CPC bid should be. You will use this number later in the article.
Step #4: Write your ads
Your ads are what will make people go to your store. If you fail at making people want to click, your campaign won’t have any impact.
If there are two words that describe successful Google Adwords ads they are enticing and relevant.
First and foremost, you need to make people stop what they are doing and read your ad. Once you grab their attention, you need to make the ad relevant to their search. If it is, they most likely click on your ad, and therefore, visit your store. That’s all you need to focus on.
There are 4 elements to make a great Google Adwords ad:
1. Headline: 25 characters which you need to make them count to the max.
2. Display URL: Make it relevant to the keyword. If the keyword is “casual shoes”, your display URL should be “https://ivanshoes.com/casual-shoes/”.
3. Text: You only have 2 lines with 35 characters each, so like with the headline you need to make up the most out of it. The best thing you can do is show your unique value proposition. Some examples: free shipping, great prices, unique products, etc.
4. CTA: Two or three words, like “Buy now” or “Order today”.
Step #5: Pick or create your landing pages

If you made a prospect click on your ads, now they need to see what you have to offer. If this has nothing to do with the ad (due to its irrelevancy), or if the landing page is confusing, they will go back and carry on with their lives as if you never existed. You don’t want that to happen.
You can do everything right, but if the landing page sucks, no one will convert.
The first thing you need to do is remember this:
Never take people to your home page, always take them to your product page.
There are a few rules of thumb you need to follow to have a high-converting landing page:
* Ensure the primary headline of your landing page matches the ad visitors clicked to get there. If your ad says “Casual Shoes for Men 50% Off”, the landing page must be called either “Casual Shoes”, or “Casual Shoes for Sale”.
* Make your call to action (CTA) big and position it above the fold. This is valid both for your Adwords landing page and for your product pages. Make sure to display your “Add to cart” button prominently and above the fold.
* A landing page should have a single purpose and thus a single focused message (i.e. buy). If you take them to your product page, and this page is already optimized for conversions, you’ll be set. If not, fix your product pages and then use them for your Adwords campaigns.

Step #6: Fix the small (but important) things

Before launching, you need to make sure it’s optimized and ready to go. If you follow the steps from this article, you’ll be 90% ready to launch it. That last 10% is what we need to fix.
First of all, pick the right match type for your keywords. There are four types of match types:
1. Broad match: Has the broadest reach and the lowest CPC. However, they can make your ads highly irrelevant, lowering your CTR and increasing your ad relevance. This is the default option. If you are just starting out, leave it as it is.
2. Modified broad match: An in-between of broad and phrase match. It allows you to reach a similarly wide audience to broad match but helps you have a better control of who sees your ad by “locking” individual words in a key phrase using the “+” parameter. This is better if you are a bit more experienced.
3. Phrase match: Has an intermediate reach as it’s more restrictive in the queries variations, but has better control. This is a great choice for your category keywords.
4. Exact match: Has the narrowest reach and the highest CPC. This is a great option to promote your products, and any keyword with a high purchase intent (i.e. any keyword with the words “buy”, “purchase”, “sale”, “discount”, etc.)
Also, don’t put too many keywords in each ad group. Ad groups should have between 10 to 20 keywords each. If you have around 50 keywords in your campaign, try to separate your ad groups in pieces of 5-10 keywords each.
Put your max CPC for each keyword. To do so, go to Ad Groups and click on each ad group you have. Then, you will see a list of all the keywords you have for that ad group. Next to each keyword you will see a column called “Max CPC”. Add the max CPC you got from the step #3, or leave the default for the ad group (not recommended unless all your keywords have the same max CPC).


Finally, set up conversion tracking. 

Step #7: Launch your campaign!

Now everything is done, you can unpause your campaign and start getting those visits.
Before you get all worked up and start playing with your bids and match types, wait until you get some data. This depends a lot on your daily budget and your CPC bids. Assuming you are using a budget higher than $10 per day, you should wait around a week before coming back to check your campaign. If your daily budget is lower than $10, you may have to wait longer.
Either way, let your campaign run until you have got a few thousand impressions and at least 10 clicks per keyword (or at least for some keywords). Less than that is statistically irrelevant.
If you wait long enough and get your clicks, you should look for two things:
1. Keywords with more than 10 clicks and no conversions that have high CPCs (relative to your max CPC)
2. Ads with lots of impressions but a low CTR
The former means your keyword is not relevant to the keyword. In that case, test different match types, or just lower the CPC. The latter means you have an irrelevant ad. Try to make your ad more attractive by highlighting your value proposition.
Conclusion

Today you learned how to create a campaign for one of the most important customer acquisition channels for e-commerce.
It can be confusing at first, especially because for all the different moving parts. Bids, targeting, match types, ads, landing pages, etc. Any beginner can find it too hard and leave it for another day.
But if you follow the steps showed in this Google Adwords tutorial, you will be able to create an Adwords campaign that will help you get more sales for your eCommerce store.














Chapter 3
Ingredients to Build a successful Adwords Campaign
Creating a new Google AdWords campaign is a thrilling endeavor—a mix of the excitement of building something new, the anxiety of its outcome, a fear of failure, and a hope for success. You really want to be sure everything is right before clicking the “Enable” button on a new campaign.
In this guide, we’ll look at some of the most important tips to keep in mind before launching an AdWords campaign.
1. Put Your Thinking Cap on for Keyword Research
The most important component of a successful campaign is understanding the customer and what they want. If you advertise a product or service that your customers aren’t interested in, your campaign will not be successful no matter how much money you spend on it. 
Customer volume is also an important factor to consider. You need to analyze whether your investment can bring a high enough volume of customers to cover the amount of money you’ll spend to attract them.
You can use Google’s AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool to figure out the search volume and competition level of the keywords you have in mind. All you need to do is get into your customers’ mindset and type in a phrase using your keywords.
However, before you begin using the tool, ensure that the “Advanced Options” are set. Select the desired location, choose the language, and set the default device type as “Laptops/Desktops,” unless you’re exclusively targeting mobile devices. To get a sense of phrases relevant to your keyword, choose the “Phrase” match in the keyword “Match Type” setting.

While looking for keywords specific to your business or product, take into account the following:
* Invest in keywords that have high search volumes.
* Invest in keywords that indicate an intent to buy, rather than someone just searching for information.
* As explained further below, consider the affordability of each keyword. This is especially important if you’re looking at high-volume, high-competition keywords.
2. Do Some Math to Compare Your Costs with Your Budget
While you don’t need to know complex trigonometry, you will need to do basic math before investing your time and money to begin an AdWords campaign.
The first question to ask yourself is, “Can I afford this keyword?” Take a look at the following example to help you find the answer:
First of all, set a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) you think you can afford (let’s say $5 as an example). Now, use the Keyword Tool to compare your maximum CPC with the estimated CPC you get in the tool. Suppose the Keyword Tool places the cost of the keyword at $4, so you know you have a window of $1. That sounds like a good deal, so let’s look at the next step.
Your maximum cost-per-click depends on the conversion rate of your website, profit per customer, and your profit margin. If you don’t know the precise figures yet, you need to come up with ballpark figures for each and do a little guess work. You’ll be tracking your campaign, so you’ll have more accurate figures soon to make better calculations.
In the meantime, here’s the formula you should use:
Max CPC = [(profit per customer) x (1 – profit margin) x (website conversion rate)]/100
Suppose your profit per customer is $200, with a profit margin of 50 percent and a conversion rate of 10 percent. By using the above formula, you can easily calculate the Max CPC:
Max CPC = [$200 x (1 – 0.5) x 10]/100 = $10
The maximum cost-per-click you’ve set should be close to the estimated CPC that is shown in the Keyword Tool. However, if your max CPC is way less than the estimated CPC, you’ll need to either decrease your profit margin or increase either the profit per customer or your website’s conversion rate.
3. See What Your Competitors Are Doing
Simply put, include competitor intelligence in your arsenal. Successful AdWords marketers identify the landing pages, keywords, and ads that perform best and those that do not. In other words, they sort and optimize their AdWords campaigns effectively. And you can know their keywords too with a competitive intelligence tool called KeywordSpy. It gives you access to all of the advertising history of your competitors in a structured and organized format.
4. Have a Strong Unique Selling Proposition
You need to have a unique selling proposition (USP) that makes you stand apart from your competition. Customers consider why they should choose you and not your competitor. The key to your success lies in how you answer this for them.
Every marketing strategy is backed by a strong USP, and AdWords is no exception. 
The best way to create a powerful USP is to pay heed to your customers. Analyze their shopping patterns, see what they like, and find out what they don’t like about your industry. After that, take a look at your competitors’ ads, websites, keywords, and everything else, then come up with a unique selling proposition that nobody else offers.
5. Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse

You should offer something so amazing in your AdWords campaign that a potential buyer feels compelled to use your services, without even realizing it. This is called an irresistible offer and it has the following four components:
* Value: Your potential buyers should feel they’re getting more for their money. Your offer should sound like a great deal.
* Believable: The price should look reasonable, and not drastically less, or they’ll feel like something fishy is going on behind the scenes.
* Reduce Risk: Consumers are afraid of losing money to some cheap product or poor service, especially on the internet. Offering a money-back guarantee can reduce this risk to help new customers feel more comfortable shopping or doing business with you.
* Call to Action (CTA): Create a clear and simple CTA—the next step you want people to take. If you want your customers to call you, don’t make them dig around your website for your number. If you want them to fill out a form, put it front and center. It’s as simple as that.
6. Advertise Effectively
When you’re using AdWords search advertising, you pay only when your advertisements get clicks. With this in mind, your ads need to perform two important jobs for you:
* Attract relevant customers to your ads.
* Keep irrelevant customers at bay.
A successful campaign doesn’t simply bring in more traffic; it means more relevant traffic that brings in more sales, and less unqualified traffic eating into your advertising budget.
7. Create Compelling Landing Pages

You shouldn’t direct every customer to your homepage, unless it’s the only page you’ve got (which isn’t a good idea for an online business).
Every ad should have a congruent landing page. If you’re offering deals on shoes, land your potential customers on a webpage that shows shoes, not on your homepage where they’ll need to figure out how to get to the page with shoes. If you’re offering a discount on a particular item, your ad should take customers to a page where they can buy that item.
8. Track Your Conversions
It’s essential to analyze keywords and ads that bring you a high return on investment (ROI) and those that don’t. Tracking your conversions will not only help you manage your ads and keywords properly, you’ll also be able to make necessary changes to optimize your campaigns accordingly.
9. Customize Your AdWords Settings Before You Get Started
What would you prefer: a “one-size-fits-all” hat or a hat that actually fits your head? The same goes for AdWords as well. You can’t run everything on default mode and expect brilliant results. You need to set up the following settings in your AdWords, and quickly:
a) Search vs. Display
Search and display are different types of advertising networks, which need different sets of keywords, ads, and landing pages to be effective. You should set up different campaigns to target these two different kinds of networks.
b) Device Bids
If your website is not mobile-friendly, you don’t need to invest in mobile device advertising campaigns. However, if you have a responsive website (one that can adjust automatically to fit any device), you should definitely consider spending money on mobile-specific advertisements.
c) Keyword Match Types
There are three main keyword match types: broad, phrase, and exact. The default match type is set to “Broad.” As a result, Google will show your ad whenever a matching keyword or phrase is used. This match type has a higher chance of driving irrelevant traffic, which also increases your website’s bounce rate.
d) Negative Keywords
These are a great way to block phrases that Google would otherwise use to show your ads.
Negative keywords are what differentiate “designer women’s shoes” or “cheap women’s shoes” from the “women’s shoes” you sell on your site. Adding negative keywords saves you from unwanted traffic and less ROI.
10. Optimize Your Campaigns
Nothing is perfect from the very beginning, and your AdWords campaigns will likely be no exception—even with careful planning. To make sure your campaigns are proving to be beneficial, you should monitor three important factors:
* Keyword Bids: The moment your website starts generating clicks and sales for you, you should think about optimizing your bids. You may want to raise your bids if your keywords are bringing you good sales but not a higher ranking. On the other hand, if the keywords are not generating profits, you’ll need to lower the bids or use other keywords altogether.
* Click Through Rate (CTR): Your website’s quality score, which is determined by Google, depends directly on your ad’s CTR. You need to test different ad campaigns to know which ones bring you the most clicks.
* Landing Page Conversion Rate: Remember, your landing page should offer what you promised in the ad, or the customer is likely to leave your website. Test different versions of landing pages to know which version suits your campaign the best.
Conclusion: 
With these 10 tips in mind, you’ll be able to boost the productivity and efficiency of your AdWords campaigns. Remember, a good campaign is one that is built around all 10 of these powerful ingredients. Good luck, and have a successful business!








Chapter 4
Google Adwords Mistakes to be avoided
If you're just getting started or are thinking about running a campaign, AdWords can be a little overwhelming. Partially because AdWords itself is huge, and every misstep often means wasted ad dollars and a lower ROI.
That's why we’ve tracked down the 10 biggest AdWords mistakes beginners make, to help you get started.
AdWords Mistake #1 - Focusing on the wrong Keywords
Everyone thinks that the keywords that have high search volume are the best ones. When building out a campaign, you should first start off with very targeted keywords. This really important if you have a limited budget as the broad keywords can eat up your budget fast and provide little to no conversions.
Use the AdWords Keyword Planner to help get ideas and search volumes for targeted long tail keywords.

AdWords Mistake #2 - Just sitting on accounts 
"Usually the biggest mistake is that people not doing work and just sitting on accounts. Less than 1% of accounts get worked on even once per week. It’s not just the confused small business owners that aren’t doing much. Even expert PPC account managers often struggle to make the time to do account work if they’re managing multiple clients, etc. So, the solution is to adopt a workflow wherein you can quickly figure out what needs to be tweaked every week in a way that doesn’t take too much time."

Adwords Mistake #3 - Setting it and forgetting it
Running ads is a constant game of optimization. There's always new opportunities to pursue for growth so don't let it just sit there
Key Takeaway: A/B testing isn’t only for experts. If you want to get the most out of your AdWords campaigns remember to test things like ad copy, bid price, and landing pages. 

Adwords Mistake #4 - Not having a dedicated landing page
One of the biggest mistakes that AdWords beginners make is driving paid traffic to their homepage. Your homepage is great for explaining what your business is about, but it’s never going to be as effective as a dedicated landing page at getting conversions.
Each of your campaigns needs to have a specific campaign objective in mind before you set it up. Having a landing page dedicated to that objective is a huge part of maximizing the return you'll see from your ad investment.
Key Takeaway: Customizing your landing pages to match your campaign objectives in one of the best ways to maximize conversion rates. One strategy that can be used to do this is to match your ad keywords with your landing page headline. This can be done by creating multiple landing pages pages for each ad group and keyword. 

Adwords Mistake #5 - Loosely bunched keywords
Most businesses just starting out with AdWords create one campaign and one ad group with lots of loosely related keywords. This type of structure does not allow for ads that are specific enough to your keywords, resulting in low quality scores. 
When you have low quality keywords, AdWords penalizes you and you have to pay more for each click, wasting your marketing dollars. Creating separate campaigns are key to managing your budget; budgets are set at the campaign level and you should use different budgets for your most important keywords and lower priority, test campaigns.

Key Takeaway: Create separate campaigns for your different keyword sets as well as to run test campaigns. It will keep your quality score up and reduce your total cost per click amount.
Adwords Mistake #6 - Not bidding on your brand
To help drive conversions you should be bidding on your brand. When you're bidding on your brand you are promoting your business and you are preventing competitors from bidding on it and poaching your customers. While there are valid reasons for not bidding on your brand, for example you may be ranking #1 organically, you're limited by budget and or the search volume for your brand is low. However, suggested bids for brands are generally low and depending how many searches are made on your brand each month, you could be missing out on potential conversions and sales. In addition, bidding on your brand will help you to dominate page one of the Google SERPs which is great for building brand awareness and reputation.

Key Takeaway: Don’t make it easy for your competitors to poach your customers. Not bidding on your brand keywords is the easiest way to lose high value return customers to another business. Bidding on brand keywords is also one of the only times you’ll be able to achieve a quality score of 9 or 10 which can help raise the overall ad score of your AdWords account.

Adwords Mistake #7 - Not paying attention to your landing page experience
It's taken as a given that paid search traffic will convert and the on-site experience is not given full consideration. Paid search won't fix a bad landing page or a high-friction shopping cart experience.
Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. Start with a high converting landing page template and add your content from there. Beginning from a base of landing page best practices goes a long way to help optimize your landing page experience.

Adwords Mistake #8 - Lack of proper tracking and attribution
A common mistake that beginners make with PPC is the lack of proper tracking and attribution. Newbies are so excited to drive additional traffic to their site that they don't set a strong foundation for tracking conversions. This will completely hinder their ability to gauge the success of their campaigns. Folks need to get tracking set up properly everywhere including AdWords, Bing, Google Analytics and any other platform before paying for a single click.
Set up conversion tracking or direct your AdWords traffic to dedicated purchase pages that allow you to track how much revenue is being generated by each of your AdWords campaigns.

Adwords Mistake #9 - Tackling too many keywords at once
The most critical mistake people make is tackling too many keywords at once. When this happens, no keywords have good impression share and you're most likely showing up for searches that would be better off excluded.
You will be a lot more successful when you target a few high-intent keywords and get those keywords to 100% impression share. Really nurture those keywords with negatives and then you'll see what keywords and search terms are profitable. From there, follow the same pattern and test more keywords to get more results.

Adwords Mistake #10 - Not having clear goals set
If you don't know exactly what you want; then no decision in Ad Words can be correct (or incorrect). You first need to determine exactly what you want you’re advertising to accomplish before doing anything else within a PPC account. Unfortunately, many companies skip this step and just start spending money and hoping for results. The problem is since they don't have a goal, their results never live up to their expectations and they get paralyzed as to what should be their next move. 
Always set your goals first and make decisions towards those goals. It's OK to change or refine your goals - but always know what you want to accomplish and then your Ad Words decisions become quite easy as you just look to your goals to determine what to do."
Conclusion:
There's no secret to being successful with Ad Words, but there are a number of tips and tricks that can help you optimize your campaigns to maximize your chances of success.
Start with clear set goals and make a point to regularly check your campaigns and constantly look for places to make improvements.
Be hyper specific with your keywords and pay attention to where your driving your traffic. Remember, where you lead your traffic is equally if not more important than the bait you use to bring them there.
If in doubt, A/B test your keywords and landing pages and you take a look at your drop off points in your funnel (since you'll be tracking your conversions, right?).










Chapter 5
Google Ad Words Audit & Optimisation Guide
By conducting a Google Ad words account audit, you’ll ensure your PPC campaigns are reaching their full potential. Using this Google Ad Words guide, you’ll discover and eliminate mistakes that might be reducing your campaign performance. 
As a digital marketer, you have two options: either hire a Google Ad Words Consultant, or carry out a review on your own. Both have their benefits, with the Ad words Consultant option being more time-savvy for those with a budget. Consultants should at least be Ad Words Certified to ensure that you’re getting expert support. Doing the Ad Words audit yourself means you’ll learn valuable skills along the way if you can invest the time and effort to learn.

Google Ad Words Guide & Optimisation Checklist
Conducting a PPC account audit isn’t a child’s play but by following through this PPC audit checklist, you’ll get a clear overview of your account performance:
* Ad Copy Analysis
* Keyword Analysis
* Ad Words Account Management Review
* Quality Control
* Visibility
We guarantee that in course of auditing your PPC account, you’ll find new ways to improve your ads’ quality score and reduce the cost-per-conversion / cost-per-acquisition.
Where to start?
Tools: Google Ad Words, Google Analytics plus any other Audit Tools you may want. 
Date range: to have enough data to back up your findings, use at least 3 months’ worth of data.

Stage 1: Ad copy analysis
 1) Check the number of ad variations per ad group
To begin the audit, see how many ad variations your average ad groups include. The easiest way to do this is to export all your account ads using AdWords Editor and use a Pivot Table in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets to count the number of variations:


Testing various ad copies contributes new insight to improve the overall click-through rate and cost-per-click.
The best practice is to test 3-4 ad variations at a time. If your ad groups include over four ad variations, reduce the number by eliminating the least successful alterations.
You can test multiple ad copy components:
* The Headline
* The Descriptive text
* The Final URL
* The Display URL
For your A/B tests to yield relevant feedback, avoid testing all of these elements at once. Rather conduct a split test with one component so that if performance changes, you know which element it was that caused the change.
Tip: Make sure that your campaign naming makes sense, reflecting on the structure of your PPC account. It will be easier to conduct an audit if you know what each campaign name stands for.
2) Are You Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)?
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is an Ad words feature that allows advertisers to dynamically populate ad copy with user search queries.
Using DKI helps advertisers to deliver hyper-targeted keyword matches to the user’s search query in the ad. 
Using dynamic keywords has its drawbacks. For example, if you’re bidding on misspellings, you can end up with misspelled words showing in your ad text. Neither should you combine DKI with keyword match types other than exact.
If you’re unsure whether to use dynamic keywords, the best answer is “no”. Nothing beats effective keyword research, but you can use DKI if you’re faced with a vast range of keywords (long tail) for which manual research isn’t practical. Sometimes DKI ads yield better CTR due to improved ad relevance, but this doesn’t mean the user is more likely to convert.
3) Check for Ad spelling & grammar errors
We all make mistakes. That’s why you should go an extra mile and check for misspelled words and grammar errors in your ad copy.

The pay-per-click ad is the first thing a potential customer sees when searching for a product like yours. You do not want the initial impression to be less than perfect.
4) Check which ad extensions are used

Ad extensions permit advertisers to complement their PPC ads with additional text.
By using the ad extensions, you can take up more “real estate” on the search engine results page (SERP), and communicate more value proposals to customers.
What AdWords Ad Extensions are available?
* Sitelinks
* Location
* Call
* App
* Review
* Call Out
* Structured Snippets
* Automated – consumer ratings, previous visits, etc.
By using more ad extensions, you can improve your click-through rate across all campaigns.

Stage 2: Keyword Analysis
5) Check Your Keyword Match types
When creating PPC campaigns, you tell Google which keyword match types you’d like to use. By varying exact, phrase and broad keyword match, you’ll get to choose how aggressively or passively your advertisements match to keyword searches.
There are 4 types of keyword match types in AdWords:
* Broad keyword match
* Modified broad match
* Phrase match type
* Exact match type
When auditing your PPC account, compare whether your resource allocation matches with the results from each type of keyword matching.
Assign the largest share of your PPC budget to the match type with the lowest cost-per-action (CPA) and the highest conversion rate.

6) Check How Many Keywords Per Ad Group
As you continue with your account audit, the next step along the way is to analyse each ad group individually.
Check for the number of keywords and match types used.


It is highly recommended that you do not use more than 20 keywords in one ad group as it helps to keep your relevance high, which is good for CTR and Quality Score.
Important note: We recommend never mixing keyword match types within the same ad group in order to have a high relevance. Many advertisers choose to mix match types for ease of management, so it is a matter of preference.
Negative Keywords: Check whether you’ve got all the necessary negative keywords in place at ad group or campaign level. You want each of your ad groups to be focused on one particular topic, combining the keywords with negative matches to target the right search queries.
7) Analyse Your AdWords Quality Score
Quality Score (QS) is a measure by Google indicating how relevant the combination of your ad, message, keywords, and landing page is. It is strongly influenced by the CTR of your ads. Each of your ads can rank from 1-10. Usually keywords start with a QS of 6/10, which will go up or down depending on performance. 
The higher QS you have, the more auctions you’ll be able to participate in, and the less you’ll have to pay for website visits. 
You can check your Quality Score by looking within your Adwords Keywords tab.
* Click the Campaigns tab at the top.
* Select the Keywords tab.
* Look for the quality score column in the statistics table. If you don’t see this column in your table, you can add this column by doing the following:
* Click the Columns drop-down menu in the toolbar above the statistics table.
* Select Modify columns.
* Select Attributes.
* Click Add next to Qual. score.
* Click Save.
 

 
Stage 3: Account management review
 8) Check Frequency of bid changes
How often do you, your AdWords Consultant or Digital Agency tweak your PPC campaigns? Check the Adwords Change History to find out.
It is important to frequently review your keyword bids and optimise when necessary. Google Adwords is a dynamic auction marketplace that needs regular review. By regularly auditing your ad campaigns, you’ll be able to rapidly adjust to the changes.

9) Review Pending keyword opportunities
To discover new keyword opportunities, and take advantage of your findings, check your Search Query Report (SQR) in Google AdWords. You can find this under Keywords -> “Search Terms”. You can also find this in Google Analytics providing auto tagging is enabled.


The SQR reveals all the new keywords and negative keywords that you can easily add to your campaigns.
If you use an extensive amount of broad or phrase match types, you can discover new keywords that didn’t seem obvious in the first place. Add new keywords as exact matches or negative matches to improve your ad’s relevance and raise the quality score.
10) Check your Audience Targeting
Ad Words has many useful features like Remarketing Lists For Search Ads (RLSAs) and Customer Match that permit marketers to segment and target their customers for more specific marketing initiatives.
During your PPC account audit, consider the new possibilities of re-targeting your audiences based on their previous preferences and actions. Returning customers are typically more likely to convert.
Customer Match lets you create and target your own user lists by uploading prospects’ email addresses. Use these lists to create Search, Gmail or YouTube ad campaigns to send more targeted messages to the right people at the right time.


Stage 4: Quality control
 
13) Check For Landing page errors
The success of your PPC campaigns is decided by multiple factors. In addition to engaging ad copy and relevant keyword targeting, you also need to set up campaign landing pages.
While auditing your PPC account, take the time to review your landing page details such as:
* Is the landing page relevant to your ad campaigns (and keywords)?
* Do you have any broken links on your site?
* Are all the final URLs correct?
* Why do some landing pages have higher bounce rate than others?
* Are all necessary URL redirects in place?
* Are there any spelling mistakes?
* Do you have call-to-actions and lead forms in place?
 
14) Review remarketing campaigns
It is highly likely that you have some retargeting campaigns already in place. While auditing your PPC account, search for new profitable ways to expand this campaign category.
First, check your remarketing campaigns’ profitability, cost per click, and conversion rate. Your target conversion rate should be decided by your Cost per Acquisition (CPA), taking into account your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV / LTV).
Second, look for new audience segments that you could retarget with a specific value offer.
Maybe you’re missing out on retargeting users that started to fill in your contact form but failed to complete it. Maybe there’s a shopping cart abandonment issue that could be resolved by using retargeting.

 15) Check Your Campaign & Ad rotation settings
Campaign settings include the basic rules on how and to whom your ads are shown.
Here are a few elements that you should check during the PPC account audit:
* Are you targeting the right language speaking audience?
* Are you targeting the right locations?
* Are you using the right type of ad delivery?
* Does the ad scheduling reflect your business goals?
* Are your ads rotating indefinitely or is Google preferring one over the others? We recommend rotating indefinitely until you have enough clicks and impressions to optimise for clicks or conversions.
 

 
16) Keywords with zero impressions
The more keywords you have in your campaigns, the harder it is to manage and review.



To keep your ad groups streamlined, find all the keywords bringing no traffic over extended periods, and remove them from your targeted keywords list.
Here’s another reason to eliminate the zero impression keywords: They might be impacting your account’s quality score.
Review all your zero impression keywords. A high rate of no-traffic matched might indicate a poor keyword or targeting strategy.

Stage 5: Visibility audit
 17) Check Impression share
Are your ads shown every time someone searches for a particular keyword, or is your impression share lower than 100%?
Usually, Google might decide not to show your ads all the time due to budget limits or because of a poor ad rank.



An impression share lower than 100% shows advertisers that there might be unfulfilled potential, or the ad campaigns are not relevant for people searching for specific keywords.
You can increase your impression share by improving the overall quality and relevance of your ad campaigns as well as increasing budget and bids for higher positions.
 
18) Review Your AdWords Competitors
It’s an incremental part of a PPC account audit to understand how your impression share compares to those of your competitors.



To get more insights into this topic, use the Auction insights report in Google AdWords.
The Auction insights report for Search campaigns provides 6 different statistics about your competitors’ campaigns and bidding:
* impression share
* average position
* overlap rate
* position above rate
* top of page rate
* outranking share.
When comparing your ads’ visibility to competitors, search for significant differences and try to find the cause of the sudden drops, or someone’s skyrocketing visibility.
Conclusion: 
Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time for you to conduct your very first comprehensive PPC account audit.

Chapter 6
Improving quality Score in Google Adwords
If you manage pay-per-click search campaigns in Google Ad Words, you know that it can sometimes be a tough nut to crack. Especially when it comes to the mysterious quality score.
The Ad Words quality score is made up of a variety of layers that have a major impact on the success of your ads. But what exactly is it? How is it calculated? And why the heck does it even matter? (Tip: It does). 
So, what exactly is AdWords quality score? And why should I care?

To make matters simple, let’s boil it down to this: Quality score is a number determined by Google that rates the overall quality and relevance of your AdWords ads and keywords. The position of your ad on the search results page, and the amount of your cost per click are based on this number.
Think of it like a credit score. When you go to buy a house or a car, your credit score determines how large or small your loan will be as well as the interest rate you’ll have to pay. The AdWords quality score works similarly to this.
The better your ads meet the needs of a searcher’s request, the higher your quality score will be and the less you’ll have to pay for each click. You’re going to have to pay Google a lot more money if you want to show ads that aren’t closely related to a search query.
But really the biggest benefit of optimizing your quality scores is that it’ll help increase your ROI (wahoo!) This is because a higher quality score lowers your cost per lead or sale by as much as 16 to 80 percent.
I'm seeing a “Rarely shown due to low quality score” error. What does that mean?
The presence of this error means your quality score is at a two out of 10 or less—definitely room for improvement. 
In this case, ads associated with the low quality score keywords will either not be shown at all or you will have to pay a much higher price if they are shown and someone clicks on them.

A lower quality score means a lower ad rank. And when this warning appears, Google is basically saying that it’s prioritizing other ads over yours because yours is not relevant to searchers—lower relevance means fewer clicks, which means less revenue for Google.
So, are you ready to start improving your AdWords quality scores? Let’s get started…
How to Improve Quality Score Step 1: Super Small Ad Groups
Google recommends using 15 to 20 keywords per ad group. However, this does not work in most cases. In fact, ideally, you should have only one keyword per ad group. 
To get a good overall quality score, you need to make sure that your keyword, ad, and landing page all neatly tie together. If you have several keywords in your ad group, your ad will likely not be perfectly relevant for each keyword; your landing page may not have all those keywords either. On the other hand, if you have just one keyword in your ad group, it is easy to customize your ad copy around that keyword and ensure that your landing page has enough references to that keyword. This gives you much more control in managing your quality scores.


When creating a single keyword ad group, add all three match types (exact, phrase, modified broad) for your keyword.
For example, if your business sells car covers, you may want to create a structure similar to this:
* Ad Group Car Covers:
o [Car Covers]
o “Car Covers”
o +Car +Covers
* Ad Group Custom Car Covers:
o [Custom Car Covers]
o “Custom Car Covers”
o +Custom +Car +Covers
* Ad Group Corvette Car Covers:
o [Corvette Car Covers]
o “Corvette Car Covers”
o +Corvette +Car +Covers
* Ad Group Chevrolet Corvette Car Covers:
o [Chevrolet Corvette Car Covers]
o “Chevrolet Corvette Car Covers”
o +Chevrolet +Corvette +Car +Covers
When you do this, you are decreasing the difference between the user search term to keyword and keyword to ad ratios. Since the user search terms directly match the keyword, your ad targeting is more relevant and precise (assuming of course that you use the keyword in your ad copy), which will increase your click-through rates (CTR) and your quality scores.
You should try this approach for keywords that are responsible for at least 80 percent of your traffic. If that’s still too many, do it for all keywords with a quality score at three or below.
Another important aspect of using single keyword ad groups is that you can use a landing page specifically customized for the keyword in your ad group. This results in a much more relevant and targeted experience for users, and improves quality scores. We’ll get into this in detail in step six of this post.
How to Improve Quality Score Step 2: Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are keywords you add to your campaign or ad group that you want Google to ignore and not show your ads. They are critical to eliminate irrelevant searches from your campaign, as well as to ensure that a given keyword is matched to only one ad group in your campaign.
At the campaign level, you would want to add keywords that you don’t ever want any traffic for. For example, going back to our Car Covers business, you would want to add the following as negative keywords (assuming you don’t sell these types of covers!):
o seat
o free
o tire
o steering
o dashboard
While most of your negative keywords will be at the campaign level, it is important to have ad group level negative keywords, especially when you are using single keyword ad groups as we discussed in the first step. In this case, you will have many ad groups with similar keywords and the only way to eliminate overlap, is to use ad group level negative keywords.
For example, the Car Covers ad group that we discussed in the first step will start to steal traffic for keywords like “Custom Car Covers” and “Corvette Car Covers.” You can solve this problem by adding negative keywords like the following:
o Ad Group Car Covers:
o Custom
o Corvette
o Chevrolet
o Ad Group Custom Car Covers:
o Corvette
o Chevrolet
o Ad Group Corvette Car Covers:
o Chevrolet
Basically, negative keywords save you from having your short-tail keywords overshadow your more specific long-tail keywords. A real life saver, since someone searching for a Chevrolet Corvette Car Cover, would be much more likely to click on an ad that specifically mentions Chevrolet Corvette.
How to Improve Quality Score Step 3: Expanded Text Ads
To take your ads to the next level, you should use Google’s new expanded text ad format which allows you to have ads that are 50 percent longer than before. This gives you ample space to fit even your long tail keywords, and you still have enough room to add benefits and a call-to-action. Not only will your ads now be more relevant than before, but they will also have increased CTRs.
With expanded text ads, you have 140 characters of ad space—a big leap from the former 25-35-35 format:













Here is a quick guide on how you should setup your expanded text ad:
o Headline 1 - Put your keyword here.
o Headline 2 - Put your main benefit / USP here.
o Display URL - Put your keyword in the URL path. If you have a long keyword, you can break it up and use both path fields for your keyword. Otherwise use one field for the keyword and use the other for a call-to-action.
o Description - Put in additional benefits and features here. Add a call-to-action. As an option, you can add your keyword or partial keyword here as well.
For example, an ad for our “Chevrolet Corvette Car Covers” ad group could look something like this:

If you are setting up an ad for a keyword containing a competitor name or a trademarked term, you are not allowed to use this keyword in the headlines or the description. But Google does allow you to use such a keyword in the display URL and you must take advantage of this fact. This is the only way that you can get a competitor or trademarked term in your ad copy while remaining on Google’s good side!

How to Improve Quality Score Step 4: Stop Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic Keyword Insertion is an AdWords feature that allows you to automatically use the user’s search query anywhere in your ad copy. However, contrary to what you may have heard before, it is not a magic bullet to improve your quality scores. If you use single keyword ad groups, then it virtually eliminates the need for Dynamic Keyword Insertion in the first place.
Another reason to avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion is that a keyword awkwardly stuffed into a headline doesn’t do nearly as much good as a well-written, emotive headline. With expanded text ads, you now have the space to create something that makes people laugh, cry, empathize—whatever moves them to click on your ad.
So forget about Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Get back to your copywriting roots and come up with something that stirs things up!

How to Improve Quality Score Step 5: Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are an important part of quality score calculations. They add extra elements of information about your business that help searchers find what they’re looking for fast, without rooting around your site to find answers. This added layer of convenience increases your click-through-rates. As Google says, “Give your customers more reasons to click.”
Here is an overview of the ad extensions that will be most helpful for improving quality scores:
o Site links: These are links to other areas of your site that searchers may find useful. It is best to use other landing pages that you have, instead of website pages. For example: additional products or services that you provide, downloadable content offers, webinars, special promotions, etc. Pay close attention to the titles you show for these links—try to use your most popular search terms here. Definitely use the additional 2-line descriptions that are available for each site link.
o Location: Use these extensions to display your address directly beneath your ad. This type of ad extension is great for location targeted campaigns.
o Call: By displaying your phone number within your ad, people can call you directly from the search results page. On mobile devices, they can just click the Call icon to place the call.
o Review: If someone from a third party site has given you a good review, you can include it beneath your ad using a review extension.
o Callout: Callout extensions allow you to add an extra line of copy that highlights the benefits or features of your business. This line is not clickable, but it could encourage people to interact with your ad.
o Structured snippet: Structured snippets allow you to add additional information about your products or services based on a predetermined list of categories. For example, you could choose “Services” from that list and add a structured snippet about the different services you offer.
o Price: These types of extensions allow you to showcase the prices of your products or services. Price extensions are only visible on mobile devices, but they can be very useful—especially if you’re offering low or promotional prices.
o Seller Ratings: If you have an ecommerce site or you are a retailer and have independent ratings available from a trusted third party source, you can link their feed with your site. Once you do this, star ratings will appear within your ad copy and provide an excellent visual cue that people are sure to notice.

An ad showing seller ratings, callout, structured snippet (types) and site links ad extensions


An ad showing call, callout, review, and site links (with 2 line descriptions) ad extensions



o Ad extensions can be added at the account, campaign, or ad group level:
o Location, call, and ratings and review extensions: These extensions should be added at the account level unless you have different locations or numbers, in which case they should be added to the associated campaigns.
o Site links, callouts, and snippets: These elements should be added at the campaign level, and in some cases at the ad group’s level. While you don’t necessarily need different ones for each ad group, you can provide the extensions for sets of similar ad groups.

How to Improve Quality Score Step 6: Landing Page Content
One of the factors that Google takes into consideration when determining your quality score is the relevancy of your landing page content. Make sure you use your keywords in the title, meta description, and meta keywords portions of your landing page. Also, include keywords within your content, paying particular attention to your headlines and subheadings. Essentially you have to use much of the same on-page SEO techniques that you would use for optimizing your website pages.
If you’re following the single keyword ad group strategy that we discussed earlier, you can use a customized landing page for each of your ad groups. Using this strategy completes your trisect of ensuring precise message match between your keyword, ad and landing page. This not only increases your quality score, but will provide an excellent boost to your conversion rate as well.
But creating a customized landing page for each ad group you have is not realistic. Not only is it resource intensive to begin with, it is a maintenance and A/B testing nightmare. You can solve this problem by using dynamic text replacement. Using this technique, you’ll only need to create a handful of landing pages or maybe just one landing page.


A landing page showing dynamic insertion of keywords “Chevrolet Car Cover” and “Chevrolet Corvette Car Covers”
This eliminates the need to create multiple landing pages yourself—a very tiresome process.
Using this technique, you’ll be able to keep each user’s experience highly relevant to their search. Not a bad way to skyrocket your quality score and conversion rates!

How to Improve Quality Score Step 7: Landing Page User Experience
Your landing page should be responsive and easily browsable from both desktop and mobile devices
Even more importantly, you need to have fast load times. Have you ever clicked a search result that took too long to load? How many seconds did you stick around before you clicked the back button to look at the other search results?
Searchers’ attention spans continue to decrease, and their patience with it. Fast loading times are super crucial for good user experience—which, of course, means they’re also crucial for a good quality score.

Screenshot of Google’s PageSpeed tool for User Experience
How to Improve Quality Score Step 8: Branded Keywords
If both your PPC and organic results show up for your branded keyword, your combined CTR will be higher than it would be if only the organic results were displayed. More importantly for our purposes, branded ads will garner the highest CTRs in your whole campaign which is yet another signal that contributes to a higher quality score for your specific keyword.

Look at these amazing CTRs and Quality Scores for branded terms
Branded terms consistently land in the seven to 10 range for quality score. 
You can also think of your branded ads as billboards. Sure, you were already going to show up in search results organically. But your ad at the top of the page holds a marketing message. Plus, you can also use ad extensions to display links for new products, promotions, and other enticing elements for your prospects.
These marketing messages reiterate your value to the customer. This is especially important considering that your competitors will probably be bidding on your brand keywords and will also show up in ad results. If you miss this opportunity, prospects may be enticed by your competitor’s ad and leave you behind.
Conclusion
Now that you armed with an actionable blueprint, go on and start implementing these strategies.  And if you follow through on all of the steps we have listed, you will boost your campaign performance to levels you have never seen before.


Chapter 7
AdWords Display Advertising
The Google Display Network is the largest contextual advertising network available on the Internet today. Consisting of millions of websites, advertisers can choose to display their adverts in multiple formats to a range of audiences across the globe using a wide variety of targeting methods.
The Google Display Network accounts for 20% of all AdWords traffic, and reaches 92% of all Internet users in the US.  These figures will continue to rise as the network expands in the future, so it is important that advertisers understand exactly how to utilise the power of Display Advertising to promote their business to relevant audiences across the web.
* Why Use Adwords Display Advertising?
Google estimates that their display network provides coverage to over 90 percent of all Internet users, which is one rather large reason why you should be using it.  However, it’s not just the reach of the network that makes it so impressive; it’s the ability to target users in a variety of ways that makes the Google Display Network such a potentially lucrative platform for advertisers.
* Different Types of Display Adverts
It is a common misconception that the Display Network only provides you with the option of displaying image ads.  In fact, the Google Display Network lets you advertise in a variety of formats and sizes with text ads, static and animated image ads, rich media and video ads.
* Text ads –The GDN allows you to run the same text ads on display as you would on the search network.  Text ads consist of a headline and two lines of text, and allow advertisers to create a range of ads to text which copy is generating the most clicks.
Square and rectangle
200 × 200
Small square
240 × 400
Vertical rectangle
250 × 250
Square
250 × 360
Triple widescreen
300 × 250
Inline rectangle
336 × 280
Large rectangle
580 × 400
Netboard
Skyscraper

120 × 600
Skyscraper
160 × 600
Wide skyscraper
300 × 600
Half-page ad
300 × 1050
Portrait
Leaderboard

468 × 60
Banner
728 × 90
Leaderboard
930 × 180
Top banner
970 × 90
Large leaderboard
970 × 250
Billboard
980 × 120
Panorama
Mobile

300 × 50
Mobile banner
320 × 50
Mobile banner
320 × 100
Large mobile banner
Supported file size
·         150 KB or smaller
Source
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722096?hl=en

* Image ads. A static image that would fill the entire ad block on the website it appears upon.  You can include custom imagery, layouts and background colours on image ads.
* Rich media Ads.  Rich Media Ads include interactive elements, animations or other aspects that change depending on who is looking at the ad and how they interact with it.  For example, a moving carousel of products.
* Video ads. Video ads have become more popular since YouTube is included on the Display Network.  You can now use AdWords to place your ads next to YouTube videos.

* Display Advert Sizes
There are more than 20 different ad block sizes within the GDN.  Each site that signs up to carry Google ads will choose the ad block that fits their website layout best, so if you want your ads to be able to show on a variety of websites irrelevant of ad block size, then it is best practice to create display ads in a variety of sizes.
Advertisers are able to upload both animated and non-animated image ads on the Google Display network as well as HTML5 ads in the following sizes:
It is imperative that you create ads to fit all the different ad blocks listed above.  Failure to do so will limit your reach on the display network and stop your ads from showing on certain websites.
You should expect image or rich media ads to have roughly twice the click-through rate of text ads, but they will show less often. Because Google can fit more than one text ad into a single block but only one image ad into the same space, therefore you will need to outbid the combined max CPC of the text ads sharing a block to display an image in that position.
If you don’t have the resource to create image ads then you could use Google’s Display Ad Builder, but be should include a clear call-to-action or branding message within each of your ads and use a design that is consistent with the look and feel of your website.
* Targeting on the Google Display Network
You can target audiences on the display network to narrow your reach to people more likely to be interested in your products or services. This can be achieved via:
o Placement Targeting
Placement targeting refers to the option of choosing which websites you want to appear on, thus giving you the most control over where you’re going to appear on the GDN.  This is effective for targeting a specific demographic, and provides advertisers with an opportunity to look for websites geared towards special interests that closely match their target audience.
So if there are any industry specific websites and forums that you feel are relevant to your business, and that you think people would be likely to visit were they interested in your services, why not advertise on them?
Use the Adwords Display Planner to help you to find websites that will carry GDN ads that are similar to sites you would ideally like to appear on.
o Contextual Targeting
This is the most common targeting type, since it utilises the keywords related to the products and services you offer.  You will firstly need to create a keyword list and Google will do their best to display your ads on sites related to the keywords you’ve provided.

 
You’ll need to keep an eye on the list of websites you’re appearing on and tweak your keyword list accordingly.  This can be monitored by analysing the data provided in the ‘Placements’ tab in Adwords, as the diagram below indicates:

o Topic Targeting
Topic targeting allows you to choose from an existing list of page topics, meaning that your ads will only display on pages about that topic.

The downside is that you can’t really drill down too deeply into many of the topics, meaning that there’s a risk your ads may appear on unrelated sites.  For example, a topic can be as broad as ‘human resources’, whereas your ad may be highly targeted towards ethical recruitment.  
o Interest Targeting
The list of interest categories available to advertisers is similar to the list of topics, but this targeting method is very different from targeting by topic.  Interest targeting lets advertisers target the user, not the page content, this means that the user might be looking at anything when your ad appears (provided they’re on a site within the GDN).
Google are able to store cookies on people’s computers every time they visit a page within their advertising network.  These are referred to as DoubleClick cookies.  Google won’t save information around which these visitors are, and advertisers won’t be able to view data at a single user level.  However, if people are regularly browsing pages about a specific category (Interest) then they will be added to the list of people who Google deem ‘interested’ in that category.
Remarketing
Without delving into the finer details of remarketing, as it is a few articles worth of content alone, it is worth mentioning remarketing among the other display targeting techniques that are available in AdWords.
Remarketing allows you to deposit a cookie on the computers of the visitors to pages on your website.  Google will then display ads specifically to those people whenever they visit sites on the Google Display Network. We will cover it in detail in the upcoming chapters.
Combining Different Targeting Methods
AdWords display targeting is most effective when a combination of targeting methods is used.  If an advertiser applies more than one targeting method to an ad group, their ads will only display to people who match both targeting criteria.
Combining one or more different targeting methods will reduce the potential impressions of your ads, but will leave you with extremely well targeted ad groups.  If you create enough of these kind of Ad Groups, you’ll be able to mimic your high traffic ad groups, but with much more effective targeting.
Optimising Your Display Campaigns
When optimising display campaigns regularly review the automatic placements report, and add strong performing placements to managed placement campaigns. Also add any irrelevant or poor performing sites as negative placements in your automatic placement campaign.
Other optimisation techniques for display network campaigns include:
* Excluding irrelevant categories
* Excluding irrelevant audiences
* Reviewing reach using the dimensions tab.  Remember to increase your budget if you wish to increase your reach
* Reviewing ad performance based on geographic region and exclude any areas which regularly perform poorly (using the dimensions tab)
* Adding click-to-call extensions if you are targeting mobile devices
* Exclude mobile apps – Showing your ads in games and music apps probably won’t be beneficial to you. Most people accidentally click on the ads to return swiftly to the game. They’re looking to entertain themselves rather than make a purchase or seek B2B services. Avoid wasting money on these accidental clicks.
There are plenty of other strategies you could implement to continually improve the performance of your display network campaigns but if you’re just starting out on the Display Network and want to closely monitor performance on specific sites then reviewing your placements report on a regular basis is where you should focus your time. 
Which Sectors Should Consider Display Marketing?
Display advertising can be used to boost paid performance for most businesses. Indeed, in some industries the search network can be so competitive that the display network presents the best opportunity for smaller businesses to gain paid online visibility.
Back in 2016, the paid advertising experts at Word Stream wrote a blog post aiming to give businesses an industry benchmark should they choose to use paid advertising. The following image from this post shows average cost per click split by sector:

As you can see, legal, employment and consumer services are the most expensive sectors on the search network. The most expensive keywords on Google infographic and Search Engine Watch’s top 100 most expensive keywords in the UK research also highlight these sectors as the most expensive in PPC advertising, alongside gambling services, where some keywords can cost up to £144.76 per click!
So, if your business falls into any of these categories and your advertising budget is low, you may benefit from trying to advertise on the Display Network. Indeed, even if you don’t fall into these categories, you may still want to try it our alongside a search network campaign, as it’s so much cheaper.
Conclusion
However, with all the targeting options available today the display network is a great option for advertisers who have been priced out of advertising on the search network. 
Chapter 8
Turbocharge Adwords for breakthrough performance
AdWords is harder than it looks.
From the outside, it seems like you just add keywords, write a few text ads, and then sit back and collect paychecks. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.
AdWords is incredibly complicated and can run away from you quickly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So now that you understand that AdWords is more complicated than it looks, let’s talk about some advanced ways to improve your results. Here’s a quick breakdown of some advanced tactics you can use to get better results.
1. Take Advantage of Callout Extensions
The first thing you want to do to take your AdWords account to the next level is to take advantage of callout extensions.
Callouts are a relatively new extension that Google added to allow advertisers to write short, 25-character blurbs to ads that “call out” important features or offers.
For example, some advertisers use callouts to mention things like “Free shipping” or “Save 50%.”  
The great thing about callouts is that they allow you to draw attention to important product features and offers while also giving you more room to extend your ad copy thereby enabling your ads to take up more space in search results.
To take advantage of callout extensions, log into your account, click on “Ad Extensions,” click “View: Callout Extensions,” and then click on the red “+Extensions” button to add a new callout.
Here’s the graphical version of the above instructions.



2. Increase Continuity between Keywords, Ads, and Landing Pages
The next thing you can do to turbocharge results is to make sure you have a good continuity between keywords, ad copy, and landing pages.
For example, if someone searches for Nike running shoes, you want your ad copy to mention Nike running shoes, and your landing page to be product results for Nike running shoes.
To carry this out, you need to make sure that keywords are broken out into multiple ad groups. Nike running shoes should be its own group, as should Xerox running shoes and Adidas running shoes, etc.
In addition, you need to write ad copy that matches the keyword being searched. 
The final step is to make sure your landing page matches the keyword searched. You don’t want to put in the time and effort it takes to create individual keyword groups with custom ad text only to drop traffic on your homepage or a non-related landing page. Instead, create as many landing pages you can to match your ad groups and the term being searched for.
3. Ensure 100% Impression Share for Branded Terms
A big mistake a lot of advertisers make is not ensuring a 100% impression share for branded terms. 
Now, let’s log into Ad Words and make sure we’re also bidding on our brand terms because if we don’t, our competition will. And if our competition bids on our brand, then they’re going to steal the most valuable clicks for our business, i.e. highly targeted visitors that like us enough and know enough about us to Google our brand in the first place.
Just remember: if you don’t bid on your brand terms, your Ad Words competitors will, and that means less money for you and more money for them.
4. Build Out Your Negative Keyword List
The next step towards turbo charging your account is to build out your negative keywords list. The good news is that it isn’t difficult to do (although it does take time), the bad news is that you’d be surprised at how many advertisers don’t include negative keywords, including accounts that are managed by PPC agencies!
The value of negative keywords is that they allow you to be more specific about which terms you show up for and also make sure you don’t show up for terms that are completely unrelated to what you offer for sale.

5. Leverage Sitelinks Extensions
Sitelinks are another AdWords extension a lot of people miss. With sitelinks, you get to add links to your website that look like this:

As you can imagine, it’s a great way to take up more search engine result page (SERP) real estate while also sharing valuable links searchers might find useful.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that sitelinks extensions don’t always show up. Google decides when they do, and just because you add them doesn’t mean all of your ads will look like the one above. But when they do, you’ll have a really good looking ad.
To add sitelinks, click on an Ad group, and then click “Ad extensions.” From there you’ll click “View: sitelinks,” and then click on the red “+Extensions” button to add your sitelinks.


6. Adjust Geotargeting Bids Based on Conversion Rates
Not many people realize you can adjust your bids by geography based on which cities, counties, states, etc. convert better for your business.
Here’s how it works.
First, take a look at conversions according to location by clicking on “Settings” then “Locations.”

Next, evaluate your conversions by country. If one country converts better than another, you can adjust your bids up by 25%, 50%, etc. If, on the other hand, one country performs more poorly than the others, you can adjust your bids down as needed.

To adjust bids by geographic region, simply click into the column next to the geographic region you’d like to adjust your bid for.

You can also drill in further by clicking “View location reports.” From here you can select “What triggered your ad (geographic)” or “Where your users were (user locations)”.


Sometimes you just need to adjust country level bids, but other times you’ll want to adjust at the city or zip code level. It all depends on the type of campaign you’re working on and how much time you or your PPC manager has to tweak the campaign.
7. Develop a Retargeting Strategy
Last but not least, you want to make sure and develop a retargeting strategy for your AdWords campaign. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, it works really, really well.
Conclusion
Like we mentioned at the beginning of this article, AdWords is quite a beast. You first have to understand the basics before you can move on to some of these more advanced techniques.
But if you’re a semi-experienced novice looking to squeeze more profit out of a campaign that’s currently performing well, we hope this article gives you the fuel you need to turbocharge your account so you start getting breakthrough performance from your campaigns.













Chapter 9
Content Remarketing strategies with Google Display network
Recapturing audience attention to turn lookers into leads is an effective marketing tactic, and if you're not doing it, you're leaving money on the table. Let's start with the basics.
1) What Is Content Remarketing?
At its core, remarketing is the process of tagging your site visitors and targeting them with content after they leave your site, in an effort to reengage them and bring them back to your site.
Remarketing provides the opportunity to:
o Turn bounced website visitors into leads.
o Increase brand recall (and thus increase branded searches).
o Increase repeat visitor rates and engagement.
o Increase the effectiveness of search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.
2) What's So Awesome About the Google Display Network (GDN)?
The GDN is one of the largest remarketing networks in the world and has over two million sites in the network, including pretty much every site in the world (with the notable exception of Facebook). It also includes some pretty big Google sites, like YouTube and Gmail. The inclusion of AdMob for mobile targeting means you can get your ads to show up in Angry Birds (I know, cool, eh?) and other mobile apps.
3) Getting Started With Remarketing
Using the GDN for remarketing gives you a great deal of reach. Generally, you can find your tagged site visitors on the network many times per day, several days per week, and across many different sites. 

On average, you'll be able to connect with 84% of the people you tag, 10-18 times per month.

o Audience Definition Strategy
One of your first steps in remarketing is to define the specific audience(s) you want to remarket to. To define an audience, create a new remarketing list in Google AdWords. Google will take care of setting all of the cookies; all you need to do is specify which website visitors to include or exclude from your audience. 
Segmenting different lists of users enables you to show different ads, depending on which section of your site they visited.
A secondary benefit is that you can bid more aggressively to get more impressions and higher ad positions, and to get visitors to the higher value sections of your website. For example, your data might show that visitors to your pricing or product page are more valuable than your blog visitors.


Another creative remarketing strategy for content marketers is to define audience categories in Google AdWords based on the different post categories in your blog. If you already have a ton of blog content that is classified by topic, leverage those existing classifications in your remarketing audience definition strategy.
o Audience Membership Duration
In remarketing, the audience membership duration is the number of days that you follow a user around with your ads. You can test and tweak this number to see what's right for your audience.

4) About Ad Fatigue
Ad fatigue is a real thing in every industry and across every medium: TV, radio, print … and, yes, display ads. But do remarketing ads fatigue faster than other display ads? 
The clickthrough rate of remarketing ads is much higher to begin with, and it stays higher even as ad fatigue begins to set in. What this means is: A user is still far more likely to engage with a remarketing ad, even after having seen it six times before, than they are with a brand new generic display ad.

Ad Fatigue in Remarketing vs. Display Ads


What we see here is that, while remarketing ads certainly did fatigue over time, remarketing ads fatigued at less than half the rate of generic display ads.
Conversion Rate vs. Ad Impressions
But how does conversion rate vary based on the number of times people have seen your ad before clicking on it? We had a look at that, too:

The chart above shows that, although a user becomes somewhat less likely to click on a remarketing ad over time, those who do click are more than twice as likely to convert.
o Try setting your audience membership duration to an amount equal to 3x your average sale cycle length.
o If it typically takes an average of one week to go from first touch to sale, set the audience membership duration to three weeks
o Don’t worry too much about impression caps (remember, more impressions means higher conversion rates. Consider rotating though multiple ads per campaign to combat ad fatigue.)
5) Creating Killer Content Remarketing Ads
Now that we’ve talked about defining an audience to remarket to, let's focus on how to create killer remarketing ads.
Ad Formats on the Google Display Network: There are 14 different display ad formats on the Google Display Network, shown below:



Ad formats matter to marketers because of how the ad auction works. Different ad formats do not compete against each other for positioning, as shown in this screenshot:

The lesson here? Diversify your ad formats.
This table shows the share of impressions accrued by the various different ad formats on the internet. 

Diversifying your ad formats maximizes your chances of ad placement in better positions.
Emotions That Make People Click on Content
The key here is to create ads that resonate with users on an emotional level. Stay away from boring, plain, informational ads that look the same as every other ad out there. Instead, diversify your ad formats, and create ads that appeal to your audience on an emotional level.
6) The High Clickthrough Rate Game for Content Remarketing
Google doesn’t make money by showing ads no one clicks on, so it makes sense for them to show ads that are more likely to get clicks. They use an algorithm called Quality Score to determine which ads to show, what position each will display in, and how much to charge the advertiser for each ad click.
To provide an incentive for advertisers to create great ads, they give out huge discounts for ads with high clickthrough rates … and dish out huge penalties for ads with low clickthrough rates.
For this reason, for every 0.1% increase or decrease in the CTRs of your ads, your click costs will go up or down by 21%. For obvious reasons, the average CTR on text ads is much lower than image ads, as you can see here:

As a result, the CPC on text ads is way more than the CPC on image ads. It’s like you're paying a 381% tax on text ads! The key takeaway here is to take the time to design beautiful, helpful, customized image ads, rather than simply converting your text-based search ads into image ads.
Winning Tactics for Improving Your Remarketing CTRs
Higher clickthrough rates win you lower costs per click, but how do you boost those clickthrough rates? Here are four ways:
1) Send people to your high-value offers. What should you be featuring in your image ads? The most common tactic is to simply promote your highest value offers, like a free trial of your product, a request for a demo, etc. 
2) Do a conversion path analysis. The goal here is to figure out which pages on your site, if visited during a user’s session, result in a much higher probability of the user converting to a lead or a sale. For example, the highest converting page on your site could be your product overview page. Come up with a list like this one and target those pages in your remarketing audience.
3) Send people to your best content. 
But how do you know what content to feature in your ads?
4) Analyze social shares on your blog content. If you analyze your blog content, what you’ll usually find is that around 5% of your pages generate half of the shares on social media.
7) Creative & Effective Remarketing Bid Strategies
Now that you have remarketing audiences and ads down to a science, let's turn our attention to bid management strategies. 
Remember, in PPC marketing, you have to pay for each click. The advertiser specifies a maximum cost per click that they’re willing to pay, but the key here is not to buy every possible click. Rather, you want to be super picky and just cherry-pick the clicks that are the most relevant to your business. The way to do this is through bid management.

The Key to Effective Bid Management: Target Your Buyer Persona
It doesn’t make any sense to remarket ads to everyone in your audience. Why? Because not everyone who visits your website is a qualified buyer.
In AdWords, you can overlay user demographic information on top of your remarketing audiences to find the needles in the haystack. For example, someone from Zimbabwe could visit your site -- but they can't convert if you can't ship there.
Here’s when it comes in handy to know a thing or two about your target customer persona. What are the ages? Parental status? Where do they live? Gender? What time do they search for your products? What is their income? You can be very picky, and just bid for the people in your audience who also meet your demographic filters.
8) Advanced Ad Formats
We discussed standardized image ad formats, but there are some really cool advanced ad formats that are worth mentioning, too.
o YouTube Ads
Using YouTube TrueView ads, you can target your audiences as they are watching other videos on YouTube.
The cool thing about TrueView videos is that you only pay if people view your video content. There’s no cost if the person clicks on the “skip ad” button. If you’re creating video content, why wouldn’t you pay a few bucks to promote it?
o +Post Ads
Another relatively new ad format is the +Post ad on Google+. Now, Google's social network isn’t as popular as Twitter or Facebook, so what they did was they came up with an ad format that lets you promote your Google+ content to visitors – even if they’re not on Google+.
o Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)
Here’s another interesting but advanced thing you can do. It’s a little complicated, but I promise it's awesome. It’s called Remarking Lists for Search Ads. RLSA lets you target people in your audiences with customized ads when they perform searches for specific keywords on Google. 
Using RLSA, you can target that comparison shopper with a specific ad, like a 10% discount code or something similar. Knowing that the person visited specific pages on your site and is now performing specific searches, it’s possible to come up with very specific and compelling ad copy.
9) Remarketing Amplifies Great Content
You've done your research, you know your topic, you have something interesting and entertaining to say -- but sometimes you need that extra push. As individuals and brands have become publishers, the game has been upped big time. Competition is fierce.
Conclusion:
In short, content remarketing enabled us to maximize the value of every piece of content we put out. We were able to get each piece in front of the audience with the most intent, at the right time, and via the right channels.
Use content remarketing to make your content sticker and increase conversions with a highly targeted audience. 






Chapter 10
Adwords Bidding Strategies your competitor’s don’t know

The AdWords Auction
PPC management companies these days easily have hundreds of different bidding options that can be performed automatically (within milliseconds too), so it’s vital that you know what’s out there to take advantage of.
The AdWords auction happens extremely fast (and extremely often). It takes three major things into account when it decides how your ad should rank:
          1) Your max cost-per-click bid for the keyword
          2) Your quality score for that keyword
          3) Your ad extensions and their relevance to ad and keyword
The Different AdWords Bidding Strategies
Whether you want to do things manually or automate, the AdWords bidding strategies we’re about to uncover can help you get closer and closer to your goals.
Always keep tabs on fluctuations, and if you improve your conversion rates through landing page testing, and then understand that your bidding goals can quickly improve and change (higher conversion rates can allow you to have more aggressive bidding strategies).
Here’s a look at the different AdWords bidding strategies available today: 
1. Manual Cost Per Click (CPC) 
Manual cost per click allows you to set bids at either the ad group or keyword level.
If you set individual bids at the keyword level, then this will allow for the highest level of control. Ad group level manual bids would give the same bid to all the keywords or placements within that ad group. 
This is usually always the best bidding strategy for brand new advertisers who want to make sure that nothing is overspending and that the control is tight. 
2. Automatic Cost Per Click (CPC)
Automatic cost per click gives Google control to adjust your bids (up or down) to help give you the most clicks within your daily budget for that specific campaign.
This is usually a decent bid strategy to use if you find yourself having to drastically reduce budgets (for one reason or the other), where you don’t want to lose impression share too fast.

Take a peek at what that will look like.
 
One of the downsides to this bidding strategy is that it doesn’t allow you to set max CPC bids at the individual keyword levels.

3. Enhanced Cost Per Click (CPC)  
Enhanced CPC (ECPC) gives Google the freedom to increase or decrease your bids by 30%.
Google tells us that they use historical conversion data and their algorithms to predict which searchers are more likely to lead to a conversion and which aren’t.

Simple as that. Sometimes this is a default bid setting when creating new campaigns, so be aware if you don’t want to use it at that given time.

4. CPA Bidding (Conversion Optimizer)
Also known as conversion optimizer, CPA bidding allows Google to adjust bids to average a certain cost per conversion goal that you’ve set. Based on the history of your AdWords account and conversion volumes, CPA bidding needs at least 15 conversions over a span of 30 days to become active.
If you meet those criteria, the CPA bidding can only be held back by budget caps that you might have.

So, there you go.
 
5. CPM Bidding (Cost Per Thousand Impression)
Only available for Display network campaigns (like remarketing), CPM bidding allows you to set target bids that accumulate after 1,000 impressions. Google once allowed max CPM bidding, but has since changed it to what’s called Viewable Cost Per Thousand Impression bidding (vCPM).
CPM bidding doesn’t charge you for clicks, but it will charge you for impressions of your ads even if they’re shown below the fold (where a user never sees them). 
Here’s what that bidding strategy option looks like within a Display network only campaign:


Flexible Bid Strategies
Your flexible bid strategies are located within your AdWords shared library.
Once you get there, you’ll find the option to choose from six different flexible bid strategies. Here’s a look at each one:

Enhanced CPC: Something we already covered earlier with the option to raise or lower bids by 30%.
6. Target search page location: If you found that your ads perform really well above organic search results or maybe on the sidebar, then this bid strategy will be fun for you to test out.
7. Target CPA: With target CPA bidding you can include as many or as few campaigns as you want to share the same CPA goals. Similar to what regular AdWords shared budgets do.

8. Target outranking share: Are you basing all your performance goals on how much you can outrank a certain competitor (strokes the ego, but can be dangerous)? Then this bidding strategy could help you out quite a bit.
By entering your competitor’s domain, you can tell Google how often you want to bid to outrank them, this is called the “Target outranking share”.

If you set your target outranking share to 50%, then Google will bid to outrank that specific competitor in 50% of the auctions.
9. Maximize clicks: This automated bid strategy is just like the automated CPC bidding. Be aware that this could lead to a lower quality of clicks which could lead to lower quality conversions.
10. Target return on ad spend: Do you have a certain ROI you want to hit when it comes to your PPC agency spend?
Target return on ad spend (ROAS) is a percentage you can set so that your conversion values (something you set at the conversion tracking stage) or Google Analytics ecommerce revenue values, are taken into account.
 11. Bid Modifiers
Did you know that all devices, days of the week, time of day, and geographic locations all perform differently?
Within AdWords, you can run reports based off those metrics and see where it may make sense to increase bids or decrease bids depending on the performance.
To see device performance, you can segment your campaigns or ad groups and see the individual device performance.

See the difference in cost per conversion.
You might find that mobile devices get you lower costing conversions, so it may make sense to set a positive bid modifier of 20% on mobile devices for that specific campaign.
To see day of week or time of day performance, you can go to the Dimensions tab and click View: Day. 

Here’s how to get to that view.

When looking at this report, you can see if you should not advertise during certain hours of the day because the cost per conversions are too expensive. You might also find that Saturdays and Sundays have very low cost per conversions, so maybe you want to target those days.
To see geographic performance down to the city level, you’ll want to stay on the Dimensions tab and then View: User locations.


See the difference in performance down at the city level.
You might find that the city of Dallas (as an example) is more expensive than Los Angeles when it comes to conversion costs. If that’s the case, then you could set a negative bid modifier of 20% for Dallas.
 12. Bidding Rules
AdWords bidding rules allow you to set certain criteria to change bids and/or budgets (also pausing and enabling) depending on the thresholds you care about.
Depending on your tab view within AdWords, you can set rules at the campaign, ad group, ad, or keyword level. To create bidding rules, you’ll want to click on the “Automate” button where you can then select which type of rule you want to create.

See what that will look like right here.
12. Bidding Scripts
AdWords scripts allow you to automate your AdWords activity on a time interval and different metrics bases that you set.
Using scripts allows for greater customization beyond regular AdWords rules as you can get really creative with what you want to control, like changing your bids based on weather patterns.
Without getting too technical (or confusing myself) you can dive deeper into the bidding scripts already available, and also see what else might interest you with AdWords scripts.
 13. Bidding For Sales, Not Conversions
A lot of people will look at an AdWords account and work towards getting more conversions for the sake of conversions.
But that’s wrong.
If you’re trying to generate leads or acquire users for your SaaS business, then it’s extremely important to know that not all keywords are created equal.
If you’re not tracking which keywords are generating sales (again, not just leads), then you’ll treat all PPC traffic as the same with an arbitrary cost per conversion goal. Some keywords will have a higher sales rate than others.
 The Different AdWords Bidding Tactics
While strategies are important, it’s also important to have a few bidding tactics up your sleeve.
1. Bid Bumping
Bid bumping is a tactic that allows your keywords to maintain a high average position, even after you’ve lowered your bids.
It works by temporarily paying a higher CPC and getting a higher click-through-rate. By then slowly lowering your bids, you can find that your performance stays but your average CPC and conversion cost goes down. 
2. RLSA Competitor Bidding
RLSA competitor bidding allows you to purposely bid more aggressive for searches for visitors who have already been on your site or landing page.
By adding an audience to an existing competitor search campaign, RLSA competitor bidding allows you to add a bid modifier to your keyword bids so that you’re much more aggressive and more likely to convert a past visitor who’s familiar with your brand. 
3. Bidding On Branded Keywords
Seems like a no-brainer, but bidding on branded keywords does more for you than just being able to control your ad message.
In addition to sending branded visitors to a dedicated landing page (compared to a static homepage), branded keywords can lead to an increase in overall account health and performance improvements for other keywords.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that while bidding is important, it’s far from the most effective type of SEM management out there. With wins from landing page testing and conversion rate optimization, you might find that your problems of bids being too competitive or expensive may disappear.










Chapter 11
Using Google Adwords for small businesses
Google AdWords plays an essential role in making your online marketing strategies easier. It’s one of the most productive and quickest methods for bringing huge traffic on the verge of converting. And while using Google AdWords might cost a bit upfront — they use a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model — the benefits could greatly outweigh the costs.
It’s quite easy to start an AdWords account; however, there are a few things to keep in mind before diving in.
1. Set a proper budget.
Establishing a proper budget is a foundational step that you need to take while creating an AdWords campaign.
 When it comes to using Google AdWords, the process is highly adjustable and flexible, allowing you to make budget decisions that best fit to your business requirements. In addition to setting monthly and daily budgets, Google AdWords monitors and adjusts all the fluctuations in your website traffic to make sure you don’t exceed your monthly budget.
By setting up a proper budget, you can create a successful advertising campaign without jeopardizing other business functions.
2. Find the right keywords.
To choose the best keywords for your business, you first need to consider the four different types of keyword matches available – Broad match, Phrase Match and Exact Match. All of them have been discussed in detail in the above chapters.
Only choose those keywords that describe your business, products or services well. 
Strong keywords that are relevant to your business could generate clicks, increase conversion rates, and improve ROI.  Adjust your budget accordingly by investing more on high-performing keywords and less on low-performing keywords. 
In addition to the regular keywords, there are also negative keywords to consider. Negative keywords prevent your ads from being displayed in irrelevant search queries. Using them can tighten your audience, reduce unnecessary costs, and improve ROI.
3. Attract more customers.
In addition to using properly selected keywords, make your advertisements clean and attractive so as to draw in potential customers. Make your headlines catchy, and make the intent clear in your descriptions. Your ads should also contain a clear, simple and strong call-to-action (CTA) to encourage the user to take action.
Don’t make the mistake of creating an ad and simply ignoring it — if your campaigns aren’t optimized and monitored, you run the risk of losing all that you invested.
You can also test different variations of your ads to ascertain which ad has the highest conversion rate. If you find certain phrasing is performing better, capitalize on it. And finally, don’t mislead your customers by offering something you don’t handle. The last thing you want is to create a negative impression.
4. Landing pages also bear significance.
Landing pages are an essential and imperative component of online marketing. All your efforts of creating a profitable AdWords campaign will go in vain if you do not have a high-quality, relevant landing page.
A great landing page might contain elements like:
o An attractive headline
o Benefits and features of the products
o Compelling images and graphics
o Testimonials social proofs
o A strong and persuasive CTA
To determine the viability of the landing page, conduct A/B testing to be sure it has the ability to convert visitors into leads and sales. A/B testing enables you to gauge and evaluate the effectiveness of different elements on a landing page, like headlines, features, images, CTAs, etc.
Pro tip: Don’t direct all of your ads to a single landing page. Not all ads refer to the same product or service.
5. Search and display networks
Usually, beginners and small business owners struggle with the question of whether to use search networks, display networks or both.
Search networks
In general, search network’s traffic is more targeted and conversion-oriented than display network’s traffic. Plus, search networks are great for achieving higher click-through rates (CTRs) and a better quality score.
Display networks
When you advertise your ads through display network, you can show your ads on a variety of sites on the internet. Display networks are more flexible, and they allow you to choose the type of content you want in your ads.
Pro tip: Since these networks perform differently, don’t mix the two in a single campaign.
Initially, advertise through search networks as most of the direct conversions are gained there. If you’re interested in building brand awareness for your business, display networks are more suitable. After considering both options, choose based off your desired end goal.
6. Operate the search term reports.
Search term reports let you know the intent and the language of the user through which you can target more relevant keywords. They even generate ideas for new keywords and exclude the irrelevant keywords.
These reports also prove to be one of the most effective ways to generate long-tail keywords, which are highly targeted and conversion oriented.
7. Track your results.
To make your work easier, Google AdWords offers a free tool called Conversion Tracking that shows you what happens after your ad gets a click. It also lets you identify how efficient your ad campaigns are performing in terms of generating leads, sales, downloads, sign ups or any other form of conversions.
The data recorded by conversion tracking gives you insight into the performing and nonperforming metrics, allowing you to optimize for better performance. For example, you can concentrate on keywords that lead to efficient conversions and exclude or pause on the non-performing keywords.
8. Location targeting
Through location targeting, you choose the particular areas where you want to show your ads, ensuring that the right customers find your business. Plus, Google Adwords provides you with suggested areas you might want to consider targeting. You can also exclude locations that contain customers who are not relevant to your business.
In conclusion
Using Google AdWords can help you drive in qualified and conversion-oriented traffic. Regardless of size, AdWords can help every business — you just have to properly maintain and optimize your campaign to garner the best results. Give it a try to see if you can grow the size and scope of your business with targeted campaigns.










Chapter 12
How to reduce wasted Adwords Spend in 2017
The best way to increase your ROI from AdWords is to take measures that whittle down your audience to the most relevant potential customers. Luckily, there are lots of ways to do this in AdWords -- you just have to know what they are.
Here are the top-six ways to filter out unwanted clicks and reduce your wasted spend in AdWords.
1) Negative Keywords
Negative keywords are the classic way to filter out unwanted, irrelevant clicks on your AdWords Ads. A negative keyword is basically the opposite of a regular keyword -- instead of telling Google “Show my ads when someone searches on this term,” you’re telling Google not to show your ads when this term is part of the search query.
There are two methods for finding negative keyword ideas:
Reactive: Keep an eye on your Search Query Reports in AdWords -- these are the real terms that trigger clicks on your ads. If you see something irrelevant to your business, add that term as a negative keyword.
Proactive: Use a negative keyword tool to get ideas before they cost you money.
2) Modified Broad Match
Another way to filter out unwanted impressions and clicks is to swap out broad match (the default keyword match type on Google) for modified broad match.
Broad match is the least restrictive match type, meaning Google attempts to match your ad against the greatest possible number of queries. So if you bid on the keyword “fish food” with broad match, it’s possible that your ad would show up for searches like “fish recipes” or “seafood restaurants,” because Google figures that only one term in the keyword needs to match the search query and it uses synonym matching pretty aggressively.
3) Narrower Context Targeting
Another way to make sure your clicks are relevant is to focus on user context – that is, only showing your ads to people in the right place at the right time.
With AdWords Enhanced Campaigns, you can adjust your bids up or down depending on a user's:
o Location: Use geo-targeting to bid more in certain areas -- for example, within a 50-mile radius of your store -- and prevent your ads from showing in locations that your business doesn’t serve.
o Time of search: This is also known as dayparting. Turn off ads outside your business hours or bid less on the weekends if those clicks are less profitable.
o Device: Adjust bids up or down depending on whether the search is using a desktop or mobile device. (Lots of advertisers assume that mobile searches are worth less, but depending on your business, the exact opposite could be true.)
By fine-tuning when and where your ads show up, you can better control the context in which users see your ads, so you focus your PPC spending on the audiences that are most likely to convert into sales or leads.
4) Mobile Optimization
If you are bidding on mobile searches (hot tip: after the upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns, you almost definitely are), you can reduce wasted spend by making sure you have enabled mobile-optimized ads.
Mobile-preferred text ads allow you to tailor the user experience for mobile users. You can include mobile-specific calls-to-action and direct users to mobile-optimized landing pages. Almost as important for marketers who are constantly seeking to improve their metrics, you can A/B test mobile text ads against each other in an apples-to-apples comparison to improve your overall account performance.
5) Smarter Bid Management
You can also make better use of your spend by adjusting your bid management strategies. There are lots of theories regarding the best way to manage bids, but at a high level, you want to:
o Raise bids on your best-performing keywords: If you have keywords with high CTR and Quality Score that are converting at a profit, bid more on them! This is just common sense.
o Lower bids on weaker keywords: Look for terms that get lots of clicks but not many conversions. These low-converting keywords are a big source of wasted spend.
o You might also want to watch out for AdWords’ automated bid management feature -- most likely, the automated bids won’t make optimal use of your spend.
6) Turn Conversion Tracking On!
You’d be amazed how many advertisers don’t follow the simple best practice of turning on conversion tracking. If you’re not tracking conversion in AdWords, you really have no idea how much money you’re wasting.
Make sure your landing pages have conversion tracking enabled so you can measure what’s working and what isn’t, then funnel your marketing spend toward the keywords and campaigns that deliver ROI.
Chapter 13
Google Adwords Update for 2017
Every spring, Google unleashes a slew of big announcements. One year, the big announcement was Enhanced Campaigns. Last year, they dropped the spectre of Expanded Text Ads on us.
Recent changes to AdWords have led the digital marketing community to declare the beginning of the end for keyword-centric advertising; in its stead, we'll work with semantic and contextual information, targeting audiences, not clicks.
Let’s dig into the most interesting features and changes:
1. AdWords Has a New UI
The new AdWords UI is sleek. It’s sexy. It’s everything the clunky old UI, with its overlapping shades of grey and unfindable sub-menus, is not.

That being said, you needn’t worry about wrapping your mind around the whirring new labyrinth just yet: despite the fact that millions of advertisers already have access (and can vacillate between the old and new UI’s at will) the “new AdWords experience” won’t be available to everyone until December.
2. Life Events Targeting Comes to YouTube and Gmail Ads
There are some things that can be categorized as everyday purchases. Hand soap. Corn Chips. Cigarettes. Whatever. For purchases that tend to happen around or because of YUGE life events (think weddings and graduations), though, things are a bit different.
There are patterns of behavior that tend to indicate an impending life event. Looking for an apartment and working on your resume and upgrading from kegs of swill to four-pack microbrews, for example, might establish that someone is graduating. If your product or service could help someone at this stage in your life, your advertising to them is a mutually beneficial proposition.

Now, AdWords will allow you to use Life Events as a targeting option in both your YouTube and your Gmail Ads. Big, bold, targeted creative. 
3. In-Market Audiences Come to Search
As you know, in-market audiences, which have been available on the Display Network for some time now, help advertisers find prospects who are nearing the end of the buying cycle. Through the synthesis of search query data and activity analysis, Google is now able to identify these hyper-valuable subsets of your target demo on the search network.
4. Location Extensions for YouTube Ads
Good: A totally disinterested stranger finds and watches your video on YouTube.
Better: A prospect sees your video on YouTube.
Best: A prospect sees your video, notices the new location extensions beneath it, then heads to your brick-and-mortar joint to buy bespoke shoelaces or chewing gum that never loses its flavor or [insert your product or service here].
Welcome to the new PPC reality.
5. Google Surveys 360
Surveys 360 allows users to:
* Create a survey
* Find a specific audience sample across the web
* Generate results quickly
Why does this matter? It promises to make A/B testing SO MUCH EASIER, by giving you the ability you solicit feedback from customers. By asking someone why they clicked your ad, you can get an idea as to what’s working (and what isn’t) straight from the horse’s mouth.

6. AMP Ads and Landing Pages for Search & Display
AMP landing pages are Google’s latest answer to improving page speed. In addition to sending search traffic to AMP pages (as you can already do organically), Google has also unveiled Display ads for AMP pages. These ads allegedly load up to 5 seconds faster than regular Display creative: even though the ads look the exact same!
7. Google Optimize: The Landing Page Solution We’ve Been Waiting For?
Google Optimize will now integrate with AdWords, giving advertisers more agility in the often clunky, belabored world of landing page testing.
Per Google: “With the Optimize and AdWords integration, you can quickly and easily create new versions of your landing pages and then apply them to any combination of AdWords campaigns, ad groups, and keywords – no coding or webmaster required.”
Landing page variants with no coding required. It’s a PPC fever dream like no other.
Simplified landing page testing will give advertisers a massive advantage over their current selves (especially when you consider the new Quality Score reporting available in AdWords, which allows us to view landing page experience on its own).
8. Hello, Google Attribution
Another new product!
The complexity of the average customer journey, which often traverses the digital and physical worlds, far exceeds my pay grade. Most attribution solutions don’t really make life any easier on this front, so the majority of marketers are stuck in “where did that conversion actually come from” limbo.
Google Attribution will allow you to view the true impact of your digital marketing efforts from 10,000 feet. For free.
Attribution modeling is a pain (unless you’re some kind of data scientist or something). This will make it easier. 
9. New Landing Page Report
Google has baked a nuanced, upgraded version of the PageSpeed tool right into the new AdWords UI.

Outside of providing suggestions for optimizing the load time for a specific page, this new Landing Page Report will allow you to review a site-wide usability report and ask experts questions.
10. Google Assistant Makes Buying Easy
Mobile devices (plural: people using multiple devices, like up to 5 in a day, is a thing) will afford prospects much faster checkout times. That’s not the neatest part, though. That honour belongs to the way Google Assistant is being integrated.
By uploading local inventory, a searcher can be alerted to the exact number of X product in stock at your shop in real time.

This one’s got some stringent caveats (prospects must use Android Pay, the Play Store, or some form of payment stored in Chrome), but it represents the future, man.
12. Price Extensions
While Google rolled out price extensions last July and swipeable price extensions for mobile devices in November, they just recently announced that price extensions will now be available to show on all devices.


Price extensions are a great new feature for businesses who have various service offerings or tiered services, as they allow you to separate out each service, the price, a brief description, and even send each to a different landing page.
13. Campaign-Level Audience Targeting
In December, Google made a significant time-saving update for many advertisers when it released the option to apply Remarketing Lists for Search Ads at the campaign level. Previously, advertisers had to apply RLSA modifiers to each individual ad group, which can be very time consuming depending on the size of your account.



The new campaign-level audience targeting not only makes it a lot easier to setup the initial RLSA bids, but it also makes measuring and optimizing performance that much more streamlined.
Conclusion
Although each of these AdWords features serves a different purpose, they are all beneficial if you’re looking for a new way to improve your campaign performance and target your customers more efficiently in the coming year. Whether you’re hoping to schedule more appointments or sell more inventory, these new AdWords features can help.












Chapter 14
Tracking Google Ads:  Analytics

With Google Analytics, you can take your monitoring process to the next level. After linking your AdWords account with Google Analytics, you can create alerts for specific benchmarks that can alert you when that particular benchmark gets hit.
Google Analytics, with the help of the intelligence alerts, can help you to identify the positive and negative changes in your campaigns.
You should also review these alerts regularly to monitor significant changes.
You can set an alert to the most important landing page when the bounce rate is more than 60% and find ways to reduce the bounce rate.

How To Set Up AdWords Conversion Tracking & Analyze Your Performance?      
Conversion tracking in AdWords is one of the most important features in order to understand how (and if) your ad spend is working (ie. Getting a positive ROI). You can track forms filled out, sales and even more advanced metrics like 3+ pageviews and phone calls.
There are a few different ways to set these up. The most common ways to track your desired goals are mentioned below that will also show you how to report on multiple conversions.
Tracking form leads is probably the most common type of conversion tracking.
You can track someone clicking the ‘Submit’ button or track someone visiting a ‘thank you’ page after they submit the form.  You should have a thank you page for a better user experience anyway. They are already interested in what you have to offer, so this is a great chance to answer questions, up- or down-sell, ask for social media follows, give them more relevant information, etc.
So how do you track form submissions?
There are two ways, and each has their own pros and cons:
1. AdWords Conversion Tracking
2. Analytics Goals imported into AdWords
AdWords conversion tracking is built in. When you track conversions this way, they are reported to the interface quickly – usually within a few minutes. 
Tracking goals in Google Analytics (GA) is much easier, more powerful, and more flexible. The problem, until recently, was that it could take up to 72 hours for goals to be imported into AdWords. Google recently updated this feature and at most, it takes 9 hours now.
They have also expanded the AdWords-Analytics link to be much easier to set up. Since you (should) already have GA installed, creating a goal for example.com/thanks/ is much easier than getting a conversion tracking code installed in many cases.



Step 1: Create Goals In Analytics
Step 2: Import Goals Into AdWords
You can also create goals based on user engagement. Things like:
* Visiting multiple pages in a visit
* Downloading PDFs
* Watching videos
These can be great micro conversions to track if you sell a higher-priced product or have a longer sales cycle. Getting a little data quickly can be a great way to gauge performance prior to the final sale.
Call Tracking In AdWords
There are a few different ways to track phone calls through Ad Words. Someone might click your call extension on a mobile device. This is commonly referred to as Click-To-Call.  
You might also have someone click through to your website and call the phone number listed. This will require the number to dynamically switch to a call tracking number so that it can be traced back to your ad. It’s even possible that someone dials your call extension number when shown on a desktop or laptop.
Click-To-Call
Click-To-Call is probably the easiest to set-up and track within Ad Words. There are actually 3 ways to enable this feature:
1. Call Extensions
2. Call-only campaigns
3. Location Extensions
Location extensions won’t let you track phone calls as conversions and call-only campaigns seem to be hit or miss, so let’s focus on call extensions.
From the ad extension tab, select Call extensions. Click the red ‘+ Extension’ button.


Note: You can add this extension at the campaign or ad group level.
Click ‘New phone number’ (toward the bottom) and you will see a screen that looks like this:

In the screenshot, select ‘Show my ad with A Google forwarding phone number’ which automatically checks ‘Count calls as phone call conversions’. If you don’t use a forwarding number, you won’t be able to track calls.
By default, Google will count calls over 60 seconds as a phone call conversion and automatically create a new conversion for you. If you want to change the call length that counts as a conversion, you can click ‘Mange conversion actions’ in this screen or from the Tools -> Conversions drop-down.

This is what one of my ‘calls from ads’ conversion settings looks like:

Keep in mind, if you have both call and location extensions enabled, your address from the location extension and the number from the call extension will be shown together.
o Calls From Website
Like a lot of the other sections, there are 2 main ways to track calls from your website:
* Google’s built-in solution
* 3rd party call tracking software
There are lots of useful features with third party call tracking that you don’t get with the built in solution. 
o Tracking Sales In AdWords
Tracking sales is similar to form conversion tracking, but in order to record the dollar amount of your sale, you will need to pass that value from the sales/shopping cart page to the confirmation/thank you page. Here is Google’s support article about dynamically tracking sales values:
o Offline Tracking

This is Google’s process for how to track offline conversions with Salesforce. It usually works the same way with other CRM systems.
Let’s explain this picture:
1. Someone clicks your ad.
2. When they reach your website, a GCLID (Google Click ID) is saved as a cookie. This ties that user back to the ad they clicked. It doesn’t matter how many pages they view.
3. When they submit a form, the GCLID is passed in a hidden field to the CRM.
4. When that lead is closed (you get a sale), you can upload that data back to AdWords. The GCLID will be matched up with the click and the sale value can be tied to a specific click.
Final Thoughts
Perhaps, there are several benefits of linking your AdWords account with Google Analytics account.
Like, you can use “pages/visit” to check if users are finding it difficult to locate the things that your ads promises.
You can also check “% new visits” and “first click conversions” to see if the ads are bringing in new visitors and which initial keywords are responsible for conversions.
You can easily find the landing page that is degrading the performance of your whole campaign.
And then can track complex conversions such as phone calls and video plays.
Google Analytics and AdWords are immensely valuable tools for marketers. They help them to gain profitable insights for the optimization of their online marketing efforts.
Linking AdWords account with Google Analytics ensures the availability and access of all the data related to the campaign.
As an advertiser, you have an access to all the data available. With this, you can easily make informed decisions on the optimization of the AdWords Campaigns.

Chapter 15 
Case Studies
Case 1: Smart display campaigns help Flygresor save time and boost ROAS!
Aiming to provide the most relevant and up-to-date information for any given destination, Flygresor provides travellers with a flight tool to compare every route, airline and destination price around the world. In 2015 Flygresor began expanding, first to the Nordics and later to other international markets. Today it’s active in nine markets and growing steadily.
THE GOALS
• Increase sales
• Increase traffic to site
• Maintain CPA
THE APPROACH
• Adopted Smart display campaigns
• Built dynamic display creatives
• Automated targeting
• Automated bidding
THE RESULTS
• Saved approximately 40 work hours per week
• 44% lower CPA & 67% higher conversion rate than other display mid-funnel campaigns
• 250% improvement in ROAS
Case 2: Pipedrive grows international sales volume by 283% with Google AdWords!
An online CRM system for small and medium businesses, Pipedrive started in 2010. As a software service (SaaS) platform, the team perceived serious potential in scaling globally. However, while incremental costs from a product and logistics perspective might be low, managing user acquisitions efficiently at scale seemed a tough challenge.
THE GOALS
• Build a scalable and structured user acquisition system using search engine marketing
THE APPROACH
• Used Google’s Global Market Finder to identify audiences to target
• Merged search trend data with client acquisition data at market level
• Built tiered market coverage structure
THE RESULTS
• Efficiently expanded paid search activity into 20 new markets
• Increased conversion volume by 283%
• For paying user subscriptions, reduced CPA by nearly 40%
Case3: Google AdWords drives traffic, phone calls and revenue for GarentaDAY!
Garenta is an auto leasing enterprise owned by Çelik Motor, one of Turkey’s oldest automotive companies. Putting digital at the centre of its processes, Garenta offers both short-term and long-term car rental services to customers through online channels with the aim of making their lives easier. Long-term car rental services operate through the GarentaPRO brand, while daily rentals are handled through 19 GarentaDAY branches.
THE GOALS
• Increase mobile click-to-call phone calls
• Increase in-store visits from online searchers
• Increase online sales and revenue
• Reduce cost per conversion
THE APPROACH
• Optimised AdWords campaigns with clear campaign structure
• Adopted mobile-first approach
• Made mobile bid adjustments
• Used mobile-optimised ad texts and extensions
• Placed strong emphasis on remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) to convert returning visitors
THE RESULTS
• 50% of website traffic and 40% of online transactions came from Google cost-per-click ads
• Nearly 30% of AdWords revenue came from remarketing campaigns
• 4% click-through rate for mobile click-to-call extensions exceeded average
• Location extension clicks emerged as a main in-store traffic driver
Case4: Search drives in-store transactions for Clas Ohlson, as AdWords store visits reveal a 400% increase in ROI!
Founded in 1918 as a mail-order business based in the Swedish village of Insjön, Clas Ohlson opened their first store 1926 and has since grown to 200 locations, selling hardware, home, leisure, electrical and multimedia products throughout the Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK, Germany and Dubai.
THE GOALS
• Understand the true impact of mobile advertisement
• Develop accurate understanding of Search campaigns effect on total (online and offline) bottom line
• To gain insights around what products that are more prone to drive people to stores rather than the webshop
THE APPROACH
• Adjust mobile presence according to what value mobile provides to stores
• Make use of store visits data in bidding optimisation to increase footfall in stores
• Increase visibility for keywords that relates to products which people want to buy in the store rather than online
THE RESULTS
• For every 1 transaction on mobile phones, there were 36 transactions in-store
• The impact of search is 5x higher when taking store visits in consideration
• Clas Ohlson learned that 4 different product categories really drive people to the store







Conclusion
Google advertising is a great marketing strategy for small business owners. You can show an ad for your business to people who are searching for your type of business at that very moment AND who are looking for businesses in your area. This type of targeting makes most small business owners want to advertise on Google.
The key to successful advertising is to find a method of conveying your information to as many people as possible while keeping your advertising costs to a minimum. Pay per click (PPC) advertising may be one of the easiest ways to generate traffic to your website and score some decent profits from your search engine marketing campaign. 
Google AdWords can make a company more successful in just a short amount of time if implemented correctly.
While the prospect of investing money on Adwords might seem like a daunting task, the results that come in are almost instantaneous and transparent. This is why it is worth every penny that you spend on it.
I hope this guide would help you to get started with running your first successful Google Ad campaign.






	


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