Google adwords for my website

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Mar 04 2019 Why use Google AdWords for my website?

To give a brief description of what Google Adwords is: it is a Google advertising tool to promote its website. In general, the user wishing to use this service will have to define an advertising budget (daily budget), this budget will be used according to a simple calculation: - Google sets up an auction system on keywords. You want to appear on a keyword, you must offer an interesting rate for Google......

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How to use Google AdWords for your website

You’ve just launched your new site and you want to get some people to visit it and see how beautiful it’s, right? But you’re now confronted with the most annoying problem that probably all the companies with a new website have faced in the past: you cannot get anyone on it. It’s new, after all, so why would anyone know about your website?! When a new pizza place opens down the street, it takes quite some time for people to discover it! And the same should apply to a website.

You’ve been scratching your head and thinking of some. What could possibly resolve this impossible problem? Well, you’ve come to this definitive conclusion: you’re going to use paid services to get your first visitors on your site. And you know the exact service you need for that: Google AdWords. You’ve heard about it from others, on the Internet or in the news. It has an aura of complexity that may seem overwhelming, but the truth is that it’s completely accessible to anyone willing to learn a few tips & tricks about it!

Anyone can use Google AdWords for their own website, but there are a few things to know before you start pouring dollars into the deep Google well. And we’re going to see together that done properly, Google AdWords can be an incredible tool that will help your business expand and reach new highs.

A few words about Google AdWords

The concept of Google AdWords is pretty simple, and it comes down to the concept of paid advertising:

On one hand, you have people willing to pay for their advertisements to be displayed somewhere
On the other hand, you have people willing to get paid to display other people’s advertisements on their website

While it may sound over-simplistic, it’s really as simple as that. The main difference here is that Google does not only have a huge network of websites willing to have your ads displayed on their website, but they also include themselves!

Indeed, Google (you know, the actual Google that you use to find funny cat pictures) can let you have your ads run on their homepage (or even in Gmail), provided that you’re willing to put money on the table. But we will see later that this can be controlled.

You can find the full list of Google Network’s members here.

Setting up your first Google AdWords account

The process of setting up your first Google AdWords account is extremely simple, and we’ll go through it with you step by step.

1. Start Now

First, go to https://ads.google.com and click on “Start Now”.

2. Signing in

You should then either log in using your own Gmail account, or create an email account specifically for running your Google AdWords campaigns.

3. Setting up your campaign goal

Google will then ask you the kind of goal you want to set for your campaigns. (We will learn more about goals in the next section).

4. Picking the right network

They will then ask you to choose the kind of campaigns you want (and essentially where you want them to be displayed). For now, select the Search Network, which is the best way to keep your money from leaking into Google’s pockets!

5. Ways to reach your goal

Google will then want you to be more specific about how you want to reach your goals. Most of the time, it will be either phone calls or website visits. In your case, the best is to select “Website visits”. In any case, you’ll be able to add a phone call extension to your campaigns.

6. Including Google Search Partners or the Display Network

You’ll then be asked again if you want Google to include your ads in its Search Partners and on Google Display. Untick that as soon as possible! Another money-drainer.

7. Location and language

You can then pick the location and the language of the people you want to target. Keep in mind that you can also exclude people who are located in some specific places.

8. Setting up your budget

You’re then asked to decide on your budget. We will see in the next sections the best way to approach your budget, and the kind of budget you should spend on your campaigns. For now, set up some dummy value such as $10. Also, make sure to select the “Standard” delivery method. It just means that your campaigns will run through the day equally, instead of exhausting all of your budget as soon as possible.

9. Setting up your bidding strategy

You’re then asked about your bidding strategy. For now, select “clicks” as it’s what you’ll want to get first: people to visit your website. Once you have more data, you’ll be able to select “conversions” to tell Google: “hey, I’m very interested in people clicking this button or calling this number”.

10. Additional settings

And finally, you’ll be presented some additional settings, which are self-explanatory.

11. Picking the right keywords

At this stage, you’ll be asked to pick keywords that reflect on your business field, and that would be typed in some sort of form by potential customers on Google.com.

Keywords are a whole topic of its own which we won’t be discussing in this article, but for now, just type in your topics of interest using brackets or quotation mark, such as: [example] and “example”. This will avoid potential variations of your keywords that have nothing to do with your business!

12. Writing your ad copy

You’ll then be asked to fill in your ad copies’ content. This part depends on the kind of message you want to communicate, where you want to get people to, and more generally the unique value proposition you have to offer them.

13. Billing information

And finally, you’ll be prompted to give your billing info:

You should be able to see this kind of dashboard. Congratulations, you just created your first Google AdWords campaign.

Now that you’ve seen the process it takes to create your own Google AdWords account, you’re a bit left in the dark. What should you do from it? There’s a simple process to follow to get started with Google AdWords, and it starts with goals. We’ll see that in the next section.

Your business goals are your most cherished metrics

The notion of “goal” is probably the most important element of any Google Ads campaign, and that cannot be overstated enough. If you don’t have clear goals, you will never be able to tap into the incredible potential that’s Google Ads. And to do so, you must ask yourself these questions:

Why do I want to use Google Ads?
What are the important actions on my website?
Among these actions, what are the most important ones?

If you think about it, there are tons of things one could be doing on your website. They can view pages, click buttons, fill a contact form, and in some cases even purchase a product. Depending on what you do or sell, some things may be more important than some others. But in any case, there has to be some sort of action that matters to you.

To make sure you understand what we are talking about, let’s take an example. So, imagine that you’re a small business who mostly provides accountancy services for small businesses. You have a nice website that says you’re in the accountancy business, your opening hours, some specific things about what you do, etc. Now, there are probably a few buttons on your site, along with a contact form and a phone call button.

What do you think would be the most important to this company? I think it’s fair to assume that in this case, a phone call may be more important to them than a filled form, and a filled form than a button click. Do you see where it’s going?

Basically, setting up goals for your campaigns will help you figure out what you really want, and it will also help you define the true monetary value of your goals.

It takes money to make money – budget is crucial

Budget is the most important factor when it comes to running a business properly. And you should think of Google AdWords campaigns as if they were some sort of business of their own! Basically, you have a budget that’s allocate to it, and the goal is to make sure there’s MORE money that’s made from this made. The basics of profitability, in other words.

If you’ve asked yourself the right questions about your goals, you know exactly what you want. And this way, you will be able to assign it a clear monetary value to each goal. Let’s make a simple calculation to help you understand:

Imagine that you’re selling a $500 service
Now, imagine that what you want are phone calls, and that it costs you $5 to get a single phone call from Google AdWords

Now, ask yourself this question: at what point does it become NOT profitable for you to keep running your ad? Well, the calculation is as such: if you get $5 per phone call, it also means that 100 phone calls with cost you roughly $500 (the price of the service you sell!).

It also means that if you don’t make at least 1 sale for 100 phone calls, you’ll lose money from running your Google AdWords ads. However, if you make more than 1 sale per 100 phone calls, it means that it’s profitable. Tada!

Keywords and bidding

The main idea behind Google AdWords and the Search Network revolves around the concept of “keywords”, “CPC” and “bidding”. Don’t worry if this sounds like Chinese for now, it’s actually pretty simple to understand.

When someone looks for something on Google, it’s usually a word or a sentence. For example, here, “lawyer in NYC” is what’s called the “search terms”. Now, imagine that you’re a lawyer in NYC. What you’ll want is to have your ads displayed there:

As you can see, there’s a small “ad” box next to the website’s address, and that means that all those people have paid Google to have their ads displayed.

But why were their ads specifically displayed in this case? Because they have set up the “keywords” in their ad campaigns to trigger their ads whenever someone types something related to lawyers in NYC.

“Keywords” are specific words or sentences that you set in your campaigns to trigger your ads whenever someone type in something related. The keywords can be more or less strict by using what’s called a “match type”:

Exact match:

by using brackets, you’ll make sure that your ads will show ONLY when people type the exact keyword in the brackets. For example, [lawyer in NYC] won’t show your ads if someone types in [lawyer in Chicago].

Phrase match:

by using quotation marks, you’ll make sure that your ads show whenever someone type something that includes your keywords in the exact order you typed them in. For example, if your keyword is “lawyer in NYC”, and someone types ‘looking for a lawyer in NYC’, your ads will show up.

Broad match:

by not using anything, you let Google display your ads whenever type something related to your keyword (and sometimes, not related at all!). For example, if your keyword is ‘cookie’, it may show your ads when someone types in ‘chocolate desserts’.

Broad match modified:

by using the plus symbol, your ads will show when your keywords or related terms show up somehow in the search terms. For example, if your keywords are +nice +place, it may show your ads when someone types in ‘nice people in a beautiful place’.

Here’s an example of how it would look like if you set up your keywords during the campaign creation process:

How much you will pay per click and how it works

“CPC” stands for “cost per click”, i.e. the average price that you’re going to pay when someone clicks on your ad (and eventually go to your website). This average price is decided during an auction that happens within milliseconds. Essentially, everyone interested in displaying their ads for the same search terms as you will bid some sort of amount. It could be $0.20 like it could be $40.

So, for example, if you are two in town to sell white chocolate cookies, and that you two have the same keywords [white chocolate cookies], an auction will happen.

You can decide at the campaign level for the maximum amount you’re ready to pay during an auction bid – for example, $2. But it doesn’t mean that Google will have you pay for that amount.

If your ads respect the three factors of what’s called the quality score, Google will actually let you bid for a lesser price for a higher ranking position:

If your keywords are highly relevant to what you do
If your ads are particularly well-crafted and adapted
If your website is tightly connected to what you’re promoting

Concretely, what it means is that even if someone else bids at $3 and that you bid at $2, if their quality score is lower than yours, they may end up at the 2nd or 3rd position and you at the 1st position, even though you bid for less than them!

In any case, you will have to pay something at some point to get people to your website. Which is why our points about goals and budget are so important. By deciding what’s important to you, and by deciding how much you’re willing to spend, you’ll have more control over the auction and how satisfied you’re with the outcome. For example, you may be dissatisfied with 50 phone calls for $100, but you may be very satisfied with 100 clicks for $20.

In the end, it really comes down to a basic calculation: are you making more money than it costs you?

Conclusion

We really hope that you’ve learned a lot of interesting things from this article, and that you now want to dig more into Google AdWords. The topic is so huge that it’s impossible to cover everything with a single article.

However, you’ve learned crucial things from this article:

How to create and set up your first Google AdWords campaign
How to define the key goals for your business
How to define your budget
What keywords are and how to use match types
What’s CPC and how the bidding auction works

In any case, remember that you should always be using a controlled Google AdWords strategy such as a “maximize clicks” strategy with a CPC limit, so that you know you’ll never pay more than a certain amount for a certain number of clicks.

And once you become more familiar with the platform and gather more data, you’ll be ready to migrate towards more advanced strategies such as “conversions” or “conversion value”.

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Google adwords for my website

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