Google AdWords For Dummies^®, 2nd Edition

by Howie Jacobson

• ISBN13: 9780470455777
• ISBN10: 0470455772
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-08-01
• Publisher: For Dummies

Summary

A completely updated reference to help you get the most value out of your AdWords campaignsGoogle AdWords is a unique tool that allows you to set your own budget and create ads and choose keywords that are specifically related to your business. When your ad appears next to the search results, people can simply click your ad to learn more about you or make a purchase. This handy guide walks you through the newest tips, tricks, and techniques for maximizing your AdWords campaign.Offering valuable advice, this new edition includes case studies from readers who have shared what they learned from using the techniques revealed in the first edition. A revised and updated guide that shares invaluable advice for maximizing your AdWords campaign Discusses changes to the AdWords interface as well as best practices in split testing, opt-in landing page structure, and ad group structure Reviews new, free tools included in AdWords as well as new and improved third-party tools Includes an in-depth explanation of Google's free Web site testing and optimization tool: Website Optimizer Includes a Google AdWords gift card worth $25 (details inside book)With this handy reference by your side, you will discover the best way to put a Google AdWords campaign to work for you!

Author Biography

Howie Jacobson is an Internet marketing strategist who specializes in growing businesses using Google AdWords. He offers coaching, telecourses, workshops, and presentations on his Breakthrough Online Profits methodology. Readers can find free tools, tips, and techniques on his Web site, AskHowie.com.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
About This Book	p. 2
Conventions Used in This Book	p. 2
What You Don't Have to Read	p. 3
Foolish Assumptions	p. 3
How this Book is Organized	p. 4
Becoming a Google Advertiser	p. 5
Launching Your AdWords Campaign	p. 5
Managing Your AdWords Campaigns	p. 5
Converting Clicks to Clink	p. 6
Testing Your Strategies and Tracking Your Results	p. 6
The Part of Tens	p. 6
Icons Used in This Book	p. 6
Where to Go from Here	p. 7
Becoming a Google Advertiser	p. 9
Profiting from the Pay-Per-Click Revolution	p. 11
Introducing AdWords	p. 12
Where and When the Ads Show	p. 13
Google results	p. 13
Search partners results	p. 14
AdSense sites and Gmail	p. 14
AdWords in the Total Google Context	p. 16
Pay Per Click: Your Online Gumball Machine	p. 18
The Direct Marketing Difference: Getting Your Prospects to Do Something	p. 19
You can measure your results	p. 20
Keep improving your marketing	p. 21
It's dating, not a shotgun wedding	p. 22
Following up with your best prospects	p. 23
How to Think Like Your Prospect	p. 24
Setting Up Your AdWords Account	p. 25
Opening a New AdWords Account	p. 25
Creating Your First Campaign	p. 27
Managing Your Account	p. 30
Activating your account	p. 31
When nobody can see your ad	p. 33
When just you can't see your ad	p. 34
Managing Your AdWords Account	p. 37
Running Mission Control with the Campaign Management Tab	p. 37
All Online Campaigns view	p. 38
Individual Campaign view	p. 42
Individual ad group view	p. 44
Content network	p. 47
Launching Your AdWords Campaign	p. 49
Discovering Your Online Market	p. 51
Assessing Market Profitability (Don't Dive into an Empty Pool)	p. 51
Determining market size by spying on Searches	p. 53
Estimating profitability by snooping on your competitors' keyword bids	p. 56
Sizing up the entire market by tallying total advertising spend	p. 57
Giving your market a stress test to determine future health	p. 59
Taking the Temperature of Your Market - Advanced Methods	p. 61
Number of advertisers on Google	p. 61
Bid persistence: Will you still love me tomorrow?	p. 63
Going deeper with the AdWords Keyword Tool	p. 63
Discovering buying trends at online stores	p. 64
Eavesdropping at the Watering Hole	p. 69
Online groups	p. 69
The Blogosphere (""World of Blogs"")	p. 75
Loitering on Web sites	p. 76
Sleeping with the enemy	p. 77
Cutting Through the Clutter with Positioning	p. 78
Choosing the Right Keywords	p. 81
Decoding Keywords to Read Your Prospects' Minds	p. 82
Learn from Google	p. 84
Decision mindset	p. 84
Practice thinking like your prospect	p. 86
Mastering the Three Positive Keyword Formats	p. 88
Broad match	p. 89
Phrase match	p. 89
Exact match	p. 90
The goal: From vague to specific	p. 90
Researching Keywords: Strategies and Tools	p. 92
The Google Keyword Tool	p. 92
Thesaurus tools	p. 93
KeywordSpy.com	p. 95
Using your server log to get smarter	p. 95
Finding Sneaky Variations for Fun and Profit	p. 98
Some quick ways to vary keywords	p. 98
LowerYourBidPrice.com - sneaky keywords made easy	p. 100
Sorting Keywords into Ad Groups	p. 102
Divide keywords into concepts	p. 103
Organizing your keywords	p. 104
Deploying Negative Keywords	p. 107
Brainstorming negative keywords	p. 109
Adding negative keywords	p. 111
Adding, Deleting, and Editing Keywords	p. 111
Growing your keyword list	p. 113
Editing your keywords	p. 114
Writing Magnetic Ads	p. 117
Understanding the Three Goals of Your Ad	p. 118
Attracting the right prospects while discouraging the wrong people	p. 118
Telling your visitors what to expect	p. 121
Tuning Your Ad to the Keyword	p. 121
Marching to a Different Drummer	p. 122
Studying your competition	p. 122
Positioning your offer	p. 123
Two fundamental ways to position your ad	p. 123
Motivating Action in Four Lines	p. 124
Grabbing them with the headline	p. 127
Using the description lines to make them an offer they can't refuse	p. 129
Sending Out a Call to Action	p. 131
Making an offer with action words	p. 132
Fanning desire with urgency qualifiers	p. 132
Mastering the Medium and Voice at Haiku U	p. 132
Naming Your Online Store Effectively	p. 134
Buying more domain names	p. 134
Adding Subdomains and subdirectories	p. 135
Testing capitalization and the www prefix	p. 136
Wielding ""Black Belt"" Techniques for Hyper-Competitive Markets	p. 136
The fake www-domain technique	p. 137
Dynamic keyword insertion	p. 137
Subdomain redirects	p. 140
Following Google's Text-Ad Guidelines	p. 140
Punctuation	p. 141
Capitalization	p. 141
Spelling and grammar	p. 141
Copyright and trademark usage	p. 141
Competitive claims	p. 142
Offers	p. 142
No offensive language	p. 142
Links	p. 142
Exploring the Other Ad Formats	p. 142
Getting the picture with image ads	p. 143
Making the Phone and the doorbell ring with mobile text ads	p. 144
Waving to the neighbors with local business ads	p. 144
Going Hollywood with video ads	p. 146
Managing Your AdWords Campaigns	p. 149
Deciding Where and When to Show Your Ads	p. 151
Getting the Most Out of Your Campaigns	p. 152
Changing the default campaign settings	p. 152
Separating your account into three types of campaigns	p. 161
Choosing content placements	p. 164
Combining keyword and placement targeting	p. 168
Bidding Smart	p. 168
Initial bidding strategies	p. 168
When you have data	p. 169
Improving Your Campaigns through Keyword Management	p. 171
Nurturing, Relocating, and Firing Keywords	p. 172
Star keywords	p. 172
Solid performers	p. 174
Long-tail keywords	p. 177
Underperforming keywords	p. 178
Negative-ROI keywords	p. 179
Resuscitating Poor-Quality Keywords	p. 180
Managing the 80/20 Way	p. 180
Getting It Done with AdWords Tools	p. 185
Improving Your Campaigns with the Optimizer Tools	p. 186
Keyword tool	p. 186
Edit your campaign's negative keywords	p. 189
Site Exclusion tool	p. 191
IP Exclusion tool	p. 191
Traffic Estimator tool	p. 191
Insights for Search tool	p. 193
Getting Feedback from Google with the Ad Performance Tools	p. 194
Ads Diagnostic tool	p. 194
Ads Preview tool	p. 197
Disapproved ads	p. 197
My Change History tool	p. 198
Website Optimizer	p. 199
AdWords Editor	p. 199
Converting Clicks to Clink	p. 201
Giving Your Customer a Soft Landing on Your Web Site	p. 203
Making Your Visitor Shout ""That's for Me!""	p. 204
Achieving relevance based on keywords	p. 205
Pleasing Google with the Title tag	p. 207
Using PHP to increase relevance	p. 208
Scratching your customer's itch	p. 210
Establishing credibility	p. 211
Defining the Most Desirable Action for the Landing Page	p. 214
""Bribing"" your visitor to opt in	p. 214
Engaging visitors in real time	p. 217
Selling the Most Desirable Action	p. 218
Using bullets	p. 219
Including third-party testimonials	p. 221
Giving clear instructions in the call to action	p. 222
Following Up with Your Prospects	p. 223
Overcoming Your Prospects' Miniscule Online Attention Span	p. 224
Pressure tactics don't work online	p. 224
Build a relationship so you can make the sale when your prospect is ready to buy	p. 225
Spinning a Web with an Opt-In	p. 226
Generating an opt-in form using AWeber	p. 227
Placing the form on your Web site	p. 231
Generating opt-ins via e-mail	p. 232
Importing and adding leads yourself	p. 232
How to ""Bribe"" Your Prospects to Opt In	p. 232
Give away something of value	p. 233
Make the opt-in a logical next step	p. 233
Offer your visitors something they really want	p. 234
Reassure your Visitors	p. 235
To sell or to get the opt-in?	p. 235
The thank-you page	p. 236
Creating a lead-generating magnet	p. 237
Staying on Your Prospects' Minds with E-mail	p. 239
Verifying your lead	p. 240
Following up automatically with an e-mail autoresponder	p. 241
Broadcast e-mails	p. 254
Managing your e-mail lists	p. 257
Going Offline to Build the Relationship	p. 258
Building a ""Climb the Ladder"" Web Site	p. 261
Identifying the Rungs of Your Business Ladder	p. 262
Using Web Tools to Help Your Visitors up the Ladder	p. 264
Design	p. 264
Sales copy	p. 267
Articles	p. 268
Blog	p. 269
Audio	p. 269
Video	p. 272
Recognizing and welcoming returning visitors with PHP	p. 277
Testing Your Strategies and Tracking Your Results	p. 279
How You Can't Help Becoming an Advertising Genius	p. 281
Capturing the Magic of Split Testing	p. 282
Conducting Split Testing with AdWords	p. 284
Creating a challenger ad	p. 284
Monitoring the split test	p. 286
Declaring a winner	p. 286
Mechanics of Split Testing in AdWords	p. 288
Strategies for Effective Split Testing	p. 289
Start wide, get narrow	p. 289
Keep track of your tests	p. 289
Split-testing is just asking questions	p. 289
Generating Ideas for Ad Testing	p. 290
Tools for Split Testing	p. 292
Automating your testing with Winner Alert	p. 292
Turbocharging your testing with Taguchi	p. 293
Split-Testing Web Pages	p. 293
Making More Sales with Website Optimizer	p. 295
Deciding What to Test	p. 296
Start big, get smaller	p. 296
Tests are just questions in action	p. 297
Test to overcome objections	p. 297
Look for things that don't work	p. 298
Creating a Testing Plan	p. 298
Making your list of things to test	p. 299
Prioritizing your list	p. 302
Start testing (and never stop)	p. 303
Testing with Google Website Optimizer	p. 305
Specifying Experiment Details	p. 308
Adding and validating your own JavaScript tags	p. 311
Slashing Your Costs with Conversion Tracking	p. 321
Setting Up Conversion Tracking	p. 322
Choosing a conversion type	p. 323
Generating and copying the code	p. 325
Putting code on your Web site	p. 326
Tracking sales from a shopping cart	p. 328
Testing conversion tracking	p. 328
Introducing Six New Columns	p. 328
Conversions (many-per-click and 1-per-click)	p. 329
Conversion rate (many-per-click and 1-per-click)	p. 329
Cost/Conv. (many-per-conversion and 1-per-conversion)	p. 330
Measuring Actions in the Conversion Tracking Module	p. 331
Tracking ROI of Ads and Keywords	p. 332
Identifying the Profitable ads	p. 332
Keywords	p. 335
Creating Easy-to-Understand Reports	p. 337
Types of reports	p. 338
Settings	p. 339
Advanced settings	p. 340
Templates, scheduling, and e-mail	p. 340
Customizing Your Reports to Show the Most Important Numbers	p. 341
Customizing keyword performance reports	p. 341
Customizing ad performance reports	p. 343
Discovering What to Do with the Data	p. 345
Making More Sales with Google Analytics	p. 347
Installing Analytics on Your Web Site	p. 349
Creating an Analytics account	p. 349
Adding tracking code to your Web pages	p. 350
Configuring Analytics	p. 351
Configuring goals and funnels	p. 354
E-Commerce setup	p. 355
Making Sense of the Data	p. 357
Checking for data integrity	p. 357
Viewing your data in the Dashboard	p. 357
The AdWords Campaign screen	p. 360
The Keyword Positions view	p. 362
Automating Analytics reporting	p. 362
Acting on Your Data To Make More Money	p. 363
Optimizing your site for your visitors	p. 363
Improving site ""stickiness""	p. 363
Loyalty and recency	p. 364
Evaluating Web site changes	p. 365
Page and funnel navigation	p. 366
The Part of Tens	p. 369
The Ten (Or So) Most Serious AdWords Beginner's Mistakes	p. 371
Neglecting to Split-Test Your Ads	p. 371
Letting Google Retire Your Ads without Testing	p. 372
Split-Testing for Improved CTR Only	p. 373
Creating Ad Groups with Unrelated Keywords	p. 373
Muddying Search and Content Results	p. 374
Ignoring the 80/20 Principle	p. 375
Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Slowly	p. 376
Declaring Split-Test Winners Too Quickly	p. 377
Forgetting Keywords in Quotes (Phrase Matching) or Brackets (Exact Matching)	p. 377
Ignoring Negative Keywords	p. 378
Keeping the Keyword Quality Score Hidden	p. 378
Spending Too Much or Too Little in the Beginning	p. 379
Ten (Or So) AdWords Case Studies	p. 381
Using Sales Conversion Data to Save $ 14k per Month	p. 381
Going Global and Tracking Conversions with Analytics	p. 382
Throwing a Bigger Party with Broad Match and Negative Keywords	p. 384
Getting Cheap and Hungry Traffic by Bidding on Your Own Brand Name	p. 385
Adding a Welcome Video to the Landing Page	p. 386
Getting the Basics Right	p. 387
15-Cent Click to $ 1,700 Customer in Minutes	p. 389
Local Search with Video Web Site	p. 390
Generating B2B Leads without Cold Calling	p. 391
Understanding and Answering Customer Objections	p. 393
Making Money in an Impossible Market	p. 396
Lowering the bid price	p. 396
Improving Web site conversion	p. 397
Index	p. 399
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