Your Guide To Google Adwords

by Tracey Simpson - Sayu Limited

The pay per click advertising arena is a complex place. As a Google adwords advertiser you compete in an auction every time a keyword prompts your ad to be shown. Unfortunately, many advertisers do not realise how complex that auction is. Find out more about how Google Adwords ranks your ads and how you can establish a profitable strategy for your online business.

Understanding How Google Adwords Ranks PPC Ads

An understanding of the way Google Adwords ranks PPC ads is essential if you wish to establish a profitable paid search strategy. Here is an overview on how Google ranks your paid search listings:

1. Every time your ad is triggered by a search term, Google calculates the Ad Rank of each paid search listing. Listings with the highest Ad Rank are shown first and listings with the lowest Ad Rank are shown in the lowest positions (or not at all.)

Ad Rank is determined by the following calculation:

Ad Rank = 'Maximum Cost Per Click' x 'Quality Score'

As you can see, Quality Score plays as important a role as bid price does in determining where your ad ranks. This means a competitor who has a better quality score than yourself can actually rank above you for a lower cost per click (CPC).

It is your goal to achieve the highest possible position for the lowest possible cost. Taking the Ad Rank formula into consideration, it becomes easy to see how a strong Quality Score can result in higher rankings at a lower price. How do you secure these high listings at lower bid rates? First, you should understand what Quality Score is and how you can increase yours.

Understanding the Quality Score

Unfortunately, the way in which Google calculates your Quality Score is unknown. However, Google does tell us many of the factors that determine Quality Score:

1. A keyword's click through rate (CTR)
2. The historical performance of that keyword
3. The relevance of text in your ad
4. The relevance of the keyword to its ad group
5. The quality of your landing page
6. Other, unknown relevancy factors.

Now that you know the fundamentals of how the Google Adwords auction operates, the question becomes; how to leverage the competitive PPC arena in your favour?

Optimising Your Google Adwords Account

In recent times the competition for broad key terms such as 'shoes', has sky-rocketed. This has resulted in higher cost per clicks for such terms.

A simple, yet effective technique is to target more specific key terms, such as 'tennis shoes' or 'buy platform shoes.' The competition for these types of phrases is less aggressive, leaving you able to capture a large amount of traffic for a substantially lower cost-per-click.

This is known as targeting the long tail of search. While the key terms that fall into the 'long tail' are searched for less often than those broader key terms at the 'head', there are far more specific keywords than there are broad key terms. That makes it possible to leverage the long tail to receive as much or even more traffic for substantially less money.

On top of the benefits above, mining the long tail enables you to target your market more specifically. The result is often an increase in quality score, and a much stronger return on investment (ROI).

Achieving a Better Quality Score

If you have multiple products or services, it is possible to group them separately into categorical groups and make each ad group's ad text and landing page specific to each product or service.

By creating ad text that better matches a user's search query, it is possible to significantly increase an ads click-thru-rate. Moreover, by creating tailored landing pages specific to the product or products the user is searching for, it is possible to increase the number of conversions.

The benefits described above all contribute to a better quality score.

Because of this ranking algorithm it is possible for advertisers with a good click through rate to achieve a higher position for a lower CPC than their competition. This is why long tail related ads often appear higher in the Google results than general keywords, despite the fact that those advertisers are paying less per click.

Summary

Optimising a PPC account to achieve optimal results can be a very complex process. Firstly you will need to build out enough ads and keywords to target the long tail. This will involve a lot of keyword research. You'll need to take into account category and product keywords, localization, common spelling mistakes, call to action keywords and so on.

Second, to make the most of those long tail keywords an advertiser will need to have very specific ad text. When dealing with hundreds of products it is tricky to generate a unique text ad and landing page for each one. Nonetheless, this is essential to maintaining a good CTR. PPC management companies will often have their own in-house tools to achieve this.

Testing ad text variations and testing landing pages are also important steps in achieving the most from your advertising spend. However the most important step is measuring and managing the ROI on each keyword. Since the PPC arena is constantly changing, constant monitoring is essential. The value of every keyword is also constantly changing therefore it is essential that you work on a keyword management strategy to deal with this. Bid management tools can be especially helpful here, as can a third party PPC Management Company.

Sayu specialize in PPC services. By utilizing advanced statistical techniques, long tail marketing and proprietary bidding software we can reduce advertising spend and increase the quantity and quality of traffic that is provided by a client's Internet advertising campaigns. Sayu are currently offering a 30-day trial of their PPC services.

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