Google Adwords provide accurate metrics showing how many people search for certain keywords and phrases every month. It calculates an equivalent of a month’s traffic to your website. It’s a very powerful tool for driving instant leads to start the engagement process.
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.
John Wanamaker
As with most online advertising, Google Adwords, Facebook and Twitter can measure the cost and success of your campaigns instantly and to the penny.
Every single aspect of your marketing campaign is measurable, right down to the number of clicks, number of impressions, click through rate (CTR), number of conversions, conversion rate, cost per click (CPC) and cost per acquisition (CPA). So, with all this in place, it is very easy to measure your ROI.
So, an advertising campaign is –
- measurable
- cost-effective
- maximum relevance
- highly targeted, based on
- location
- mobile device
- language
- auto-tagging
Google adwords
97% of Google’s total revenue comes from advertising (Google Investor Relations) that offers businesses on average a return of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Adwords (Google Economic Impact Report). It has over 1.2 million businesses advertising on its search network (AdGooRoo via Perry Marshall) and the Display Network serves 180 billion impressions each month. That works out at about 6 billion a day (comScore) reaching 80% of global internet users (Google Benchmarks and Insights).
It can only make sense to get involved, right?
Remarketing
Yankee Candle Company reports that remarketing allowed it to increase conversion rates by 600% while cutting cost per conversion in half (Adwords Blog)
Ask.com
Ask.com is one of Google’s biggest advertisers, as ranked by dollars spent in Q3 2012, according to research on more than $1 billion dollars’ worth of Google Adwords spent via WordStream, a company that specialises in Google search ads.
Ask.com is Google’s second-biggest advertiser spending £95,000 a day5
And Ask.com is only focusing on the ‘questioning’ and ’researching’ phase of the client journey. Most businesses will have many other stages on the customer journey where they can connect with their clients and begin a relationship.
If Ask.com is spending £95,000 per day advertising to people who are simply enquiring, imagine how crucial connecting with people at this stage in the buying cycle could be to you.
And remember, there are many other stages in the buying cycle where you can connect with potential clients, or add value to your existing clients, who may be looking for other services that you could be supplying them.
Cool Diamonds
And it’s not only large companies who are succeeding with online advertising. Cool Diamonds is a prestigious London Jeweller’s. There is no doubting the success that advertising with GoogleAdwords had for Cool Diamonds, both in terms of brand recognition and in the numbers being driven to their site. In 1999, www.cooldiamonds.com was achieving some 13,000 hits per month. Nowadays, that figure is in excess of 5 million.
Amazon
Amazon spent an estimated $55.2 million on Google Adwords advertising in 2011 (breaking down Google’s 2011 revenues).That’s more than $150,000 per day for every single day of the year. And the strange thing about that relationship is that Amazon is one of Google’s major competitors.
Conversion optimizer
And, do you know what else is great about Google Adwords? It even shows you how to optimise your own keyword service. According to Google, campaigns that use the Conversion Optimizer achieve a 21% increase in conversions while decreasing CPA by 14% on average (Google Conversion Optimizer).
Edinburgh + venue/event/conference/meeting room
For example, we performed a basic search for keywords that had ‘Edinburgh’ and other words such as ‘conference’, ‘venue’ and ‘meeting room’ and found there are approximately 4,000 searches per month in the UK. That’s from a selection of just 44 different search phrases per month.
So, with just those few keywords, Google guarantees to deliver 11 clicks per day, or 220 per month through to your website.
Important:
This is only the advertising budget suggested by Google. There are a lot of tricks to keeping the cost down and yet staying high in the search rankings, and we provide this expertise free of charge to our clients.
How can I reduce ad spend and increase ROI using Google Adwords or Google pay per click?
The key contributors to the cost of your pay-per-click campaign are Quality Score and Ad Rank. You can continually improve your Quality Score and Ad Rank thereby increasing your conversion rates and reducing your cost per click. Not only will the ideas we are about to share improve your CTRs, Quality Scores, ad positions, impression shares and lower your cost per click, it will also help you improve your conversion rates.
A fantastic opportunity to win new business
Ad Rank
A value that’s used to determine your ad position, where ads are shown on a page. Ad Rank is calculated using your bid amount and Quality Score.
Understanding Adwords Ad Rank
Ad Rank determines your ad position – where your ad shows on the page in relation to other ads.
The main components of your Ad Rank are your bids and the quality of your ads, keywords and website, as measured by what we call Quality Score. We also incorporate the expected impact from your extensions and other ad formats when computing your Ad Rank. When estimating the expected impact of extensions and ad formats, we consider such factors as the relevance, click-through rates and the prominence of the extensions or formats on the search results page. So, even if your competition has higher bids than yours, you can still win a higher position at a lower price by using highly relevant keywords, ads and extensions.
Your Ad Rank is recalculated each time that your ad is eligible to appear, so your ad position can fluctuate each time depending on your competitors at that given moment.
Quality Score
The exact calculations used for Google’s Adword Quality Score are top secret. However, we do know what parts affect it and can make educated guesses as to what level. It’s important to fully understand what influences the cost of Google Adwords to maximise ROI. It is Quality Score that defines the Ad Rank and it is the combination of those two elements which greatly impacts on the cost of your pay-per-click campaign.
Think of it in the same way as your credit score affects the cost and rates of mortgages and loans when applying for them, except, this time, your Quality Score affects the cost per click and performance of your ad. We, at Virtual Global, perform the same job as the Experian team of advisers who help people get on top of their finances.
Google explain it like this –
The 1-10 Quality Score reported for each keyword in your account is an estimate of the quality of your ads and landing pages triggered by that keyword. Having a high Quality Score means that our systems think your ad and landing page are relevant and useful to someone looking at your ad.
It is used to determine your cost per click (CPC) and multiplied by your maximum bid to determine your ad rank in the ad auction process. The formula for the Google Search Network is as follows:
Ad Rank = CPC bid × Quality Score
And your Quality Score depends on multiple factors, including:
- account-level Quality Score
- ad Group Quality Score
- keyword-level Quality Score
- ad-level Quality Score
- landing page Quality Score
- display network Quality Score
- mobile Quality Score
However, without going into each element in detail, there are some golden rules for running Google Adwords campaigns.
High conversions (click-through rate)
High conversions are great because they influence your Quality Score and mean you are getting more traffic. Write ads that are eye-catching and entice people to click on. For instance, free delivery, dazzling variety. Tell people! Showcase the products, services or offers that make you stand out.
Match your ad to your landing page.
There is nothing worse than running a search in Google, clicking on a link and ending up on a page that has nothing to do with your original search. Make sure your landing page matches exactly what your Google Adword is suggesting or stating. Google will reward you for it and so will your visitors.
Keyword relevance
Match your keywords to your ad and your landing page. Your keywords MUST appear in the Google Adword and the landing page in the most important areas like title tag, h1 tag, url and others too. Keep lots of short lists of more relevant keywords for specialised landing pages and Adwords.
A/B split test adverts.
A/B split test your Google Adwords campaign. It’s as simple as writing two adverts. They can be similar or completely different. After a few days or weeks, check to see which advert has converted the fewest click-throughs or leads and then replace that advert with a new one that you hope will outperform it. You then continue improving on adverts by competing them against each other at the same time reducing your costs and increasing your position in the results.
Enormous opportunity
There will be thousands of specific keywords that will help initiate a relationship with a potential client, partner or journalistic. They may then become involved with your company at many levels and across multiple mediums.
Each keyword is a potential interaction with a potential client. Each keyword allows you to attract someone’s attention. The Google Adword sparks the conversation off. The landing page keeps their attention and they may respond to a call to action, like sign up to your newsletter or download your ebook because they are interested in you and want to keep in touch. This ‘permission marketing’ gains someone’s trust by offering value that is a win-win for both parties.
Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.
Seth Godin