Before You Begin Your AdWords Campaign, Be Sure To Take These Seven Steps

Ever wondered what you need to know, in order to build a successful Google AdWords Search campaign? A campaign that actually delivers you measurable leads and enquiries, not just brand awareness?

Look no further – here it is!

Step 1: Commit

• Commit yourself to advertising for a minimum period of 6 months.
• Don’t go in with the ‘give-it-a-crack’ attitude and a tiny, experimental budget. This is a sure way to get extremely limited results, and waste your (tiny) budget.
• Commit yourself to monitoring your campaign, and making adjustments to it, every single week. Campaigns that are setup once and never touched are an almost sure-fire recipe for failure and wasted money. Your campaign needs to be regularly analysed, updated, and optimised: optimised to what your customers are actually searching for, and optimised to what is actually brining your leads/enquiries/sales.?

Step 2: Begin With The End In Mind

• ?What is the end goal of the campaign?
• List the major outcome you want to achieve from advertising (for instance, if you are a mechanic and you want to increase enquiries for brake repairs – then your end goal is to generate leads for brake repairs!).
• ?You MUST have a single goal for every single campaign. No ifs or buts about it.
• ?Choose a product or service to advertise that delivers you excellent revenue, has good profit margin, and is in high demand (as in, people are searching for it regularly).
• Ensure the product/service is in high demand. If the product/service is not in demand, and people are not searching for it, then a Google Search campaign may not be the best advertising solution!

Step 3: Research Your Competitors

• Find out who is advertising to capture the exact same customers that you want to capture.
• See if your competitors are advertising any important/unique selling points that your business may not be able to advertise.
• List the number of competitors Ads you can find in Google Search, and write down the Keyword Phrases that you can see those businesses advertising for.

Step 4: Research Keyword Phrases

• Use the Google Keyword Planner to search for keywords that you can advertise for, when someone in your target market types those keyword phrases into Google Search.
• Only use keywords that a potential customer may search, when they are ready to buy or close to buying your product/service (NOT keywords that are relevant to your industry, but searched for in the context of gaining initial education/how to/DIY etc). You want to be advertising in Google Search only for strategic keywords that put a real customer in front of you.
• Use the selected keywords to review an appropriate budget for your advertising campaign. Try not to set a small, limiting advertising budget before you do any research! Successful AdWords campaigns may not require the cheapest budget possible. Often, a small budget completely limits your ability to generate enough traffic (website visitors) to actually create conversions (enquiries).
• ?Save the selected keywords into a spreadsheet (AdWords allows you to Download a spreadsheet from the keyword planner, then re-upload it later when you build your campaign. It’s a huge time saver).

Step 5: Does It All Add Up?

• Do your selected products/services have high revenue and margins?
• Is there enough search demand based on Keyword Research for those products/services?
• Can you close enough sales from the leads that will be generated, to make a return on your advertising investment?
• ?If those boxes can be ticked, then you are ready to proceed further!

Step 6: Consider What You Are Going To Say In Your Ads

• The amount of text in an AdWords ad is quite limited, so be brief, yet concise.
• Don’t get creative with your text copy – a quality, successful Ad simply addresses what the customer is searching for directly, and tells them that your business has a solution for the problem they are seeking a solution for.
• Tell the customer you have exactly what they are looking for in your headline (30 characters).
• Tell them the major benefit they will get by doing business with you in the second headline (30 characters).
• List more benefits and your key sales points in the Ad Description (80 characters). Don’t write the same thing that all of your competitors are writing – and try to refrain from writing things that any of your competitors could write. Be unique and highlight the exact reasons people should do business with you, as opposed to your competitors.

Step 7: Setup Great Sales-Focused Landing Pages For Your Ads To Land On

• When someone clicks an Ad in Google Search, they get taken to a web page. Do you want to waste money? No? Good – then you won’t send everyone who clicks on an Ad for a specific product or service to your broad, generalised home page!

??????????Ensure that your Landing Pages have ALL of the following boxes ticked – no exceptions:

• 1 Landing Page per product or service only. The page should be single topic, and talk only about the product or service the customer is searching for. Nothing else.
• The Landing Page needs a relevant Headline message. The Headline should be the first thing that the customers eyes are drawn to when they land on the page (NOT your logo; and NOT an image). What you communicate here will help sell your product/service to the customer in the first 3 seconds – your logo or an image cannot do that, however a Headline can.
• The Headline should tell the customer exactly what you do – and that you can solve the problem they are seeking to solve.
• Follow it with a Sub-Headline that explains how you solve the customers problems and why they should contact you, not a competitor.
• Follow the Sub-Headline with a Call To Action – ask the customer to buy! Everyone forgets this and it’s the most important part of the page!
• The next section should list 3-4 Key Selling Points. Use real selling points here – things you do for your customers, that your competition does not do. Things that highlight your point of difference, and the real reason someone should do business with you.
• The rest of the page can include content further expands on your key selling points and continues telling the customer how you will solve their problems better than anyone else.
• Your content should speak directly to the person reading the page (your customer) – and should not be ‘internally focused.’ Avoid using the word ‘We’ as much as possible, and instead try to use the word ‘You’ as much as possible – make it about them!
• Don’t use a laundry list of jargon as your selling points. “Family Owned,” “10 years in business,” “Highest Quality,” “Best Service,”? – these are not selling points. They are expected by your customers, and they are NOT unique. Everyone can do them, and everyone will be saying they can do them.
• Use videos, photos, maps etc on the Landing Page as long as they assist in selling your core message to the prospective customer.
• Include your Call To Action button 3 or 4 times in total on the page: under the Sub-Headline; twice in between your content; and once more at the end of the page.
• Ensure that your phone number can be clicked to call directly from a mobile device.

Repeat for every service/product you want to advertise. No exceptions.

Following the above steps is a proven successful method to ensuring that you get quality visitors who are ready to buy your products/services, to a quality Landing Page that actually sells to them the real reasons they should be doing business with you.

If you can tick off all of the above, then you are now ready to build your campaign and setup your Ad Extensions, Bid Management, Location Targeting, and other settings crucial to the success of the campaign.

This article first appeared on the BEFORE YOU BUILD AN ADWORDS CAMPAIGN… at www.awwk.com.au.