A very common complaint by new advertisers in the AdWords Help Forum is that their newly placed adverts will run well, typically for a few days, and then stop running. Often, the advertiser will notice that Google is complaining of a low “Quality Score”. This video blog with supporting notes is a consequence of a charity posting their problems, together with sample adverts and keywords. This unusual openness makes them a great candidate for a case study.

Google Video – lower quality, faster to display, click the “Play” button at lower left:

Click on the link at the end of this sentence for a higher quality, large QuickTime Movie – where you can see the detail of the slides and screens, showing precisely which links to click to setup a new AdWords account, as a new AdWords user.

The video shows choosing a Standard Edition rather than Starter Edition AdWords Account. I’ve picked “Standard Edition” because the best use of AdWords usually comes from the additional power of the Standard Edition account. The Starter Edition limits you to a single campaign – and you need at least two campaigns to fully manage performance.

In the video I warn that users should not use a publicly known email address, especially if they have given other people access to their normal email account; perhaps a family member or an office colleague. Since the AdWords account controls the spending of money, make sure that everyone who has access to the Google AdWords Account, uses their own account name; that way you can trace decisions and actions. Especially make sure that the account names that are used, are not published anywhere. My standard practice is that I have public email addresses and private email email addresses. The private email addresses are used for receiving email from AdWords only, so no one knows their identities, other than AdWords. If you know an email address to send me email, then that’s one email address you can be sure I won’t be using for AdWords management!

AdWords Account Activation Email

Note the addresses that Google uses in the confirmation eMail. Especially notice that the right URL to sign in to AdWords is “h t t p s : / / a d w o r d s . g o o g l e . c o m /” If you see anything else at the beginning of the URL, then you may be visiting a spoof site that will try to steal from you.

Campaign Setup

The video steps through the process. Key points:

• Name this first campaign “Keyword targeted” – because that’s what we’re doing
• Target one language and one country per campaign – this is usually the most effective
• If your budget is high enough, then select “Accelerated Spending” to maximise your impression volume
• If your budget is too low to spend all day, use the default budget method – this spreads spending through the day
• Deselect the “Content Network”, despite the popup window that warns you about losing traffic; we’ll set up the content network in a later video.
• Select “Rotate” adverts, rather than allowing Google to optmise; it is easy to manage advert performance and rotation allows you to optimise better than the default.

Schizophrenia Charity

You can guess at the most likely keywords that a Schizophrenia information charity should offer. As it happens, the advertiser decided to appeal to a particular symptom, hearing voices. So the advert didn’t include any of the keywords. That’s almost certainly why he has a poor quality score… Psychological factors.

User Psychology

If someone types in “schizophrenia”, then they probably are looking for information about it. If they type “red leather shoes” then they probably want information and possibly sales sites featuring read leather shoes. Advertisements that mention the keyword help to assure the user that the right advert is showing. By coming back to them with what they said, you show you are listening and that you address their interests. The difference in Click Through Rate (the percentage of impressions that result in clicks) between using and not-using the Keyword in the advert can be more than 50% – you can double click rates by using the keyword in the copy.

We’re going to use that technique of “mirroring” to help get a good quality score in the adverts.

If the keyword is “schizophrenia”, then we should use that word in the title of the advertisement.

If the keyword was “luxury red shoes”, then we should use that.

User Psychology – Continue The Dialog

Apart from using the keyword, what else needs to be said? Classic marketing – a Call to Action. Obviously you want people to click and come to your site, but what will make them come? A low selling price? A wider range? A free delivery service? Free extended warranty? What is *your* unique appeal that will have a segment of the audience click on your advert more than they will click on other advertisements?

In the case of the Schizophrenia advice charity, they probably have three audiences. The person who is hearing voices – who probably won’t be inquiring about Schizophrenia. The friends and family – the social network – of the schizophrenic, who may want support and advice and might be searching for “Schizophrenia”, or “hearing voices”, or “psychosis”, or looking up side effects of prescribed medication, or a bunch of other search queries. And finally medical professionals – the care network – who probably have specific terms and may be considering the use of specific drugs for treatments.

When you have three segments, and overlapping keywords, you should probably offer three different web sites. The types of people going to each should be different, will need different language in the landing page and think about the problems they are trying to solve in different ways. That also means that potentially you might *need* to advertise three times on the same keyword – expecting different segments to click on different adverts and go to three different websites.

We’ll look at that, a very advanced concept in advertising, later. For now, let’s focus on reaching the main groups in the obvious ways. As you learn the techniques, you can start to apply some subtlety!

Google Video about improving advertising with AdWords

Since publishing this article, Google has produced a short video that emphasises many similar points:

Summary

This technique is about focus for new advertisers. Instead of spreading widely and becoming confused, pick a keyword that is the essence of what you do. Whether that is “lawn mower repair”, “luxury teas”, or a charitable operation. Pick that one word and write the best advert you can, that will bring people to the best page on your site that addresses the implicit question. If you have to, create a new page to make sure you address the search query.

Restrict the campaign to avoid the content network. The content network has its uses, but you need to target in a different way, and the adverts often should be different. Budgeting – is tricky. Generally, for a first campaign, keep the bid lower in order to get more clicks from the budget. There are reasons to worry about position, but you’ve enough to learn getting just one AdGroup working properly.

Before looking at anything else, this would be a good time for you to explore the rest of the user interface, and especially look at the reporting and web analytics. Future steps in performance improvement will require web analytics on your web site, or AdWords Conversion Tracking… But that’s still a few steps away!

Updates

2009-06-06 – Added Google video about optimising adverts – it echoes many of the same points made here.