The Maine SEO Blog

Create ad and keywords: Create an ad

Now that you’ve got your advanced settings all in order, it’s finally time to create your first ad!

First things first: you can create a variety of ads in AdWords: text, image, video, or mobile. Each has a variety of techniques, and I’m only going to go over the text ad, as it’s the most popular.

You’ll see five lines of text in the ad manager:

1. Headline: The blue hyperlink to your landing page; total of 25 characters.
2. Description Line 1: 1st line of black text; total of 35 characters.
3. Description Line 2: 2nd line of black text; total of 35 characters.
4. Display URL: The green text displaying your landing page; total of 35 characters.
5. Destination URL: The actual destination landing page (that must match the display URL domain); total of 1024 characters.

The wrong way to write an ad

Below is an example of how not to write an ad. It’s vague, not overly enticing, and most importantly: there’s no call to action!

The right way to write ad

Here are some of the pointers Google AdWords Help gives for optimizing your ads:

• Make your ad simple and enticing.
• Have a sale or promotion? Include it! Free shipping – add it! Price, as we all know, is a huge differentiator.
• Call-to-action. Have one. ‘Nuff said.
• Include the keywords you’re bidding on in the text.
• Choose the best destination URL – more often than not, it won’t be the homepage.
• Test multiple ads. You might be surprised about which one performs better.

With a purpose in mind, I set out to try again:

Remember: you’ll want to have tested the keywords you use in the ad beforehand (which I haven’t with this example), but you get the idea.

Congratulations!

You’ve created your first ad! Tomorrow, we start on keywords.

Nicki Hicks
Puppy Presents on the Brain

Create your first campaign: Advanced Settings

Last time we set up bidding and budget, and today it’s time to learn some of the advanced settings for when your ad(s) will populate.

Schedule

First, choose the start and end date of your campaign. Would you like to start it today, but have it end in a week? Or perhaps this is an ongoing campaign that will never end, but you want it to start next week.

Then, you can decide when your ads will show. As you can see, Google isn’t allowing me to insert this information until I enter billing information.

Typically, you’ll be able to schedule your ads to specific times and days. For my pet shop, I might leave the settings at their default 24/7. For a service-based, 9-5 business, I might change them to something like this:

If this is your first time using AdWords, keep these settings at 24/7 and see what times are the most popular for clicks and more importantly, conversions. Running this campaign, I might have noticed that people clicked early and late on the weekends, but didn’t convert. This way, my ad doesn’t even show during these times.

Ad delivery

Ad rotation is essential for ad testing. When you create more than one ad in the same campaign (targeting the same set of keywords), Google will start by showing them equally. Then, as one acquires a higher click through rate (CTR) and Quality Score, that ad will begin showing more often. You’ll be able to see which ad this is in your “% served” column in the AdWords admin.

Frequency capping applies only to Google’s content network. With it, you can control how many impressions (or number of times your ad appears) for a unique visitor. This setting would typically be helpful only after you’ve gained some statistics – perhaps your content network impressions are extremely high, with a low click through rate. In this case, a frequency cap might help increase your CTR.

Congratulations!

You’ve completed your ad’s advanced settings. As mentioned, many of these settings may require some initial stats; but don’t worry, you can always come back and change them! Tomorrow we’ll discuss creating your first ad.

Nicki Hicks
Advanced is just a fancy word

You may think you have a killer blogpost – and you probably do, but are you gaining all the search engine traffic you possibly could?

1. Choose a narrow topic. If, after you start writing, realize you’ve chosen a broad subject that you could write for days on – split it up into smaller blogposts; even a series.

2. Choose a title. Not just any title. Think about how to make your topic the most interesting it could possibly be. Lists are great (Top 10 Reasons to…, 5 Ways You Could…, 6 Things You Can’t…); how-to’s and answers to frequently asked questions are also hot blog topics.

Think about what your audience might be searching for in order to find an article like this, then phrase accordingly.

3. Continuing to think about what your audience is searching for, create content around those keywords. In other words, write keyword rich content – using your 2-3 major keywords about 2-3 times. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to keep content short and sweet: around 250 words should do it.

4. Include an image if it applies. As they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words.

5. Don’t forget about video – maybe there’s one that exists already, or one you could create that helps engage your readers – include it!

6. A call to action is critical, if it makes sense. It would probably apply for this post if I ended with: “For more helpful tips on blogging, contact flyte new media today.” Notice I linked that entire sentence. I could have linked “contact flyte new media”, but that wouldn’t have been taking advantage of anchor text, now would it?

7. Depending on what type of content management system you use, you’ll have the ability to assign tags and categories to your post. In WordPress, you can list a number of tags – or keywords – you’d like to assign to the post. Tags are helpful if a reader wants to see related posts tagged with the same keyword.

Categories help group your blogposts into just that – categories. Try to keep your categories general enough so you can keep them to less than 10.

Nicki Hicks
Blogging 101

Create your first campaign: Bidding and Budget

You’ve just decided where your ads are going, now it’s time to put some money behind it.

Bidding Options

By default, Google suggests focusing on clicks – with a choice to create a manual bid for clicks, or automatic. Manual bidding simply means that you want to manually tell Google how much you’re willing to pay for any given keyword. By using automatic bidding, Google will choose how much your bid will be – but don’t worry you get to put a ceiling on that amount with the bid limit.

You also have an option to base bids on conversions. This might be a good option for an Ecommerce site – as conversions are black and white: to buy or not to buy. You can count whatever you’d like as a conversion: signing up for your email newsletter, filling out your contact form, subscribing to your feed, downloading your white paper…you get the idea. (Notice you have to set up conversion tracking – by inserting a code not unlike that for Google Analytics.)

Budget

This one is pretty straight forward: how much are you willing to spend for AdWords (per day)? Like every other option we’re setting up here, you can change this at anytime. And, don’t worry, if Google thinks you should be spending more based on “missed opportunities”, they won’t hesitate to tell you.

Position Preference

That’s right, you can choose where your ad shows up! (You’ll just have to pay for it.)

Unless you have a specific need to show up in the #1 spot, or maybe you want to be down around #3 to save costs (and you know you’ll convert just as well there), then I would suggest leaving this option “off”.

Delivery Method

Have a product in short supply and want to sell it fast? Or do you have a bottomless budget? Go ahead and show your ad(s) quickly over time. Otherwise, show them evenly throughout the day.

Congratulations!

You’ve successfully set up your bids and budget. Now that the money piece is (partially) out of the way, tomorrow we’ll go over some advanced settings.

Nicki Hicks
Budgeting isn’t just for accountants

Create your first campaign: Networks, Devices, and Extensions

You’ve set up your location, language, and demographics settings; now it’s time to decide where your ad is going to show up.

Networks

Google has two networks: search and content.

The Google search network includes a huge number of Google search and website partners (including Google Search Results, Google Maps, Google Product Search, Google Groups, Amazon.com, etc.) that will display your ads. This is the traditional portion of AdWords we’re all used to.

The Google content network includes a large number of websites, blogs, and content affiliated with Google. Some of the most popular sites in the content network include: The New York Times, HGTV, About.com, FoodNetwork.com, and Gmail. Google only shows your ad on content placements where it applies. (For example, my Maine pet store ad wouldn’t show up on a blog about home improvement, but it would probably show up on a blog by a Dalmatian lover in Maine.)

By default, AdWords will suggest you push your ads out to all available sites (the entire Google Network). By “letting me choose”, you can decide where you’d like to show your ad.

Within the content network, you’ll see you have another choice to show your ad on relevant placements you manage. Ads with placements are simply those websites and blogs within the content network you choose your ad to show up on. For example, I might choose to place an ad specifically in Maine Pets on Maine Today. (If you’re interested in ads with placements, you’ll be able to choose the content network(s) later in the setup process.)

Devices

Unless there’s a strong reason for not wanting your ads to show up on both computers and smart phones/mobile devices, I would suggest leaving the device setting on “all available devices”.

Congratulations!

As they say on the all the reality shows, “you’re one step closer to…” completing your first AdWords campaign! Tomorrow we’ll dive into bidding and budget.

Nicki Hicks
Wannabe reality show host

Searching this afternoon led me to an interesting discovery: a search box, located right in the Google Search Results Page:

I can definitely see the power of having a function like this – especially for large, robust websites.

Performing a search for “maine” in this search box would surely return a search result page from the US SBA website, right? Wrong.

A Google search result page of the website is served up.

Having neither seen nor heard anything about this, I started looking around for an article about it. No such luck.

Has anyone else seen anything like this?

Update: Shines and Jecker was kind enough to point me in the right direction.

Nicki Hicks
(Un)stumped.

Create your first campaign: Location, Language, and Demographics

You’ve already set up your AdWords account, now it’s time to create your first campaign. There are four easy steps:

Click the “create your first campaign” button.

For the purpose of this series, I’m going to pretend that I’m creating a campaign for a pet store, with one location in Portland, Maine.

Choose a name

Think of something a little more specific than “Campaign #1″. If you start creating multiple campaigns, you’ll quickly forget which is which.

My first campaign will be some general ad stores. (I want to get an idea of how it does before I create more specific ads around pets: dogs, cats, fish, etc.). So I’ve called it “pet store”.

Choose your location

I chose Maine; but notice that you can choose your state, United States, United States and Canada, etc. By clicking “select one or more  other locations,” you’ll be able to choose locations visually on a Google Map.

Local Business? You can also show relevant addresses with your ads. This is also known as local or ad extensions, and it wasn’t long ago that Google began populating your AdWords ads in Google Maps. All you have to do is connect your AdWords ad with your Local Business Center account (or simply input your address):

Choose your language

‘Nuff said.

Choose your demographic

Selling high-end women’s clothing? You might want to separate your demographic to women within a certain age range:

As a pet store owner, I’m simply going to exclude the 0-17 year old demographic; assuming everyone outside of that range could theoretically own (and care for) a pet.

Congratulations!

You’ve successfully completed part of the campaign setup process! Tomorrow we’ll cover Networks, Devices, and Extensions.

Nicki Hicks
Maybe you should sweat the small stuff

Setting up your Account

Go to Google AdWords.

If you’ve already set up your AdWords account, then you needn’t go further. Stay tuned for Step 2.

If you’ve never signed up for AdWords before, click the ‘Start now’ button on the upper right hand side of the page.

If you already use a Google product…

Even if you currently use Gmail, iGoogle, or another Google product, you still have to create your account. Choose the following options and login with your account.

If you do not currently use a Google Product…

You’ll have to go through the steps of creating an account.

Set your timezone and currency

This is pretty self explanatory; but evidently you cannot change these settings once they’ve been setup. So don’t go messing around by setting Uruguayan time. (Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Congratulations!

You’ve completed Step 1 of creating your account. Stay tuned tomorrow, where we’ll talk about setting up location, language, and demographics for your campaign.

Nicki Hicks
Now on to the fun stuff…

Alright, so you’ve decided you need to utilize paid search in conjunction with your organic efforts. But…how do you do it?

You’re a newbie who just doesn’t have time to read the entire Google AdWords Beginner’s Guide.

Or maybe you’ve read the guide, but can’t make heads or tails of it.

There’s a lot of confusing language during AdWords setup: many settings which can have a huge impact on your campaign.

Rest assured, dear reader; with the next series of posts, we’ll take setup nice and slow – and you’ll quickly become a Google AdWords setup pro!

Nicki Hicks
Stay Tuned

SEO isn’t the answer. Neither is Twitter. Or Facebook. Or LinkedIn.

Your website isn’t the answer. Neither is your blog.

Social bookmarking isn’t the answer either; but in combination of all of these, it could be your answer.

There’s a lot of overlap between social media and social bookmarking; but at its core, bookmarking is just that: tagging a website or blogpost that might be of interest to other members of your community.

How do you start?

I would suggest starting an account on the major social bookmarking sites:

• Digg
• Sphinn
• Reddit
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Yahoo! Buzz
• Technorati
• Squidoo

Just like social media, sooner or later, you’ll find the one(s) you (and your network) gravitate more towards. In other words, don’t feel like you have to commit time to all of them.

How can you leverage them?

Every time you write a new blogpost or article, digg/stumble/sphinn/buzz/etc. that post. Better yet, have someone else do it for you!

If your article or blogpost makes it to the homepage of one of these sites, the viral possibilities are endless, and you’ll reap the benefits of a ton of traffic.

In addition, mark your favorite blogs, blog posts, and websites on your favorite social bookmarking site. Ask friends and coworkers to join your favorite site and start building a network.

What will happen?

You might just see the benefits of social bookmarking traffic.

Nicki Hicks
Bookmarking Socially

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