Lachlan Kirkwood – Digital Marketing Specialist

Over a month ago, I had finally been blessed with the opportunity to delve into creating my first real life Google AdWords campaign. Similar to my previous post about creating my first campaign, in the past, I’d had experience setting up dummy AdWords campaigns, however have never actually been presented with the chance to use real money to gain real results. From what I’ve heard in the past, Google AdWords can one of the more effective methods of paid advertising although it can also be quite expensive if not implemented correctly. From my understanding, when using Google AdWords, you’re in a constant bidding war against your competitors to secure a hot spot in your target users search results.

Throughout my AdWords campaign, I was planning to target select keywords that aligned with our companies already existing keywords strategy. As I work for an app development studio, I could have simply used keywords such as ‘app development’ or ‘apps’. It is however more effective to pursue the use of long tail keywords instead. Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very specific to whatever you’re targeting. You see, whenever a potential user uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. It’s a better practice to use long tail keywords as your conversion rate will be higher. If you’re wanting to delve into long tail keywords and their best practices, feel free to jump over to HubSpots online academy… I used that as my AdWords bible!

Whenever you’re searching for effective keywords for your AdWords campaign, I’d also highly recommend the use of SpyFu. SpyFu lets you peek at your competitor’s website to gauge what keywords they’re using and how much they’re paying for them. If you’re someone like myself who is setting up their first AdWords campaign, it can be quite daunting to understand what the average price is for certain keywords and what your bid should be. SpyFu takes away the stress of wondering where you’ll sit in comparison to your competitor’s keyword searches.

When it comes time to set up your AdWords campaign, it’s actually a fairly straight forward process. Especially with the help of my favourite Google employee Erica. You can literally follow a step by step tutorial video on how to correctly set up and make adjustments to your campaign.

One thing that Erica didn’t teach me though was the importance of adding quotations to your keyword phrases. By adding direct quotations to your keywords it can ensure that your target keywords are shown to the right people. A good example of this would be the phrase ‘app development’. If I simply use the search phrase of app development with no quotations, my paid ad is valid to appear in any search using the word app or development within any context. Alternatively, if I use direct quotations on my keyword and add it as “app development”, my paid ad will now only appear in users searches who have searched that exact phrase. This will make it more likely to reach the right people who are in the market for your product/service.

The final important piece of advice I’ll give is to always monitor your AdWords each day. Running an AdWords campaign is like babysitting a small child, you can’t just set it up and walk away. You have to constantly monitor your keywords performance and adjust your bids accordingly to your competition.

I will admit though, when you do outbid your competitors search phrase, it feels exactly like this….

To summarize my experience with AdWords, I’d genuinely recommend it to anyone looking to increase leads or website traffic. When compared to advertising on social media channels, you’ll spend a whole lot less for a conversion through AdWords. It’s important to remember that when a user is scrolling through their social media feed, they’re unlikely to be actively searching for your specific product. Whereas if you target someone who is searching for your exact product, you’ve already succeeded in jumping a step forward into their purchasing decision.

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