Time to revisit how AdWords works, and winning tactics and strategies. I’ve been answering some more questions over on the AdWords Help Forum and I’ve realised that while I’m spinning ever more clever ways to optimise, that a lot of people are just starting with AdWords and making the same old mistakes. However, Google AdWords 2008 is a lot more complicated than Google AdWords 2003. You can make more mistakes now, and you can also get a lot more help – if only you can interpret the error messages.
Overview: What Does AdWords Do?
AdWords is how advertisers reach certain audiences. AdWords is how Google makes money. AdWords *isn’t* Google’s primary focus. If you conflict with Google’s core purpose, you’ll find AdWords to be an unhappy place. What makes AdWords so attractive to advertisers is the large number of visitors. Do something that, in Google’s opinion, upsets visitors, and you’ll find yourself with no advertising, no matter how much you’d like to pay.
It faintly reminds me of SpiderMan – “with great power comes great responsibility”. Google can channel the flow of billions of dollars of online buying. If they get the experience of search wrong, then they’ll lose searchers. Lose searchers and they’ll lose advertisers. Is Google prepared to annoy advertisers? Well, there’ll always be somebody else who’ll play by the rules. Don’t expect that you are going to cheat on Google users, however great you think your idea is for making money. Google would rather have a lot of users than a few sneaky advertisers. If you don’t like that game, then you aren’t going to be able to play with Google’s ball :)
My focus is on real businesses and solid affiliates, not scamsters and cheats. That said, there are some ways to slide decent quality traffic out of Google, while not being completely transparent about what is going on… But that won’t get covered directly, here. You’ll have to read between the lines, or go read one of those “Google Secrets Revealed, How I Made $1.000.000 In A Minute!” type sites.
What Does AdWords Advertising Buy You?
The main mass of users you want to reach come in three distinct audiences:
- Google’s direct search users. People who use Google.com or one of the national Google servers such as Google.co.jp or Google.co.uk. These usages are typically only a clear use of Google’s search engines to find something. “Real” search.
- Google’s indirect search users – Google licenses their search product to other companies, and also licenses the advertising to other businesses that do search. That means AOL and Ask.com, and even, though it has stopped now, Yahoo, their main competitor. Sometimes Google will add unexpected “Search Partners” – Domain Parks, Error Pages, and sites with no search engine themselves. You need to keep an eye on this traffic. Sometimes you get more business from these than you do from Google only. Sometimes you waste your money…
- Google’s content publishing system – AdSense. All those sites with one or more “ads by Google” advertising blocks? That’s Content match. IMO, very tricky to use well.
One more technical word, and then we’ll take a look at the kinds of sites that can appear with these choices.
Keywords and Search Queries
When you go to a search and type in something, you are keying in a “search query”. The Search Query is what the user types.
When you go into AdWords (or Yahoo!Search Marketing or MSN AdCenter, etc) the advertiser enters “keywords” against which they want the adverts to show.
We’re going to make this much more complex shortly, but for now, just think that the keywords you want as an advertiser, are the same as the searches that should show someone your site. Avoid a classic beginners mistake and don’t use irrelevant keywords because they ar cheaper than the right keywords. And do use multiple word keywords – we’ll look at the reasons for that, soon.
Appearance of adverts
Three distinctly different types of audience – plus the radio and magazine advertising and whatever other stuff Google is doing.
But what do these variations of audience targetting look like?
Here’s some screen shot examples.
Google Search Pages
Google Search Partners
A small sample of some of the sites that will show your adverts on the Search Partners.
Under circumstances that aren’t made clear to advertisers, Google will also place adverts targeted for the Search Partners, in AdSense blocks. They make no apology for this behaviour.
Content Network
Standard AdSense adverts. You’ll see them everywhere. Here’s some of the odder places…
Gmail – if you don’t deny advertising with a Google Apps account, then adverts can be shown down the right hand side, and also be shown in the revolving headline area. This shows that you must be a little careful with ad layout – they aren’t always shown in a block. The example shown here, seems to have been triggered by the word “new” – matching “New Zealand”; this advertiser could sharpen the focus by dropping the word “new” and focusing on “Zealand” and “flights”.
Unexpected Places
Richard Ball of Apogee Web Consulting has done a lot of work identifying how Google uses and misuses domain parks. There’s a whole industry of advertising on domain parks. The best “domainers” produce some sites that at least partially satisfy accidental visitors. Google seems to have lower standards… See Rich Ball’s postings on his blog for the painful details.
You can also appear on “404″ pages. If a web page doesn’t exist, then the site owner can subscribe to have adverts shown on that 404 page.
There’s a small list of other “odd places” that you can control. They are mostly tied to the “Search Partners” and “Content Networks”. We’ll look at them in detail when we come to settng up those campaigns.
