Google Adwords - It’s All About the Keywords
When we talk about paid advertising we usually discuss two major platforms - Google Adwords, and Facebook ads. Consider this chapter the 20% you need to know to get 80% of the results you want.
Adwords is Google's advertising platform and it's the main revenue source for Google. The Adwords network is divided into two separate networks. The search network, which is in charge of all of the sponsored ads you see when you search in Google's search engine. And the display network which is in charge of all the ads shown on websites with Google ads.
The main advantage about using the Adwords search network is that you can get your ads in front of a targeted audience when they are looking for a specific solution. It's what's known as "pull marketing" since you don't need to convince the user of anything, they are already looking for a solution to their problem.
On the other hand we have push marketing - the Adwords display network. This network reaches a larger audience than the search network, since there are much more websites that display Google ads than there are searches on Google.
In this chapter I'm going to cover only the basics of the search network since I think it's the main game-changer you can use for your Bitcoin business. If you feel you want to learn more about the display network as well there is an excellent guide by Google here.
Keywords are what triggers ads
Ads on the search network are triggered by keywords that people type in to Google. When I say keywords (or KWs in short) I don't mean just words, but also phrases. So for example, in the 99Bitcoins' Adwords campaign I put in KWs such as:
Buy Bitcoin with PayPal
Buy Bitcoin with credit
How can I buy Bitcoin anonymously
and so on...
Each one of these phrases is consider a different KW
Now let's say you're an advertiser on Adwords. You sign up to the system and upload a list of keywords which you think are relevant to your product. After you upload your KWs and write the ad for your product, you're good to go (don't worry all of this will be explained in depth later on, I just want you to get the general idea at the moment). Once someone searches for one of your KWs, Google will display your ad. So it's all about picking the right KWs to make your ad show up in the right time.
But here is where it gets tricky.
Google wants their ads to be relevant to what the user is searching for, so you can't just put an ad up for a Bitcoin exchange if the user is searching for "red tennis shoes". This means that you have to have a high correlation between your KWs and your ads.
You also need your landing page to be related to the KWs you pick. So if the KW you are bidding on is "Bitcoin exchange" and you send your user to a webpage about organic fruit - that's a big no-no in Google terms.
Chapter 10.1: A Bit of AdWords Terminology
The correlation between the KW, the ad and the landing page is called Quality Score (QS) and it's one of the main factors that decides at what position your ad will show up if at all. Each KW you will add to your campaign will get a different QS between 1-10 according to this correlation.
The QS also changes according to how effective your ad is. If many users click on your ad - your QS goes up. If nobody clicks on your ad, it goes down.
The percentage of users who click on your ad is called Click Through Rate or CTR. It's going to be your job to make sure you have a high CTR so that your QS will go up and your ad gets shown more often.
Any time your ad is shown, it means it got an impression (or imps in short). So if your ad was shown 200 times, it means it got 200 impressions. And if from these 200 times, 10 people clicked on it, it means its CTR will be 10/200 = 5%.
So to recap what we learned up until now:
- There are two main networks - search and display.
- The search network is activated by KWs.
- The KWs have to be related to the ads and to the landing page as well.
- The higher the correlation the higher your QS for that KW is.
- CTR also affects QS.
- Every time an ad is shown it means it received an impression.
If you haven't lost track of me yet then we're doing great. I have one more technical thing I want to go over which is crucial to understand and that's the pricing model of Adwords.
You only pay if someone clicks your ad
Adwords works on a Pay Per Click model (also known as PPC). This means that you only pay for your ad if someone clicked it. This makes it extremely effective for the advertisers since they don't have to spend a dime if no one clicked on their ads.
Your max CPC is the maximum amount you are willing to pay per 1 click. This can be any number between 1 cent and a million dollars depending on your budget.
You will almost never pay you max CPC. That is why it's called a max CPC - it's the maximum you are willing to pay but usually you'll pay less. I won't get into details on how to calculate how much you're going to actually pay since it's a bit complicated but for now just remember that usually you'll pay a lower price than your max CPC.
So why not show my ads all the time? I won't pay if no one clicks....
I thought you might ask that. The thing is, Google wants to make money, and it's not going to let you put up ads that no one clicks on if they can put more relevant ads which will get clicked.
That's exactly why the QS is affected so much by the CTR. If your CTR is low it means that no one is clicking on your ad. If no one is clicking on your ad, it's probably not that relevant. If it's not that relevant it's not going to be showing up for long since you're losing Google money.
How does Google decide if your ad will be shown?
Each ad you own has its own ad rank. The ad rank is the result your QS X your max CPC.
So for example, let's say you want to advertise for the KW "buy bitcoins" and your max CPC is $2. Google calculates your QS and gives you a result of 7. This means your ad rank for that specific KW is 2*7 = 14.
Whenever someone types "buy bitcoins" in Google, your ad rank competes with all other ad ranks for that KW and the order of appearance is decided from the highest ad rank to the lowest. Since there are only 10 ad spots on a Google page, ads that come after 10th place won't be shown at all.
As you can see, even though Craig bid higher than Melissa, he will still show up below her because his QS pretty much sucks. Usually KWs with QS of 1 won't show up at all. So now you know why it's important that your QS will be as high as possible. If you have an extremely high QS you can pay a lower CPC and still maintain a high position.
For those of you who really want to dig into this the exact formula to calculate how much you'll pay is: (Ad rank below you/your QS) + $0.01
Hey, I told you it was complicated
So another short recap:
- Your ad rank = your QS X your mac CPC
- Your ad rank will decide your ad's placement
- Higher QS means you can pay lower CPC for the same placement
- You only pay if someone clicks on your ad
KW Terminology
When you're looking for KWs there are several terms you need to be familiar with:
Short tail KWs
These are short phrases that usually have a high search volume but are also very expensive to bid on and are not very focused. An example for a Bitcoin short tail KW can be "buy bitcoins" or "bitcoin mining".
I say that these KWs are not focused since if someone types in "bitcoin mining" you don't know if he's looking to buy a mining rig, learn about mining, or join a mining pool - the term is just too broad.
Long tail KWs
These are long phrases that usually have a lower search volume but are very focused and usually are less expensive to bid on. Examples for long tail KWs include: "buy bitcoins with PayPal" or "how to mine bitcoins at home".
Broad match
When you enter your KWs into the Google Adwords system they are entered in a broad match. This means that any time someone enter a query in Google that has your KW, your ad will show up. It doesn't matter at what order the KWs were entered or if there's anything before them, after them or in between.
For example, if your KW is "bitcoin trading robot", your ad will show up for all of the following queries in broad match:
is there o good robot for trading bitcoin
best bitcoin trading robots
best automatic robots for bitcoin online trading
There is also phrase match that will show your ads only if your KWs come in the right order, but you may enter other words before or after them. So phrase match will show your ad only for these queries:
Best bitcoin trading robots
bitcoin trading robot list
An exact match will show your ads only if some types your exact KW and nothing else. So only if someone type in "bitcoin trading robot" without anything before or after, your ad will be shown.
Negative KWs
These are KWs that if you put them in your campaign under the "negative KWs" category Google will never show your ad if they appear in the search query. This is good in order to filter out unwanted clicks that won't convert into actual customers, since broad match can show your ad to users who entered a different query then what you originally intended.
For example, let's say you own a website that sells Bitcoins with a credit card only and not with PayPal. You decide to add the word "buy bitcoin" to your Adwords campaign. You can also add "PayPal" as a negative KW to your campaign.
Any time a user searches for anything with the word "PayPal" in it - your add won't show up. So queries like "buy bitcoin with PayPal" or "How to use PayPal to buy Bitcoins" won't trigger your ad while "How to buy Bitcoins" will trigger it.
Chapter 10.2: Tools for KW Research
Now that we've covered how the Google Adwords search network is built, let's move on to setting our first campaign. The first thing you'll want to do is some KW research to find out what KWs people are already looking for in the Bitcoin niche.
There are many tools you can use to start crafting your KW list. Here are a few ideas:
Google KW planner
As explained in Chapter 2, you can use Google's KW planner to get KW ideas. Type in some sort of a basic short tail KW (e.g. "Buy bitcoin") and see what results the KW planner gives you under the KW ideas tab. You can also see the monthly search volume for each KW on the right column.
UberSuggest
As explained in Chapter 2 you can use UberSuggest to see what people are already searching for according to Google's autocomplete feature. The process is similar to the KW planner, just put in a basic short tail KW and see what the tool comes up with.
Jargon - Use the Bitcoin vocabulary to think about KWs such as “hash rate”, “mining difficulty”, “blockchain explorer”, etc.
Brain storming - As usual it's better to do this step with a few other people related to Bitcoin so you can get a group thought process growing.
Questions - Many times people will type questions or problems in to Google and not solutions. If you're building a Bitcoin info product this is an excellent opportunity to use questions as KWs. For example: "How to mine Bitcoins at home?" or "What is the best Bitcoin exchange".
Make sure to drill into KWs vertically and horizontally. When you drill into KWs vertically you take a certain KW as your "base KW" and then add different variations to it. For example, if I want to drill vertically into the base KW "bitcoin mining" I would come up with the following KWs:
Bitcoin mining hardware
Bitcoin mining calculator
How to mine Bitcoin at home
Mining Bitcoin guide
and so on....
Each new KW will have the base KW and an addition to it.
When you drill down horizontally you try to find related KWs to your base KW. So if I drill horizontally into the same base KW "bitcoin mining'7 I'll come up with these related KWs:
Network difficulty
SHA mining rigs
How to generate Bitcoins
The result of horizontal drilling is that the base KW should be present at any of the new KWs you come up with. Now you can take these new KWs and drill vertically into each of them.
Grouping KWs into Ad groups
After you create a list of 100 KWs or so you can move on to the next step which is to group KWs together into ad groups.
Ad groups are groups of KWs which will end up showing the same ad. Since you don't want to create a different ad for each KW but you still want to show different ads to different categories of KWs we'll just group them into ad groups.
An ad group consists of 10-20 KWs which are closely related and that the same ad can suit them all with highly relevancy. Here's an example. Let's say we have a Bitcoin beginners' website and we want to target the following KW:
how to buy bitcoins in the US
how to mine bitcoin
bitcoin mining rigs
best bitcoin mining rigs
bitcoin wallet comparison
bitcoin wallets review
bitcoin mining guide
buy bitcoins with credit card
Assuming these were the only KWs I thought were relevant (in reality you should have a much bigger list), I will now group these KWs into ad groups:
Ad group #1 - buying bitcoins:
how to buy bitcoins in the US
buy bitcoins with credit card
Ad group #2 - mining guides:
how to mine bitcoin
bitcoin mining guide
Ad group #3 - mining equipment:
bitcoin mining rigs
best bitcoin mining rigs
Ad group #4 - bitcoin wallets
bitcoin wallet comparison
bitcoin wallets review
Of course I will also add a negative KW ad group later on as well. Once you have your ad groups grouped together you can move on to the final stage which is writing your ads.
Chapter 10.3: Crafting An AdWords Ad
The final step will be to create your ad. Fortunately if you went over Chapter 9: Online Marketing Basics, this should be a breeze. Adwords ads are compiled out of the following elements:
Title - 25 characters, usually it's best to have your KW show up in your title (I'll show you how in a second).
Description line #1 - 35 characters, usually will have you benefit written here.
Description line #2 - 35 characters, will either complete the benefit from the first line or state a feature + call to action.
Display URL - 35 characters, this can be used to further covey your message. Since this is only the display URL you can add words to your domain to make it seem more relevant.
Destination URL - The URL which the ad actually leads to (can be different than the display URL).
Cap each word - if you take a look at the first ad shown above you'll see that each word is capped. This is a known technique to get more visibility on your ads.
Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) in your headline - remember how I told you it was best if your KW showed in your ad's title? Well that's done through the use of DKI. DKI is simply a way of telling Google to insert your KW inside your ad. If the KW doesn't fit since it's too long, a default KW will show up instead. In order to use DKI in your headline insert this text into your headline: {Keyword: default keyword}
Make sure to change "default keyword" to whatever default you want to show up if the keyword which actives the ad doesn't fit (i.e. it's more than 25 characters). Also notice how I wrote Keyword with the K and W capped. That will take care of capping the first letter of each word in your headline like we talked about before.
Use numbers or signs - If you can enter numbers or sign like %, # or @ in your ad it will usually make it stand out and get better CTR. See how the ad shown on top used the ® sign?
Chapter 10.4: Setting Up A Campaign
Once you've created your KW list, grouped it in to ad groups and wrote your ads you can start your Adwords campaign.
Go into Google Adwords,open an account and set up your campaign. The process is pretty straight forward but there are a few things to keep in mind.
Create a different campaign for each product/country
I highly recommend creating different campaigns for each product or country. It will help you understand your statistics better and also allow for better optimization later on.
Create a campaign for the search network only
When starting your first campaign, make sure to choose "search network only". This will prevent you from running on the display network. If you forget to do so you risk showing up on the display network as well and getting a much lower CTR and a less targeted audience.
Setting a daily budget
Adwords lets you choose a daily budget that once you reach it, your ads will not be shown. Make sure to figure out how much you are willing to spend monthly and just divide it by 30.
Deciding on a max CPC
One of the most intriguing questions is how to decide your max CPC. One option would be to calculate it backwards from your product's break even cost. Here's an example:
Your make $40 for each user that buys your product. If on average 2 out of 100 (2%) people buy your product this means you can pay 40*2/100= $0.8 per click.
Think about it this way - if 100 people got to your website with a $0.8 CPC you would spend $80 on advertising and earn $80 in revenue, meaning you would break even.
So you can start out with your break even bid and then optimize according to your results. Now you know that if you end up paying more than $0.8 per click you're probably losing money.
Another option would be to just give a super high bid so you'll reach the 1st place and boost your CTR and then tone it down a bit after you get some initial stats. The risk in this method is that you may end up paying a lot of money. Having said that this method will boost your QS the fastest since you'll have high CTR from the get to.
The last option would be to use what the Adwords system or the KW planner tell you is the appropriate bid. I generally don't like this option since they seem to be very incorrect most of the times.
Dos and Don'ts of Launching a Campaign
Once the campaign is airborne there are a few rules you must follow.
Do check the initial QS of your KWs
Go into your KWs tab and add the QS column by clicking on "columns"->"modify columns" and then selecting Quality Score from the "Attributes" section. Don't forget to click "apply" at the bottom.
Your initial QS should be somewhere between 3 and 8. If it’s more than that - great job. If it’s less, you probably did something wrong. Perhaps your KWs aren’t related to your ad or to your landing page.
Do check that your ads are showing up
Do check that your ads are showing up through the use of the Google Ad preview toolwhich was demonstrated on Chapter 2. Make sure to set the tool to your campaign geo settings and then just type in one of your KWs to see which ads are showing up. If your ads aren't showing you may have done something wrong.
Do check that all of your KWs are active
Do check that all of your KWs are active by going over to the Keywords tab and scanning the "Status" column. In the example below my KWs aren't active since my campaign is paused.
Sometimes you'll find that your KWs aren't active since they don't have enough search volume (nothing you can do about that) or that the bid you gave them is too low (in which you can increase the bid only for those KWs).
Do not check the campaign every five minutes
Do not check the campaign every five minutes; it's not good for your health. Trust me, I've been there. After you finish the preliminary checks that we just talked about you can come back to the campaign after 24 hours and see what happened.
Do not make changes before 48 hours have passed
Do not make changes before 48 hours have passed since usually you will not have enough data to make any wise changes. Most changes done in this manner are just impulse changes driven by fear and not actual reason.
Do not click on your own ads to bump up your CTR
Do not click on your own ads to bump up your CTR. Google knows how to find you and you will get banned.
Chapter 10.5: Setting Up Conversion Tracking
The last thing you'll want to do is set up conversion tracking so you can see who actually bought your product, signed up for your newsletter or took any other action you decide is worth tracking. Conversion tracking is done by implementing a small piece of code on the thank you page of the required action.
If, for example, I want to create a conversion every time a customer bought my eBook, I'd put my conversion code on the "thank you for your purchase" page on my site.
Choose "conversions" under "tools" in your Adwords admin panel. Click "+ conversion". Follow the instructions in Adwords until you get a snippet of code which is your conversion tracking code. You will then need to paste this code inside the page you'd like to track.
Since this part is a bit technical you can always use a Fiverr freelancer to do this for you for a few extra bucks. Once implemented you'll also be able to track which KWs are the most converting ones and focus on them instead of low converting KWs.
Chapter 10.6: Bitcoin-related AdWords Hacks
I use to run Adwords campaign for 99Bitcoins for about a year. I stopped when I realized that my Return Over Investment (ROI) wasn't positive, or in other words, I was losing money. But what I can tell you from the time I did run these campaigns is this:
Using DKI in your headline gives you an advantage over your competitors. Since most Bitcoin advertisers don't use it, it makes your ad stand out from the crowd.
Try to go for the long tail KWs that are laser-targeted for your audience. The short tail KWs are less effective and too expensive anyway.
Focus on different countries with dedicated campaigns. When I was advertising for KWs like "buy bitcoin with a credit card" I saw huge differences between countries like the US and the UK. find out where is the most profitable country for you by creating low budget tests for each country.
Use typos to expand you KW list. Amazingly enough one of the most effective KWs I bid on was "but bitcoin with PayPal". Since it's a common typo (the "t" is close to the "y") a lot of people were searching this KW on Google.
Homework: Create An AdWords Campaign
Pretty obvious homework I guess. But I want to break it down for you so it's easier to wrap your head around it:
- Conduct KW research and come up with at least 100 KWs for your campaign, including negative KWs.
- Group your KWs into Adgroups. Each Adgroup should contain no more than 20 KWs.
- Write an ad for each ad group.
- Calculate your max CPC through your breakeven point.
- Open a Google Adwords account and set up your first campaign.
- Set up conversion tracking for your campaign.
One more thing...
You may ask yourself, "Why am I teaching you how to pay for users before teaching you how to get users for free?" I mean that's what everyone is interested it right? The guerrilla tactics that don't cost a dime.
From my experience, it's much better to start off with paid advertising and only then move on to organic advertising. The reason is because organic advertising like SEO take a lot of time to come into effect, so you want to make sure you're targeting the right keywords. So start off with AdWords, find the most converting KWs and then move on to target these KW through SEO.
