How To Get Started With A Successful Google Adwords Campaign

Lessen Your Chances Of Wasted Clicks And Burning Your Money

Before seeking our marketing advice, many clients try their hand at implementing marketing techniques on their own – a Google Adwords campaign being one of the most common. Of course, what they don’t know is that this campaign requires a number of critical steps to yield success. These steps are often overlooked, thus deeming their efforts a failure and leaving a sour taste in their mouth after their experience.

By not setting up a proper campaign, many clients look at Google Adwords as a money burner – when, it reality, it’s quite the money-maker.

Here’s a fun little fact about Adwords that many companies don’t know: the effects can be immediate. You can literally activate your ads and receive a call lead minutes later. Granted, these immediate leads all depend how you accurately set up your account. Fortunately, our clients have experienced great success with their Google Adwords campaigns, and this is thanks to a thorough set-up and a focus on their campaign goals – something that may or may not occur when you have little experience with Adwords.

Below, we’ve outlined some simple steps you can follow when setting up your very own Adwords campaign. These steps can help you set up a campaign which can eliminate the high probability of ‘wasted’ clicks and money loss.

Setting Up Your Campaign

We’ve met our share of clients who already have an Adwords campaign set-up, but it’s pretty much all over the place.

What do I mean by “all over the place”? They set up one campaign and throw in all of their keywords for every service they provide. Let’s look at an example of an Adwords campaign that is deemed to be “all over the place”:

For example, a dentist is looking to set up their own ads campaign. They create a standard copy for their ads which includes the word “dentist” somewhere in the mix, MAYBE their target city and a list of some of the services they offer. The majority, if not all, of their keywords are broad. So, what happens? They burn through their money and miss out on quality leads because they’re making themselves show up for everything.

So, do you setup a proper ppc campaign the right way?

We First Start With Research

Choose Your Focus

We always advise our clients to select one-to-two of their most profitable services (such as higher cost procedures/services and even ones that already yield a high volume of business). Our goal is to focus your budget on what will actually bring money to your practice. By doing this, you’re not stretching yourself too thin across several services that pack less of an impact on your business.

Once you decide which services to focus on, we can move on to keyword research.

Keyword Research and Budget

Adwords provides a great free keyword research tool called the “Keyword Planner”. Within this tool, you have the ability to research new keyword ideas, see the average monthly search of a keyword, keyword competition and bid suggestion.

Here’s how to find the keyword planner tool and how to use it:

Login to your account
Click “Tools” and click “Keyword Planner” in the dropdown
Once the Keyword Planner page opens up click on “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category”

Under the “Your product or service” section, include some keywords which you believe prospects might use to find you (do one service at a time)

Example: emergency dentist, dental emergency, etc

If you have a specific landing page url, add it under the “Your landing page” section. If you do not have one yet, it’s ok– you can leave it blank
Under the “Targeting” you will choose your location

Your location will be the city your dental practice is in – i.e. “Pembroke Pines, FL”
Tip: Make sure to delete the “United States” location that is automatically added, or else the planner will gather data from the entire US instead of your local area

Choose your “Language” (i.e. English)
Click “Get Ideas”

Once you’ve click “Get Ideas”, you will be taken to a new window with a graph and tabs titled “Ad Group Ideas” and “Keyword Ideas”. We put our focus on the “Keyword Ideas” tab to find and evaluate new keywords and then help us determine a budget. A keyword’s average price depends on its competition and–depending on your location–the competition can be very steep or limited.

Once you’ve created your list of keywords and have calculated the average cost per click, you can determine how much money you would like to allocate to your daily budget. If you only want to spend $100 a day and each click averages $10, you will get 10 clicks a day. This money adds up, which is why all of these steps are necessary.

Create A Landing Page That Converts

Now that you’ve done your keyword research and finalized your budget, the next step before setting up and activating your Adwords campaign is to create a landing page that converts.

A landing page is one that you will use to direct prospects to learn more about your product or service. You do not want this to be a general page (like your “Home” page), but one that was specifically created for the one service you are targeting in your campaign. This landing page should include:

A phone number in large font, preferably in the header
A contact form above the fold
An image (or images) that reflect the content on the page or states a bold call-to-action
Your content should include keywords from your research so to improve your ads’ quality score

Tip: Do not overload the page with TOO much content or else you’ll lose your audience. Use bullet points to showcase your main selling points.

Tip #2:: When you create your website, design your core pages to be “PPC ready” in case you plan to use them for an Adwords campaign later in the future.

Setting Up Adwords

Once you have finalized your landing page and budget, you can now move on to setting up your campaign. In this blog, we’ll outline how to set up a “Search Network Only” campaign.

Login to Google Adwords
Click “Campaigns” to add a new “Search Network Only”
Once the new pages loads, under “Type” choose “All Features” and the page will reload again
Once the page has reloaded, change the campaign name

We tend to name them by the account’s respective city and language setting (if more than one). For example, “Pembroke Pines English”

Under “Locations”, select “Let Me Choose” and type in your target city

Example: Pembroke Pines

Under “Bid Strategy” select the option “Enable Enhance CPC”

You can select your preferred bidding strategy – we can advise beginning with “Maximize Clicks” and set your daily budget.

Under “Ad Extensions” always add the following:

“Call” extension–add your phone number
“Location” extension– add your office address (great if you have more than one location)
“Sitelinks” extension– add related pages that your prospect might be interested in and can help you convert them into clients

Example: your “About Us” page; prospects always want to know learn more about the company they might purchase from

Under “Advanced Settings”, select your “Schedule”

This is important because if you do not offer a 24/7 service, then you should schedule your ads to only show during your hours of operation. This protects you from wasting clicks and money

Under “Ad delivery: Ad rotation” select “Optimize: Prefer best performing ads”

Since we will be creating three ads per Ad Group, we want to rotate them to determine which ad performs better (great for A/B testing)

Save and Continue

Creating Your Ad Group

In the next page, you will create your first Ad Group. Each group should be dedicated to one service. For example, some dentists may want to target teeth cleaning services, so you would name the group “Teeth Cleaning”. Within each Ad Group, we will create two ads to rotate and lead each ad back to the same landing page; this is to help determine which copy is captivating your audience more and generating more clicks. This data will help improve your ads when it comes to updating information and testing new theories for even better conversions.

We usually like to title our ads using one of the direct keywords being targeted (for example “Pines Dental Emergency”). One of your lines should also include a call-to-action like “Call Now!”, “Schedule An Appointment Today!” or “Free Consultation” to invite prospects to click on your ad.

Tip: use the ad url as another opportunity to add another targeted keyword phrase (i.e. “dentist.com/pines-emergency-dentist”)

Once your ad is created, scroll down to add your keywords. When adding your keywords, we always suggest adding them as a “phrase match” instead of a “broad match”. For example, “Pembroke Pines Emergency Dentist” and “Pembroke Pines Dental Emergency”.

Broad Match: No punctuation is used and the keyword phrase does not have to be typed in any specific order for your ad to show up. Broad matches can lead to more clicks but possibly less conversions–this is where most clients have burned a lot of money.
“Phrase Match”: Involves using quotations around your keyword phrase. If your keyword phrase is “Pembroke Pines emergency dentist” then your ad will show appear if your visitor types in that phrase in that order (FYI:your ad will show up even if there are extra words before or after the phrase as well).
[Exact Match]: Involves using brackets around your phrase. For example, if your phrase is [Pembroke Pines emergency dentist] then your ad will show up for that exact phrase, (Unlike a phrase match, your ad will not appear if there are other words before or after an exact phrase).

Once you have input your list of keywords, we will add another ad for the same Ad Group. Make sure to add a new call to action and keyword phrases that include your city.

You will repeat this Ad Group process for every service you want to advertise for. Remember, do not mix your services within one Ad Group; each should be separate.

Adding Negative Keywords

This is a step we’ve seen so many clients miss when attempting to launch their own campaign–one that can so easily help refine their campaign and prevent wasted clicks. A negative keyword is a keyword or keyword phrase that you do not want your ad to appear for. So, if a dental practice does not want to appear for anything dental school related (as they do not offer courses for future dentists), they would add negative keywords that include “university”, “college”, “courses”, etc.

You can tackle negative keywords in two ways. You can:

Go through all your campaigns or Ad Groups and add all of these negative keywords one by one, or
You can create “lists” and add them to all of your campaigns in a few simple clicks.

Creating Negative Lists

On your left hand menu, click “Shared Library”
Then click on “Campaign Negative Keywords”
Click “+List” to add your first list
Separate your lists by topic; for this example, we’ll name the list “Educational”
Add words that are related to that topic
Once all negative keywords have been added, click “Save”
Click on your list and then click “Apply to Campaigns” and select all the campaigns you would like to apply this list to

There Are More Tips

Congrats! You’ve just successfully created your own Adwords campaign. There are a number of other PPC tips and tricks that can help you create an even more successful campaign, but we’ve said enough for now.

If you feel that you’re burning way too much money a month with your campaign, then contact us today! We can help you restructure your campaign and offer monthly management to ensure your campaign sees consistent success.

Please Share: