Hubspot Google AdWords PDF
Hubspot Google AdWords PDF
Hubspot Google AdWords PDF
How to Use
Google
AdWords
A Beginner’s Guide
to PPC Advertising
Ads
How to Use Google AdWords
offers.hubspot.com/google-adwords-ppc Your Ad Here
Learn how to use Google AdWords to generate leads and customers google.com/AdWords
Learn how to use Google AdWords to
generate leads and customers
HubSpot | How to Use Google AdWords 1
Table of Contents
T his guide is designed to provide you with a basic introduction to paid search and to give you a fundamental
understanding of how to use paid search to drive more leads and customers for your business. We’ll start off by
explaining what paid search is and how it differs from organic search. Then we’ll talk about the different ways you
can use paid search, followed by how paid search works, some campaign strategy discussion, and finally, how to
measure the effectiveness of your campaign with metrics.
A quick note: There are many search engines that support paid search campaigns. For the purposes of this ebook,
however, we are going to focus mainly on Google and its paid search program, Google AdWords. If you have a
solid understanding of Google AdWords, you’ll be in a good position to understand how the other search engines
work, since they have set themselves up in a similar fashion.
Organic and paid listings both appear on the search engine, but they are displayed in different locations on the
page. On the next page, you’ll see a diagram of a search engine results page that highlights the positioning of the
paid links vs. the organic search results. According to HubSpot data, most searchers click on the organic results –
in fact, over 70% of people click on the organic search results, while only 30% are likely to click on the paid links.
So does that mean you shouldn’t bother with paid search? No, it doesn’t! Paid search is a great option if you are
not ranking well in the search engines with organic search alone. It is an extremely powerful tool and a valuable
asset for enhancing your company’s online presence. So let’s dive in and find out how paid search can help your
business.
Now that you have a fundamental understanding of what paid search is, let’s talk about how you should use it.
Note the emphasis on how you should use it, not how can you use it. The reason for this important distinction is
that all too often, companies -- small businesses especially -- think that if they just pay to be on a search engine,
they don’t have to invest time and resources in search engine optimization to rank higher organically.
It’s important to make clear that paid search is not a replacement for anything, but should instead be used to
complement other inbound marketing strategies. Paid online advertising takes a lot of time and effort, a lot of
resources, and a lot of management, and it’s something you really need to invest in.
Let’s take a look at some of the useful things you can do with paid search.
Paid search is a great way to do landing page A/B testing because it allows you to direct traffic to your choice of
pages, split this traffic to different pages, and ultimately find the pages that convert at the highest rate.
Below is a sample Search Terms report. On the left hand side is the list of keywords. The ones that show the green
‘Added’ box next to them are the ones that are already in this paid search account.
Now, this high conversion rate tells me not only that I should be buying this keyword, but also that maybe I
should consider using this keyword for search engine optimization as well. Maybe I should make a landing page
geared toward this keyword, or an offer built around this keyword. You should use the information in these Search
Terms reports, and also in Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner, to discover new keywords that will help you
further optimize all of your SEM campaigns. For more information on keyword research, check out this blog post:
How to Do Keyword Research for SEO: A Beginner’s Guide.
If you do a little research, you’ll find that ‘pet food’ is also a big keyword in this space, and PetSmart ranks far
below the fold for it. On top of that, they’re not running a paid search campaign with Google AdWords either.
But their competitor, Petco, does have a paid search campaign, and so their ad appears on the results page, while
PetSmart does not. So this is a sample instance where running a paid search campaign makes a lot of sense.
For instance, here we have the search term ‘inbound marketing’. You’ll see that there’s an organic search listing
for HubSpot that ranks second on the page (just after Wikipedia), but we’re also buying the keyword ‘inbound
marketing,’ which displays our paid search ad for it. So now we have that natural search ad, the paid one, and,
if you scroll down the page, you’ll find yet another organic search listing for HubSpot via SlideShare. This
widespread coverage on the search engine results page for “inbound marketing” helps to establish HubSpot as an
authoritative figure for inbound marketing and drives more traffic to our pages.
The good news is – you can do this for your business as well! Take the opportunity to establish your company as a
leader in your industry by increasing your presence on search engines with paid search campaigns.
Now that you have some ideas for how to make good use of them, let’s take a closer look at how paid search
campaigns work.
Note: There is the option to pay per thousand impressions (CPM) with Google, but the only case where this would
be a better choice than PPC would be for a “share of voice” campaign, which is when you’re just trying to spread
awareness of your brand. For the purposes of paid search, however, especially if you’re just starting out, PPC is the
better option.
So what determines how much you pay per click? Google uses an auction-style bid to set their prices. For any
given keyword, you have the top bidder – let’s say they bid $5 for someone to click on their ad. Then you have the
next highest bidder who values a click at $4.50, another at $3.75, another at $3.00, and so on, all the way down to
the last person who says that they value a click on their ad for that keyword at, let’s say, $2.25.
Now, these are not the prices you actually pay for each click. Instead, the lowest of these bids is used as the price
for the least valuable (least visible) spot on the results page, and then each spot going up in value (more visible
placements) is priced at an incremental dollar value higher (we’ll use a $.05 incremental bid for this example). So
in this case, the top bidder ends up paying only $2.50 per click, even though they bid at $5.00.
$2.50
$2.40
$2.45 $2.35
$2.30
$2.25
Google’s motivation for including quality score in the evaluation of each keyword is to provide an optimal user
experience for their searchers. It used to be that ad placement was determined solely by bids, but then someone
could easily bid on “toothbrushes” when they were really selling lawn mowers. Google introduced quality score
to make sure that the ads they were displaying were always relevant to the search terms, and to keep their
advertisers in check.
So how does it work? Quality score is on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest rating and 10 being the highest.
What this means is that if your competitor bids on a keyword at $5 and has a quality score of 4, and you bid on
that same keyword at only $3 but you have a quality score of 7, Google may give you the top position for the price
you bid because your ad is more relevant. It makes more sense to serve your ad because its higher relevancy
makes it more likely that viewers will click on it.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Quality score can also help you determine what keywords are cost-efficient for you to use. Let’s say, for example,
that you have a site about fitness tips and you bid on the keyword “nutrition”. If you find that you have a low
quality score, it may indicate that the content on your site is not relevant enough to compete in that space, and it’s
not a cost-efficient channel for you. You can use this information to optimize your choice of keywords.
If you want to set yourself up for a successful PPC campaign, show Google how tight you can make the
relationships between the keywords you’re bidding on, the ad copy that you’re displaying, and the landing pages
you’re directing to. (We’ll discuss strategy for optimizing each of these in the next section.) If you can do this,
Google will see that you really know what you’re doing, and they’ll be far more likely to put your ad in that top
position for the least amount of money possible.
Let’s say, for instance, someone searches for the term “red men’s tennis shoes with Velcro.” A keyword set to exact
match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword, with the words in that exact order.
So, for example, if I have the keyword “red men’s tennis shoes” on exact match, and someone searches for “red
men’s tennis shoes with Velcro,” my ad will not be displayed, since there were other words included, making it not
an exact match. My ad would only be displayed if the search query was exactly “red men’s tennis shoes.” Exact
match keywords are surrounded in brackets, such as:
Keyword Strategy
So you have these keyword match types that you know can somehow help you optimize your campaign strategy
– but how do you know which ones to use and when? There are multiple strategies for setting match types, and
there is no one correct solution. We’ll discuss some general practices, but keep in mind that you’ll have to check
out your own performance metrics to determine what’s working for your campaign and what isn’t.
The value of setting keywords to exact match is that you can target a very specific search audience. However, if
you’re only bidding on exact match keywords, you’ve very narrowly defined your target, which sharply limits your
reach, so chances are you’re not going to get a lot of traffic. This is because there’s no way to know exactly what
terms people are going to search for, and if you try to guess at a list of exact keywords, even if it’s a long list, you’ll
likely be missing out on tons of potential leads and customers that are using different search terms.
To avoid this issue, a popular strategy is to start with all keywords set to broad match, which opens up the
floodgates to traffic. Now, a high volume of traffic may be a good thing, but you have to make sure that it is
qualified traffic. In other words, say, for example, someone searches for “Velcro” and your ad for “red men’s tennis
shoes with Velcro” appears. The viewer may click on your ad, but because the search term that sent him to it
was so general and vague, the likelihood that he will convert to a lead on your offer is significantly lower. This is
because the likelihood that he was actually looking for red men’s tennis shoes with Velcro is much lower than it
would be for someone who searched for that term, or something closer to that term.
Yet, many people are easily misled by the quantity of the traffic they drive with broad match keywords, and they
don’t look at the reporting to evaluate quality. Oftentimes, they’re ranking on totally irrelevant keywords and
driving unqualified traffic from them, which just wastes their money.
This is why it’s extremely important, if you set your keywords to broad match, to closely monitor what search
queries are coming through. Don’t forget, you can use negative match to add negative keywords when necessary.
A good keyword strategy is to use broad match and phrase match to drive traffic, then use the Search Terms
report to find the keywords that convert well and make sense for your business, and set those to exact match,
because they’ve been proven to work.
The best thing to do to figure out your match type strategy is to just keep testing. Use your performance metrics to
optimize your keywords, which could include adding and deleting keywords or changing their match types. It’s an
ongoing process. Keyword performance will change over time, and your campaign strategy should change with it.
I can do this by creating a grouping of related keywords in what is called an “ad group.” So let’s say I have the
keywords “tennis shoes,” “best tennis shoes,” and “shoes for tennis.” I can create a “Tennis Shoes” ad group, put
those keywords in the ad group, and create an ad that is closely targeted to those keywords. Then if my company
also sells other kinds of shoes, I can set up more ad groups, maybe for “Walking Shoes” or “Running Shoes.”
Let’s say my company also sells shirts, though. Google lets you structure your account on one more level as well,
and that is by “campaign.” So I can take all of my ad groups for shoes and put them in a “Shoes” campaign, then
create another campaign for “Shirts,” with its own ad groups, keywords, and ads.
It’s important that you structure your account in such a way that your keywords and your ad copy are tightly
woven together. Then you can use your ad groups and your campaigns to keep them nicely bucketed together and
better organized.
What if all that money is spent in only an hour or two? After all, if you have highly relevant or very popular
keywords, you do run the risk of blowing through your budget quickly. Well, Google also offers a feature that
allows you to request that your budget be spread out throughout the entire day. This works well for brands that
want to establish a presence throughout the day.
The daily budget cap is certainly a reassuring feature, especially for those who are just starting out with paid
search. You can set a low budget when you get started, slowly begin measuring success and lead quality, and try
your hand at optimizing your campaign before you really invest a lot of money in it.
When it comes to creating your ad, there is essentially a formula for it, since Google limits the number of
characters you can use. The four numbers you need to remember are: 25, 35, 35, 35.
You have 25 characters for the title or headline, which is displayed in blue text as the first line of the ad. Then you
have 255 characters (35 shown) for the display URL (also called the “vanity URL”), which is not the actual URL
to which your ad directs viewers, but is simply for display purposes. For example, if my ad is about polo shirts, I
could set the display URL to be www.acme.com/polo-shirts, even if this isn’t the site to which I’m redirecting. The
URL to which you actually direct clicks to your ad is called the “destination URL.” These will often be longer and
may contain tracking codes, which makes them messier – so of course, you wouldn’t want these displayed in your
ads anyway.
Then you have two description lines of 35 characters each. You’ll notice in the sample ad above that there are
actually a few incentives there. The first line informs viewers that they can shop for polo shirts, a more general
piece of information, whereas the second line is a call to action for a special offer -- 25% off and free shipping.
This is the typical format of a paid search ad, but Google has been doing a lot of testing, so if your ad is displayed
at the top of the search results, it may look more like the one below. Here, Google consolidates the title, URL, and
the first description line into a banner format.
Whichever ad structure you’re working with, make sure you maximize use of the limited number of characters
you’re given, and make your ad as effective as possible.
There are four basic metrics that are important for paid search: impressions, clicks, conversions, and spend.
An impression is a single instance of your ad being displayed when someone types in the search keyword for it.
So you can consider the number of impressions to be roughly the number of people who look at your ad, or at
least the number of viewers to whom the ad is served.
A click is an instance of a viewer actually clicking on your ad once it has been displayed. This is distinct from
the number of impressions because it requires that the viewer actually clicks on your ad, not just that your ad is
displayed.
A conversion is an instance of a viewer that saw your ad, clicked on it, and took the action you intended for them
to take once they got to your landing page. This action could be downloading an offer, purchasing your product,
etc. When you set up your account, you put some tracking code on your website that lets Google know when
someone has completed an offer or bought something, so they can keep track of conversions.
Spend is simply the amount of money that you have spent on your campaign so far.
Click Through Rate (commonly abbreviated as CTR) is the percentage of impressions that turn into clicks. The
more this percentage goes up, the more efficient your campaign is.
CTR = Clicks/Impressions
CPC = Spend/Clicks
Cost Per Acquisition (or CPA) is the amount of money you’re spending on each conversion. You can find the
average CPA by dividing the total spend by the total number of conversions. Again, this is a cost metric, so you
want to keep lowering this number.
CPA = Spend/Conversions
Just remember – the higher your percentage metrics and the lower your cost metrics, the more efficient your
campaign will be. It’s a good practice to set goals for your campaign performance in terms of these metrics. As you
continue optimizing your keywords, ads, and account structure, monitor these metrics closely and use them to
measure the performance of your campaign as you work toward reaching your goals.
Conclusion
After reading this ebook, you should have a solid understanding of how paid search works, and a strong
foundation to create and manage a paid search campaign for your business. Here are a few important takeaways
to remember:
Next Step:
Boost Your PPC Game.
Get a Demo of HubSpot’s
Ads Product
http://offers.hubspot.
com/ads-demo