Making the best use of Google Adwords

Shanfeng ChengFlashPeak Inc.

FlashPeak Inc. specializes in web browser development.

We have developed a few browsers over the years. Slimjet Web Browser (风之影浏览器 ,

http://www.slimjet.com） is a one-year-old product and our rising star (30000+ DAU globally). It is built on top of the Chromium project, offering more features and customizability out of the box than other big-name browsers.

About FlashPeak Inc.

The time of making easy money with Adwords has long gone.

90% of the traffic goes to 10% of the advertisers.

Big companies usually have dedicated teams which optimize their Adwords campaigns everyday. They also have much deeper pockets with startups or one-man workshops like us.

Either stay away from Adwords completely or expect to spend more time and work into more details than the big guys.

Competition on Adwords is hotter than ever

Start with a simple test campaign. Pick a few core keywords that is tightly

related to your business. Set a conversion goal and a reasonable bid

amount. Let it run a week. Get the cost per

conversion. Compare it against your profit per conversion.

If the cost is more than three times the profit you make from each conversion, you need optimize other sides of your business first before considering adwords.

Is Adwords for you?

Create an adwords account. You don’t have to run any ads.

Pull up keyword planner. Select “Find New Keywords”

Enter your product or service, your landing page, targeted location and language.

Select “Get Ideas”

Find the right set of keywords to target

Use negative keywords to screen out traffic you don’t want.

Excludes traffic that won’t convert to your target goal. For example, if you are selling a product, you can use the word “free” to exclude people who have no interest in paying. We are making desktop browser only, I would add the words “mobile”, “android” or “iOS” as negative keywords.

Excludes keyword that you already rank on the top positions organically to avoid unnecessary expense. Most notably, exclude the name of your business and product. For example, I would exclude “FlashPeak” and “Slimjet”.

Negative keywords

The ideal goal is to pick keywords with high search volume and low competition, i.e., suggested bids. However, normally, you can find very few such ideal keywords.

Focus on high relevancy keywords with moderate volume and low competition.

Bid on your competitor’s brand name before they claim it as proprietary.

Don’t completely believe the suggested bids from Google. Google often gives ridiculous estimates. If you spot a high quality keyword, always try it out despite high suggested bid.

How to pick good keywords

Type of matches

Match type Special symbolExample keyword Ads may show on searches that

Example searches

Broad match none women's hats include misspellings, synonyms, related searches, and other relevant variations

buy ladies hats

Broad match modifier

+keyword +women's +hats contain the modified term (or close variations, but not synonyms), in any order

hats for women

Phrase match "keyword" "women's hats" are a phrase, and close variations of that phrase buy women's hats

Exact match [keyword] [women's hats] are an exact term and close variations of that exact term

women's hats

Negative match -keyword -women are searches without the term baseball hats

Opera (165000) bad keyword since it doesn’t necessarily mean the opera browser.

Opera web browser (5400,$0.5)good choice. Competitor’s brand name. $0.5 suggested bid

Browser (7400). Bad keyword, too generic. Doesn’t indicate exactly what the user is searching for. Might result in low conversion.

Fastest web browser (1600, $5). High relevancy keyword. I tried it anyway and got some conversions. Sometimes Google gives ridiculous estimates on suggested bids.

Examples of Good keywords and Bad keywords

Slimjet offers the following features Form filler Ad blocker Web page translation High speed download manager Social network integration

Get more keywords based on your product features

Ad blocker, Adblock, Adblock Plus, uBlock Password manager (estimate priced too

high) Download manager, Internet Download

Manager. Form filler, auto fill Page translator, translate this page

Keywords targeting specific features

Check what your competitors are bidding on Ask your customers Use some third-party keyword discovery

tools (SpyFu, AdGooroo, Wordstream, Wordtracker, etc)

Use search terms report in Adwords system.

How to dig more keywords

HeadlineDisplay URLFirst line of your adSecond line of your adActual URL

Writing the Perfect Ad Copy

Separate closely-related keywords into different ad groups.

Write an ad copy for each keyword group to accurately target the set of keywords in the ad group.

The headline of the ad copy should be closely related to the keywords people are searching for.

You can use the {Keyword} macro to exactly match the keywords people are searching for. However, if the keyword is a competitor’s brand name, make sure you state it clearly that you are not distributing competitor’s product. Otherwise, you might waste money on people not open to alternative solutions.

Writing the Perfect Ad Copy

On the first line of the description, mention a BENEFIT of your product or service that is most appealing to your customers.

On the second line of the description, mention the most relevant features of your product which help create the above-mentioned benefit.

In the display url, embed the keywords people are searching for to maximize the relevancy and quality score of the ad.

In the destination url, if you are directing to a common home page, add a unique tracking parameter so that you can do conversion analysis on your side.

Writing the Perfect Ad Copy

An ad should be first about your customer, then about your product. Talk about their problems and how you can solve them.

You are not actually selling a product. You are selling a better version of the customers themselves.

Write Creative Ads

Texas Entrepreneurship SchoolBorn. School. Job. Marriage. HouseKids. Retire. Want More out of Life?

Writing the Perfect Ad Copy – Example 1

Writing the Perfect Ad Copy – Example 2

Assume we are bidding on the keyword “ad blocker”, which of the following two ad copies is better?

Compare two ad copies

Efficient Ad BlockerBlock Annoying Ads with built-in Ad Blocker in Slimjet Web Browser

Slimjet Web BrowserDownload Slimjet Web Browser Now to Block all the Annoying Ads

Always run two ad copies in parallel in each ad group with significant number of impressions.

Let Google optimize for lowest conversion cost by automatically rotating the two ad copies. Let it run for about a week.

After a week, delete the ad copy that is not receiving the majority of the impressions as decided by Google.

After that, create another ad copy trying to beat the current ad copy. Repeat the same optimization process.

Optimize Ad Copy using automatic Ad Rotation

Adwords performance and CPC depends a lot of the running history of the campaign and ad group. It tries to be smart but sometimes too smart for its own good.

You might get totally different CPC for the same keywords and ad copy in two different campaigns and ad groups.

If you have a highly optimized campaign or ad group that’s been running for a long time, don’t pause or delete it carelessly. Instead, set it on a low daily budget if you don’t spend money on it for a while. Otherwise, you might lose the additional score earned through the long running history.

The weight of history in the Adwords system

Don’t direct all the ads to your home page. Design dedicated landing page with highly

targeted content for each keyword group with significant impressions. This takes a lot of time but will be worth it in the long term.

When you design the landing page, design it for human audience and maximum conversion rate. That’s quite different from designing a page for best search engine ranking.

Do split testing on different versions of landing page for best conversion.

Optimize your landing page

Set up conversion goals on your websites by copying generated javascript from your adwords account into your web pages.

Set proper type of conversion, unique conversions or all conversions. If the goal is download/installation, set it to unique. If it’s sales/order, set it to all conversions.

Use your own tracking mechanism if necessary to track until the very last phase of the sales transaction to get accurate cost per conversion. Compare it against conversion cost estimated by Adwords system.

Optimize your campaign/ad group for minimum cost per conversion instead of minimum cost per clicks.

Set up conversion goals

Separate different keyword groups into different ad groups.

Separate any high-impression keyword into a different group for further optimization.

Create different campaigns for different ad networks (search, search partners and display network).

Create different campaigns for different geographic locations.

Design separate optimized landing page for each keyword group.

The principle of Separate and Optimize

Every loop of the customer acquisition chain should be optimized to the bone so that you can afford to bid as many keywords as possible to get maximum traffic without constantly bleeding money.1. Increase revenue per sale or download of your

product/service.2. Improve the conversion ratio of your entire websites.3. Optimize your landing page4. Optimize your ad copy5. Select the best keywords

Compare your business vs. your competitors and find out which loop you are lagging behind and find ways to improve that.

The Big Picture beyond Adwords