Mesh Marketer

AdWords First Stage

January 9, 2010 by mm

Google AdWords First Stage is char­ac­ter­ized by either set­ting up your Google AdWords account cam­paigns and then pop­u­lat­ing them with ads and key­words or tran­si­tion­ing from some­one else’s man­age­ment of the AdWords account (whether that is your tran­si­tion­ing it to some­one else or tran­si­tion­ing from one expert to another).

The thing you should know about this stage is that it is often char­ac­ter­ized by wild swings in effec­tive­ness. This is unavoid­able because there are so many vari­ables in an AdWords that just one vari­able can scut­tle what oth­er­wise seemed like a good start. Some­times these sim­ple set­tings and changes can cause other vari­ables to not func­tion cor­rectly and it’s easy to think that the thing to change isn’t what it seems to be.

For exam­ple, when you are set­ting up your first cam­paign, you may opt to include the Google Con­tent Net­work in addi­tion to Google Search for use with your key­words and ads. How will you know that the prob­lem is not with your ads or your key­words until you have had enough time to eval­u­ate them? Per­haps the prob­lem is with the your bids being too low or your daily bud­get not being high enough? What if the prob­lem is that you have iso­lated your searches to a geo­graph­i­cal area and you are pay­ing for ads being shown around the world which are use­less to you? How is it pos­si­ble to know which prob­lem is the true prob­lem and not just “pos­si­bly” the problem?

Google AdWords has two major types of ads: Google Search and Google Con­tent Net­work. Google Search is for plac­ing your ads on the top and left of Google Search results. Google Con­tent Net­work is for contexturally-placed ads on web pages such as online mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers and blogs.

It’s impor­tant to begin with know­ing two impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions. Do peo­ple know who you are or not? This will deter­mine whether or not you should be using the Google Con­tent Net­work. With it, you are pay­ing for essen­tially bill­board ads on the free­way. Peo­ple are read­ing an online mag­a­zine, news­pa­per or blog and your ad is there just as if you were cruis­ing down the road and you either notice it or you don’t. Your goal may be only to expose peo­ple to who you are and that’s how Google Con­tent Net­work is best uti­lized. For this rea­son, you aren’t really expect­ing a direct sale to hap­pen with your bill­board. You are just build­ing aware­ness of your prod­uct like a movie that is about to come to the­aters; you aren’t sell­ing the ticket today but you are plant­ing the seed for a pur­chase to hap­pen on pre­miere day.

If your goal is not to get peo­ple to know who you are alone, then you should use Google Search and pos­si­bly add the Google Con­tent Net­work. You may not want to use the Google Con­tent Net­work at all if it is cost­ing you too much to put up those bill­boards if they aren’t giv­ing you the return you want. You may also want to focus on just Google Search at first until you are very sure which ads and key­words work really well. You can leave the Google Con­tent Net­work for Third Stage if you like; it’s not essen­tial to First Stage or Sec­ond Stage and may intro­duce too many vari­ables in First Stage to clearly under­stand what to leave in and what to throw out.

You know that you are the end of First Stage when you are get­ting enough clicks on a day to day basis where you don’t get a bunch on one day and then 10% of the same num­ber the next day. At a min­i­mum you should get a decent num­ber (let’s say 1,000 or 100 or 10) and then not less than half of that the next day (500/50/5) and then the day after it should either go down by 10% (400/40/4) and then up again or it will stay at that level (400/40/4) or go higher. If you’re sat­is­fied with this level at 400/40/4, then you can count on build­ing that up in AdWords Sec­ond Stage. You should be able to back up to the 1,000/100/10 over the next two to three weeks.