Mesh Marketer

AdWords Second Stage

January 9, 2010 by mm

Google AdWords Sec­ond Stage is the stage between wildly fluc­tu­at­ing results and the achieve­ment of the over­all goals you will need to move into the main­te­nance phase of Google AdWords: Third Stage.

By now you have iden­ti­fied most of your key­words and you have ads that work, but you also have tons and tons of key­words that don’t work and some ads that don’t work at all.

The key to get­ting through this stage is prov­ing that the key­words and ads that you are using are going to give you long-term sta­bil­ity. And, just for the record, Google does throw every­one into a tail­spin with regards to AdWords every once in a while. Those “sta­ble results” are gone overnight and peo­ple who have been count­ing on Google AdWords for year for their rent/mortgage are sud­denly freaked out and scram­bling to get back out of AdWords First Stage into Sec­ond Stage and then back into Third Stage as soon as pos­si­ble. Over the years, Google has made it harder and harder to get in and stay highly prof­itable because there has become so much com­pe­ti­tion from legit­i­mate com­pa­nies as well as scam­mers and get-rich-quick types.

Remem­ber your goal here is to reach the three over­all goals for Google AdWords success.

The Three Over­all Goals of a Suc­cess­ful Google AdWords Campaign:

1. Your Click-Through-Rate is over 1% for all of your keywords.
2. Your Qual­ity Score is 7 and above on all keywords.
3. All of your ads together in each Ad Groups have over 1% CTR.

Basi­cally, you’re going to be bring­ing your key­words with a CTR below 1% to over 1%. This is done by work­ing some SEO on your pages so that those key­words are a bet­ter match for the pages that they are linked to through your ad.

Next, you are going to elim­i­nate all of your key­words that are below 7 (though it is pos­si­ble that you can keep the ones that are either at 5 or 6 but you need to drop all the ones below 5). For those that are at 5 or 6, again you will need to focus on the SEO to bring up the qual­ity score.

The major ben­e­fit of hav­ing a higher qual­ity score is that the cost of your key­words will go down. If you have a key­word that has a key­word qual­ity score of 10 then you will have a very inex­pen­sive key­word to use. It is really ideal to have it this way. So, how do you get a key­word qual­ity score of 10? Well, just get linked by a high-traffic web­site, of course! The rea­son why the ad costs less is because if you DO have a key­word linked from a high-traffic site then you should be at the top of Google’s organic search results (mean­ing the unpaid search results). You could just turn off Google AdWords if all of your key­words that you rely on are at a 10. How­ever, peo­ple gen­er­ally don’t have con­trol over this.

The last thing that needs to be done is to have at least two ads that, when com­bined, pro­duce an aver­age CTR of over 1%. This can only be done by writ­ing some good ads and I will post a sep­a­rate arti­cle on this later. And regard­ing writ­ing good ads, con­sider that most ads that are effec­tive are ones that really grab people’s atten­tion; so it’d be a good idea to con­sider the following:

1. It’s OK to be funny.
2. It’s OK to be cute.
3. The only way to know a good ad is to test it.

Part I: Demys­ti­fy­ing Google AdWords
Part II: AdWords First Stage
Part III: AdWords Sec­ond Stage
Part IV: AdWords Third Stage

If you have any ques­tions or com­ments, please leave them here and I will be happy to respond.