Over the last few days, several people have asked me about Google Adwords and how to run an ad campaign for their blog there.

Adwords is a very complicated beast, and a comprehensive guide is well beyond the scope of this blog, but I thought I’d get together a few tips for those of you who are new to AdWords.

If you’re looking for something more comprehensive, there are many books out there. A quick scan of Amazon reveals that AdWords For Dummies is quite popular and has good reviews.

So, down to the tips:

Fix your site first
First things first - there’s no point advertising your blog if it doesn’t work - or just looks terrible. Before you consider advertising, you might want to move your blog to your own domain and find an attractive template. Make sure your template has space to promote you RSS feed, ad space, and anything else you need. Ask a friend or colleague to look over your blog and give honest feedback - and proof-read everything!

Start small
Ad adwords campaign can easily become very, very big. At one company I worked at recently, we were spending around $1000 a day advertising one site. Occasionally, we’d get a burst of traffic for one reason or another and end up spending twice that.

Set a budget and stick to it
AdWords has a “daily budget” feature, and it’s really important you use this wisely. Spending $10 a day might not seem like much, but can you afford to be spending $4000 a year? Don’t be tempted to increase your daily budget just to get a bit more traffic - at least, not unless you know you can afford it!

Don’t over-bid for keywords
Many people don’t fully understand how AdWords works, new advertisers often end up bidding (and spending) far too much on specific keywords. Depending on the content / niche of your blog, you may have to bid a little more or a little less for specific keywords, but remember, if you bid $1, you may well end up paying $1 per click on your ads.

Use geotargetting
Geotargetting (showing your ads only to people in the countries you specify) is incredibly useful. You might think you want readers from all over the world, but if your budget is low, you can end up only getting clicks from poorer countries where less people are bidding (and hence ads are cheaper). Certain countries also have more click-fraud. Personally, I try to start with a limited set of countries, then expand that slowly over time.

Use the keyword tool
The keyword tool lets you find similar or related keywords to bid on. Sometimes you may only be able to come up with a few keywords to bid on, but they keyword tool will often find hundreds of related keywords. Having a wide selection of keywords in your campaign will get you more clicks, and also allow you to see which variations perform best for you. As an example, I have around 200 keywords in the campaign I’m currently running.

Work out your cost per subscriber
I’ve already talked about subscriber values for my particular niche, so I have a reasonable idea of how much I should be looking to spend on advertising in order to acquire a new subscriber. In marketing terms, this is called the Cost Per Acquisition, and it’s vital to have an idea of this before you start your campaign - otherwise, you’ll just end up throwing money at ads that don’t really achieve anything.

Use several ad variations
Another great feature of AdWords is that you can have as many different versions of your ad running as you like. The system will work out which ad variations perform better and serve those more often. You might be surprised how a small change in wording can affect the click through rate of your ad.

Check your stats daily
This goes hand-in-hand with the ’start small’ and ’set a budget’ tips. Google changes the cost of keywords constantly, depending on several factors, including what other advertisers are doing. The cost of your keywords or the level of traffic you’re getting could very easily double - or half - over night, so keep an eye on things!

Watch your ROI
Your ROI (Return On Investment) is just as important as the cost per click. You might be advertising just to increase the number of subscribers to your site, but you need to keep an eye on how much income those subscribers are bringing in. You might end up getting 100 new subscribers a week, but if those people aren’t actually earning anything, you might want to re-think your strategy.

That’s it for now!

Subscribe to Money Blogger

Share this post on: