One of the most common mistakes I see business owners make in regards to PPC, or more specifically, Google Adwords campaigns, is trying to catch everything with the same generic ads and landing pages. If you have multiple services that people search for, it serves you better to create a process through adgroups to match the keyword concept straight through from search to the landing page. This not only results in more conversions, as searchers respond better when seeing exactly what they want through the process, but it also leads to higher quality scores for your own advertising, which leads to lower costs per click (CPC). Google bases the quality score on providing a better user experience because this is better for the searcher and for the advertiser. The most effective way to succeed in paid search is to match concepts as completely as possible.
What Not To Do With Adwords
Though it is less common, primarily because it leads to a lot of wasted budget, I still regularly see people using broad match searches to try to cover anything anyone wants to search for and match it to a generic ad, and then send them to the homepage.
For example, here is a way a florist may not do it correctly:
Search Phrase: Romantic bouquets
Ad Headline: Jones Florists
Landing Page: Generic Florist Homepage
The searcher doesn’t get to see what they are looking for. You are making them do all the work, and in the days of very short attention span, they are more likely to click back to Google than to find the romantic bouquets on your site. They know the next, better result in Google, will take them right where they want to go.
What To Do With Adwords
You will be surprised at how much more successful you will be just by matching the concept all the way through the process. It takes more work to set up, and constantly monitoring your keywords to see whne you may want to expand and make even more specific adgroups, but matching the searcher’s thoughts always works better and makes your money work better for you.
The florist would likely improve sales significantly with this approach:
Search Phrase: Romantic bouquets
Ad Headline: Romantic Bouquets from Jones Florists
Landing Page: The specific product page showing romantic bouquets.
Maintain the Keyword Concept Through The Process
With this in mind, every Adwords campaign should have multiple adgroups, and it should probably keep growing and growing. You may even find that you want to make ads that match “Best romantic bouquets” searches or “organic romantic bouquets”. It just keeps getting more and more specific, and the better you can match them and show them that you have exactly what they are looking for, the better you are going to do. Just think that you should not only build an adgroup for each of your services that you advertise for, but for every individual concept that someone might search you for. Now I realize that you may not have a landing page for every concept, but at least match it as closely as you can. Ads are easy to write, while pages are a little tougher to create, and can get you in trouble in the SEO world, if you create a lot of duplicative content and don’t tag it properly.
If you need help with any of this or to get started with Google Adwords, I am a Google Certified Partner, and have been managing campaigns for people for over a decade, from small businesses to national and international organizations. We know what works and what doesn’t.
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