Bad Ads, Good Ads

When we talk about good and bad ads, we are also talking about:

• the keywords that those ads are targeting.
• the landing page of that ad.

A bad ad will be unfocused, using a general keyword list and will probably send traffic to the site's main page. This will first of all hurt the advertiser's CTR, and worse, it will hurt their conversions as well.

And in competitive markets, that means that you will be losing money badly.

Here's an example of a poorly optimized ad (I'm going with a different niche here - insurance);

.. and they'll use the following keywords for this ad.

• auto insurance quote
• auto insurance rate
• affordable insurance rates
• affordable insurance
• auto insurance online
• health insurance
• california health insurance quote
• california health insurance plan

Then what they'll do is they'll send their visitors directly to their homepage, no matter what keyword the visitor had searched for in Google, to find their ad.

... and they'll use the following keywords for this ad.

auto insurance quote
auto insurance rate
affordable insurance rates
affordable insurance
auto insurance online
health insurance
california health insurance quote
california health insurance plan

Then what they'll do is they'll send their visitors directly to their homepage, no matter what keyword the visitor had searched for in Google, to find their ad.

If we created a little organizational chart of their campaign, it would follow this path:

What's wrong with this? Well, there are several things that are MAJORLY wrong with this campaign. Let's list them below:

1. They've placed ALL of their keywords into 1 single Ad group. You should place only "similar phrases" into their own separate Ad groups.
2. The headline of their ad is horrible: a team financial Really... I'm assuming A Team Financial is the name of their company? I really don't know... They SHOULD have included the main keyword in the title of their ad.
3. Their ad description talks about what "their" passion is. People don't care about what the company's passion is. Thread should talk about the customer. What's in it for me?
4. Their ad takes visitors directly to their homepage, for all of their keywords. Each keyword "group" should take visitors to an individual web page designed specifically around that keyword phrase.

Now... Here ishowthey should have structured their Adwords campaign:

Alright, now what they should have done is grouped their keywords into the following different Adwords groups:

Once they've done this, they could write 2 different ads for each of these 3 Adwords groups. The ads would be written to target the main 3 keywords: auto insurance, affordable insurance, and health insurance.

Here's an example of 2 much better written ads for the newly created ad group, health insurance.

What I've done...

• Added keyword to the headline.
• First line of description contains a benefit. Tells the visitor "what's in it for them".
• Second line of description contains a feature.
• All words have been capitalized

URL has part of the main keyword as a subdirectory.

In ad #2 I've done the same thing as ad #1, but I've changed the URL by adding a more specific subdirectory.

It's always best to split test 2 ads to see which will give you the highest click through rate. The higher your click through rate, the less you'll pay Google.

So, that's the basics of splitting your keywords up into targeted groups, so you can write specific ads based on the EXACT keyword phrases that people are searching for. Make sense?

To get high CTR and high conversions you have to focus on targeting keyword sets, not a generalized list. In addition, you have to write as a salesperson which means following the process that I've detailed in this chapter.

Trick #3

Let's do a quick example so I can show you how I use Keyword Elite to separate my keywords into their own Adwords groups.

Step 1: Open up and run project 1 "create a keyword list". We'll enter the keyword "insurance". Under step 3 we'll select "Overture". And under step 4 we'll tell Keyword Elite that we want 400 keywords related to the word "insurance". We could choose more, but for this example, let's just go with 400. Then click ok.

Step 2: Keyword Elite will begin to gather keywords for us, related to the keyword insurance. Once it's finished processing, we'll highlight all of the keywords. Then "right click" out mouse and select the option titled "Export as groups to TXT".

What this will do is it will automatically separate all of our keywords into their own Adwords groups for us! It will create 1 text file for each group. So, all we'll need to do is open up each text file and paste our keywords into our Adwords account and we're all set. It can't get much easier that that :-)

The text files for our "insurance example" will look like this:

And, for example, the "life insurance" group would contain these keywords:

You'll notice that all the keywords contain the word "life insurance", so you could write 1ad based on "life insurance". If you wanted, you could also take 1 of these keyword phrases and then use Keyword Elite to create a brand new keyword list based on 1 of the keywords from this file. This would then give you an even more specific list of keywords, which you could then break down into smaller ad groups...

This is a real time saver for me.

Coming up... how to track your keyword performance through Google AdWords, how to track conversions and the what makes landing pages so important.

Tracking EXACTLY which keywords are making you the most money is the absolute most important thing you can do to increase your revenue via Adwords. Tracking is vital. We'll cover the ins and outs of this in the next chapter, so pay close attention.