Researching keywords and finding out search volume for a term
Once you have signed up for a Google Ads account, you then get access to Google’s planner tools where you can actually see how many people are searching for what you sell and how much you’ll have to ‘bid’ to get your advert shown to them. This is really useful for researching not just ideas for adverts, but for gauging interest in new products or services. Again, the technology keeps evolving and the layout may have changed since this was written, so go find the latest tutorials to get the best out of using these planning tools.
As an example, we can take a look at a simple report for the search term ‘vegan sweets’. Google calls the terms people enter into the search engine ‘keywords’ and you can use the ‘keyword planner’ to see exactly who is searching for what. When you look at the top of the report, Google gives you a general overview. Think of this as Google’s pushy virtual salesperson telling you what great results you are going to get! In this example they said “I can get you 3,400 people a month in the UK who are searching for vegan sweets and it will only cost you £1,400! What a bargain! What an opportunity! That’s just £49 a day! Just sign here!”
Although it is useful knowing there’s a demand out there, you need to look past these big figures. Further down the screen you will see the predicted numbers for the search term you’re interested in paying for, and you can switch tabs to look at the actual results from previous months also. The real number you are interested in is ‘Avg. CPC’. This stands for average cost per click and is the amount of money Google will charge you each time someone clicks on your advert. Remember, the only way someone will trigger your advert is if they have searched on Google for the phrase you are bidding against, so if we have set this up correctly then it SHOULD be someone who is genuinely looking for vegan sweets. The Avg. CPC for this search term is 42p – so that’s the equivalent of paying 42p to get someone to walk into your shop.
And this is where the real power of Google PPC comes in to play. Because you set your own spending limits, you can test, review, tweak and test again until you get something that works. Instead of giving Google £1,400 to send 3,400 interested people to your website for you, give them £10 to test out their estimation. Based on their estimated figures, £10 in this case should give you 24 people looking for vegan sweets, so see how that works out first.
And if you’ve spent the time researching your customers, then you can keep chipping away at Google to get your advert shown to only the people who are most likely to buy. You know that Yana the Yoga Instructor isn’t online in the evenings because that’s when she’s teaching Yoga classes, so you want to set your advert aimed at her to only show during the daytime.
You can also further define what search terms you want to pay for based on what you know about your customers. Using Google’s keyword planner tool we can see that ‘vegan sweet hampers’ has fewer searches but will only cost 35p per click. Even better, ‘sweets for vegans’ will only cost you 22p per click. What about the specialist sweets you do? ‘Vegan cola bottles’, at the time of looking, is only 9p per click.
And it’s this drilling-down and customisation that can make Google PPC very successful for your company. I’ve worked with businesses whose Google PPC spend is 10k a month, it’s how they get all their trade. They are constantly testing new search terms, re-writing their adverts and landing pages, and once they hit upon something that works they then ramp up the budget on that advert to get everything they can.
Your advert is a headline with a few lines of text and a call to action. Someone should be shown different adverts based on the search phrase they are looking for, and Google Adwords is built so you can run hundreds, if not thousands, of search campaigns all at the same time. It’s why it first looks so complicated when you start using it. Pick out the value propositions that you know each customer profile will respond to and put those messages in your advert. Each advert can take someone to a different page on your website. So, someone searching for those vegan cola bottles should be sent directly to the product they are searching for, not have to re-find the product because you’ve instead dropped them on your homepage.
The final point to make on Google PPC is that it is NOT a ‘set up and forget’ channel. Depending on how much you decide to spend, you need to review your campaigns at least every month if not every week. If you are spending thousands of pounds then you will want to be keeping an eye on it daily. Things change. A new competitor can start bidding on your search terms pushing the cost up. Over time you can also see the exact phrases people searched for that triggered your adverts to show. If you are picking up bad searches you want to exclude these from your campaign. For example, you might see that people are being shown your advert after searching for ‘vegan sweets recipes’ when you actually only want it to be shown to people looking to buy vegan sweets, so you can add this phrase as a ‘negative keyword’ – meaning that anyone using that search term in the future doesn’t get shown your advert.
