We here at the Digital Moses Confidential have been covering the online advertising industry for over 3 years now. We have a combined 8 years of search engine advertising experience. Our years of search engine advertising have included branding campaigns, search engine arbitrage, lead generation, and direct sales. We have driven close to a billion clicks to thousands of different web pages. We have utilized most of the major and minor search engines available, and have decided to pass the education we have gained from this experience on to our readers.
First, we will discuss the advertising programs of the 3 major search engines, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Google AdWords. This article is intended as a tool for those who are just getting started with search advertising. We will discuss the pros and cons of each as well as the the fundamental differences that separate one from the other. Not only will you gain insight into which of these options you would like to tackle first, but we will provide tips to assist you in getting started quickly and accurately.
The first program to be considered will be Google AdWords as they are the largest and most prolific of the 3. In discussing Google AdWords we will also cove most of the basics that you will need to handle all of the major three. Then, in discussing Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter we will limit our discussion to the finer points and the differnces. Google AdWords has done an incredible job of creating a system that is wonderfully simplistic when getting started, yet highly complex as you drill into the tools available for increasing ROI, and keeping your costs down. With the AdWords system, anyone can create a campaign from nothing, to receiving clicks in as little as 10 minutes.
When setting up your campaigns in AdWords, you simply name your campaign and ad group, Set the languages you are targeting, and then the geographic locations (geo-targeting) where you would like your ads displayed. The geo-targeting feature is a fantastic feature that lets you target by city, by city and surrounding area, by state, or by country. You then create your ad, AdWords allows for a headline of 25 characters, two 35 character description lines, a display url, and a destination url. The destination url is the link that takes the user from the Google ad to the page you want to lead them to (the landing page). The display url is the link that the user actually sees in the ad, usually the name of the site with a slash and the name of the product you are promoting. After setting up your ad, you choose the keywords you would like to have your ads shown on. The Google system will look at the landing page that you have provided in your ad text on the previous page and make suggestions of keywords to use. These keywords usually have the best quality score (the Google ranking system that determines the price you would need to pay to get a keyword active, based on landing page, ad relevancy, and keyword relevancy) which usually means the most amount of traffic at the lowest rate. However, they also provide a search box where you can type a term, and they will provide suggestions of similar terms. Or you can simply create your own list of terms and enter them directly. Then you simply enter your daily budget, the maximum price you would like to pay for each click, then review, save. Then you simply enter your billing information, hit save, and you are live and getting clicks!
I would suggest, however, that after you are live you click on the “Edit Campaign Settings” link on the account summary page. In there you will see a check box that says “Content network,” and one beneath that that says “Content bids.” The content network is usually where you will find most of the traffic. Be sure to click the Content bids box, and set a lower cpc (cost per click) for the content network, as that traffic does not convert (turn from click to sale) as well. Sign up for Google AdWords by clicking here.
Stay tuned for Yahoo and MSN, coming in May!
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