Google Text Ads - Both a Science and an Art Form

Over the past year, our company has been focused very strongly in social media marketing, helping to both  manage our clients' social marketing efforts, as well as doing a lot of education in the form of workshops, seminars and webinars, teaching clients how to do this type of marketing on their own.  A lot of emphasis has been placed on "tying all of the social media pieces together", but one area that we've not spent a lot of time on has been performance-based ads with Google and Facebook.  Until now.

By default, social media marketing will work to improve a company's search engine positioning on Google, Bing and Yahoo as well. These and other search engines are incorporating more and more social media in their search results, including Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and blogs. In addition, these search engines are incorporating Twitter and Facebook status updates as well, selecting those status updates that are shared the most (commented on, liked, retweeted, etc.) and showing those status updates in more and more search results, known as “trends.”

Google Text Ads, using their AdWords online software, is a whole different matter.  AdWords has become refined enough that they provide the science in a way that is unrivaled in search engine marketing today.  We have found that the "trick" to making it all work to its best potential is an art form, of which we try to summarize as follows.

1. We start with a first set of key words you would want your site to be found with when an online user is entering in their search term query. We set the regional demographics of who the ad is shown to, as well as set the daily budget and maximum CPC at approximately $1.00 per click.
2. We watch the performance of this first set of key words and using Google’s AdWords software, add additional key words Google suggests that are related to this first set we selected.
3. We then analyze all of this after about 10 days of the campaign running, fine-tuning each individual key word based on how it’s performed (click-through ratio, impressions delivered, etc.), it’s position relative to competitive ads running, and it’s overall quality score as ranked by Google. Key words that are performing poorly are discontinued and the campaign’s final fine-tuning is done after about 2 weeks of analyzing this empirical data provided by Google, allowing each individual campaign to be optimized based on real-world performance.

Now this, as we have stated, is our "formula" for success, of which we are constantly modifying as new tools become available.  Other SEO marketers will typically have their own formula, which may be a variation of the above, or a completely different set of tactics that has worked best for them.  Which one is better or not can become a matter of debate, but for your needs, if some of the world of Google text-based ads is still a bit of a mystery to you, hopefully this information can help you to both better understand how this type of marketing works, as well as help you to improve your current or future text-based ad campaigns and make them and your business a success!