This is a quick guide on how to use Google Adwords for promotion of your business. We focus on the search network (which shows in the search results) rather than the Display Network which shows ads within other websites.

1. Create your Account

Sign up for a Google Adwords account - it's free to set one up.

There is online or telephone help that can guide you through this process if you need it, but it is pretty straight forward.

2. Do your Keyword Research

Keywords are phrases that your target audience use when looking for your services or products and form the basis of your campaign.

So you need to create a list of potential keyword phrases that are:

• Relevant – to your business and it's unique aspects
• Commercially viable – ones that you are going to make you money from.
• Competitive – ones that don't have a lot of competition
• And have sufficient volume to make it worthwhile but avoid ones that are too generic like 'finance', 'shoes' or 'appliances'

Begin with starter or 'seed' keywords to find related search phrases and the average number of searches each one gets.

Google Adwords 'Keyword Tool' generates a list based on seed phrases, and will suggest Ad groups for you as well.  You'll also be able to get an idea of costs.

3. Structure your campaign for success.

Set preferences at campaign level – your budget, duration, devices and geographic targeting.

Then write your Ads, load your keywords, setting billing preferences and you are off!  (Easy, Eh?).

Create an Ad Group for each service or product you want to promote - this makes it easier to turn ads on/off and see how each one is performing.

Writing ads are an art in itself but Google provides a guide for doing this.

Make sure you link Adwords to your Google Analytics Account so you can track performance.

4. Getting the most from your campaign budget

Because the higher your ads appear on search result pages the better the response, you want to get as close to the top spot as your budget allows.

Google decides this ad 'rank' with an bidding formula that says:

Page Position = Maximum Cost per Click (bid) x Quality Score

Pay less for top positions by having a high quality score. You do this by having relevant, targeted ads, competitive bids and an effective landing page.

Include those tightly focused keywords in your ad text.

Once your campaign is up and running, you need to monitor which keywords and ads are getting the highest click through rate (CTR), and remove the ones that aren't performing.

Low CTR's impact your quality score because it is an indication of poor relevance.

Load negative keywords to stop your ad showing for certain search terms such as 'free' or 'cheap'.

Set keyword match types to something other than 'broad', otherwise you will get a lot of matches that only loosely relate to your offer.  See Keyword Matching Explained for more.

5. Create a Campaign landing page.

Once people click on your ad, you want as many as possible to call you, fill out the form, or purchase a product.

To do this:

1. Create a landing page specifically for your campaign, that is not visable to other site visitors.
2. Repeat the Ad headline so they know they are in the right place.
3. Use the targeted keywords in the text as this reinforces relevance.
4. Include the offer, features and benefits as relevant.
5. Include a Call To Action!
6. Include testimonials as a way of building trust.
7. The load speed and use of search phrases on your landing page affects your quality score in Adwords.
8. Remove destractions like your main menu, links to other content

The page can stand alone if you want to – the quality of the rest of your website does not impact on your landing page.  It can even be completely seperate to your website.

Really, do I need a seperate page or microsite?

We've had a lot of debates about whether a seperate landing page is the best approach, or really necessary. 

In an ideal world, you'd test both approaches and see which works the best.  But if your buget is small (say, under $1000 per month) you may not get enough data to make a determination, and you will need very good conversion tracking. Most smaller businesses with modest campaigns don't have this so it's guess work.

All we can say is online marketing of any kind is more successful when focused on a single message to a specific audience with a specific need.  Your landing page/micro site should support these.  If you are trying to generally raise awareness of your brand, or are going broad with your campaign targets it becomes more difficult to be focused. 

We recommend landing pages (and it is 'best practise') but sometimes it's just not possible due to lack of budget or willingness.  So  make up your own mind about whether people will need to see all the information on your site to make a decision to get in touch or buy your product.

6. Track, measure and improve

Once your campaign is up and running, you need to see how effective it is.

You should have goals for your campaign such as number of leads, so you can measure how effective the campaign is. If it's phone calls (like many small local businesses) try and get a seperate phone number for your campaign so you can see how many calls you get.

Google Analytics integrates with Adwords to provide in-depth reporting on many different aspects of your campaign's performance.

Things you should measure:

• CTR (Click through rate) – the percentage of people using that search phrase that click on your ad. There is no ideal CTR because it depends on your offer, but if you get into double digits you are probably doing well
• CPC (Cost per click) – you want to tweak your campaign to pay the lowest price per click through, but still maintain a higher ad rank
• Ad position – the best spot is #1 but you can get good results from lower positions, if you want to minimise the cost
• ROI or Conversion – how many of the click trough’s actually resulted in a lead, and then a sale. This needs to be tracked before you can measure it!

And try out different things all the time to figure out what gets the best response - tweak wording on your ads, your landing pages, timing etc.