If you are a beginner to online marketing, Google Adwords is likely one of the first places you’ll end up when you want to promote your business. That’s not a bad thing, either – Google Adwords offers businesses of any size the ability to run targeted, profitable marketing campaigns. The danger, though, is that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste alot of money running an Adwords campaign.

I am writing this post to be a super-basic guide to Google Adwords – after you read this article, you’ll need to start learning about the issues I’ve covered in more depth. The purpose of this article is not to teach you everything you need to know about Google Adwords, but to get you started in the right direction.

Steps to Google Adwords Success:

Step 1: Learn From The Experts

The world of Google Adwords can be very confusing at times – if you want to really succeed in this world, you’ll need to start with expert advice. We would suggest that you either hire a Google Adwords consultant, or that you obtain training material from an expert such as Perry Marshall.

Several years ago, it was easier to get started in online marketing – there was less competition, and the rules were simpler. Today’s search marketing world is much tougher, though. I’ve seen too many people get started without proper training and help, only to lose lots of money because they didn’t do it right. It’s very important that you get expert guidance if you want your Adwords campaign to succeed.

Step 2: Get Your Site Right

We’ve seen way too many website owners skip this step – with devastating results. BEFORE you start advertising, make sure your website is ready to be advertised. Is it well designed and easy to use? Does it clearly and compellingly present your business, products, or services? Does it have clear conversion funnels with strong calls to action? A website with a poor conversion rate will only serve to waste advertising money.

Step 3: Pick Your Keywords

The keywords you select are the heart and soul of your Adwords campaign. When selecting keywords, you need to ensure that they are relevant and have the correct commercial intent.

Choosing relevant keywords is pretty simple – if you are selling blue widgets, you should choose keywords like “blue widgets” and “buy blue widgets”, not keywords like “blue horses” or “firefox widget”.

Choosing keywords with the correct commercial intent is a bit trickier. Commercial intent is a non-tangible factor that refers to what people intend to do when they search for a keyword. Start by asking yourself: “When someone searches for this keyword, what are they looking for and can I give them what they want?”. Then ask, “Is someone who is searching for this keyword looking/wanting/ready to purchase my products or services?” If the answer to either question is no, don’t use that keyword. For example, if you sell blue widgets, you probably would NOT want to advertise under these keywords:

blue widget scam
widget insurance
free blue widgets
sell my blue widgets

Note: Oftentimes, determining correct commercial intent is very difficult – sometimes the plural and singular versions of the keyword may even have different commercial intent. In some cases, you just have to test and see which keywords work and which don’t.

Step 4: Watch Your Quality Score

Google applies a Quality Score (QS) to every keyword in your advertising campaign; the score for each keyword can change over time. Quality score is extremely important – Google uses Quality score to help determine if your ads will displaym how high they will be ranked, and how much you will pay per click. If you want your campaign to be a success, you will need high quality scores. A quality score of 7 is a good minimum to aim for.

If you want to learn more about Quality Score, you can start with Google’s article: What is ‘Quality Score’ and how is it calculated?

Step 5: Measure Everything

The difference between a good marketing campaign and a great marketing campaign is testing, or analytics. You need to test everything – which keywords drive conversions, which pages on your website perform well, and even which variations of website sales copy perform best. There are 3 free tools from Google you can use to help you correctly test:

Google Adwords Conversion Tracking – allows you to track which keywords, ads, and ad groups drive conversions.

Google Analytics – gives you comprehensive analytics for your website. This offers all the features of Google Adwords Conversion Tracking plus many, many more.

Google Website Optimizer – allows you to split test different versions of your key page(s) against each other to choose the highest converting version.