How to maximize your Google ad campaign
by jeffbinnc
Anyone following Chris Bowers's excellent idea to "run your own media campaign" by using Google AdWords has an opportunity to use a low-cost communication tool to speak to a mass audience in a really powerful way.
I've been running pay-per-click campaigns for non-profit organizations for two years and am astonished that more political campaigns and advocacy groups don't use this effective tool for getting their messages out and engaging voters and supporters.
Using Google's AdWords lets you:
- Select the exact audience you want to reach with your ad.
- Spend the exact amount of money you want to communicate your message.
- Prompt active searchers for information to click through to a destination on the internet where they can read an important advocacy message or engage in a petition or fundraising activity.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your communication and determine how to get better at persuading your audience.
According to Google, a nation-wide Google AdWords campaign for "obama" can generate between 322 - 407 click-throughs (clicks on your ad) per day and for "mccain" 407 - 515 click-throughs. That's a lot of quality contacts with a broad audience actively searching for information about the candidates. But you don't have to aim that high for your campaign in order to be effective.
It's really very easy to start your campaign and keep it funded without breaking your budget. But to get the maximum benefit from what you spend, you need to follow a particular methodology and pay attention to a few tips.
First the methodology . . .
The basic methodology to running an effective Google campaign is to look at media not only as a megaphone for campaign messaging but also as a way to educate yourself on the receptivity of audiences to your messages and the effectiveness of different messages on your audiences' behavior. Let me break that last sentence down a little bit.
When you operate your Google campaign the right way, you'll discover how audiences react differently to different messages you put into Google, and you'll use those discoveries to create ever-more persuasive messages.
The way you do that is to set up a series of rotating ads that each sends out a slightly different message. Then, every few days check on the results of your campaign to see how people have responded to your messages. See which ad gets the most response, drop off the least popular ads, and create new ads to run against your most popular one to see if you can get more response.
Sound difficult? Not really. After opening your account, just be sure to follow these tips:
First, some helpful terminology:
- Impressions: the number of times your ad shows up in a search ranking
- Click-throughs: the number of times someone clicks on your ad to go to your destination page
- Click-through rate: a ratio of click-throughs to impressions
- Cost per click: an average of what it costs you each time someone clicks on your ad
Getting your Campaign Settings right:
Set your budget for whatever you want to spend, but take these steps on this page to make sure that you don't burn through it too fast and get really crappy impressions and click-throughs:
- Set your delivery method to "Standard" to space out your ads evenly
- Limit your Networks to "Google search" and "search partners". Many of the impressions generated by content search are worthless, due to bogus websites and blogs that participate in Google AdSense in order to try to generate income. However, if you find that you're not reaching your budget amount at the end of every day due to a really low number of impressions, turn on the content search option. Just keep in mind that you want the majority of your click-throughs to come from Google search and partners because content search click-throughs are way more apt to be fraudulent.
- Limit your target audience by choosing a specific region, state, or city.
The other really important step to take on this page is to set your Ad Scheduling to "Rotate." This ensures that you can implement the methodology described above.
Creating your Ad Group:
The three elements for a Google ad are the head, text, and the destination page (where you want to send people who click-through on your ad). The first step to writing an effective ad is to choose your destination page and design backwards to get the most effective ad.
For example, to send internet searchers to this editorial in the New York Times about McCain's radical health care proposals, you could write the following ad that features a head and text that are relevant to the destination page:
McCain on health care
John McCain wants to tax
your health insurance.
www.nytimes.com
Then, following the methodology I recommend above, create any one or all of the following alternate ads to run simultaneously with your first ad:
McCain's Radical Agenda
John McCain wants to tax
your health insurance.
www.nytimes.com
McCain on health care
What John McCain plans to do
to your health insurance.
www.nytimes.com
McCain's health care plan
Make it more expensive, riskier,
or, for many, non-existent.
www.nielsenhayden.com
Choosing the best keywords:
The first step to choosing keywords is to look at the frequency of certain words in your destination page. For the ad group above, possible keywords are:
mccain
john mccain
mccain for president
mccain campaign
mccain, healthcare
mccain, health insurance
mccain, health policy
Plug these keywords into Googles' keyword selection tool and you'll get other possibilities for your campaign. Also include misspellings such as "mckain" or "mccane." You can always come back and delete keywords that no one is searching on. But at first, avoid using overly generic terms, such as "health care plans," that could get you lots of traffic that has nothing to do with politics. You can always decide to add these keywords later if your ads aren't generating many impressions.
You can also consider adding negative keywords, such as "obama" and "biden", if you're burning through your budget too quickly and you want to reach only those people who are searching for information on John McCain.
Deciding on your Cost-Per-Click
Right now, the benchmark for nation-wide searches on "obama" is $0.47 to $1.30, per click. For "mccain" it's $0.64 - $2.13. Start off at the lower end of these ranges.
You can always decide to go up later if your ads aren't ranking very high. Keep in mind that you want to aim for getting your ad within the top 5 positions in search rankings. In my experience, rankings below this get very few click-throughs and, thus, probably a lot less notice. But you can't necessarily bid your way to the top of search rankings. Google also considers your ad quality in determining how your ads will rank on search results (more on that later).
Evaluating your results:
To view your results, click on your Ad Group and go to the Ad Variations tab. Your Google ads have four basic outputs that you want to keep track of:
- Impressions: the number of times your ad shows up in a search ranking.
- Click-throughs: the number of times someone clicks on your ad to go to your destination page.
- Click-through rate (CTR): a ratio of click-throughs to impressions.
- Cost per click: an average of what it costs you each time someone clicks on your ad.
Generally, your best ad is the one with the highest CTR. But if some of your ads aren't getting any impressions at all, and the ad with the highest CTR is hogging up all your budget, it means that you're going through your budget too quickly and you have to go to the next step. Which is to go to the Keywords tab.
If the top 2 or 3 keywords on this page also have the highest average cost-per-click (Avg. CPC) of all your keywords, then it means your current bid on these keywords is too high. Again, you want your average position (Avg. Pos.) to be in the top 5, but you don't need to rank number 1 or 2 to get good CTR. In fact, sometimes a number 3 or 4 rank will produce higher CTR.
Next, click on "Customize columns" and scroll down to "show quality score." This lets you view Google's assessment of your ad's effectiveness. You want to see a score of "OK" or better next to every keyword.
For keywords rated "Poor" by Google, you can click on the magnifying glass icon to view Google's recommendations, but if all your ads are showing and your average positions for your top keywords are within the top 5, then just "Pause" these keywords. You can always "Unpause" them later as your ads change and your Ad Group evolves.
If all your keywords have poor ad quality, it doesn't necessarily mean that this ad group is totally ineffective. As long as you go through the process of picking the best ad in your group, then creating new ads to run against it, then you will eventually improve your ad quality.
Managing your Ad Group and adding new Groups:
One temptation is to totally revamp your ads whenever results are disappointing or when there is a new issue that has jumped to the top of newspaper headlines. This is a mistake. Always keep your best-performing ad and test a new ad against it.
Just remember that each time you create an ad that has a different destination page, you'll want to add new keywords that are relevant to that page and delete some of your keywords that are no longer relevant.
To create ads that focus on a totally different target audience or a totally different set of keywords, create a new Ad Group or new Campaign that would have totally different sets of keywords than what you're using in your current campaign. Any new Ad Group you create will share your current budget, and every new Campaign will need its own budget.
By keeping a tight focus on the right methodology and implementing these tips, your Google media campaign will not only educate internet searchers about the issues in this election, it will educate you about what is the best way to engage and influence potential voters.
