I notice that when you first sign up on the Adwords site, you fill out a form with basic questions and it says stuff about how Google will help you set up your account and help you meet your objectives. What are people's experiences of this? Is this 'help' helpful? How much do they actually help?
I guess we would also need to think of some keywords. I expect this is the million dollar question but does anyone have any advice for this? Should we choose 'popular' keywords, choose words people are already using to find our site, and to search within our site, or just guess what we think people might look for? Any advice would be gratefully received.
Our company is based in the UK (in case that makes a difference to any advice you might have).
Am likewise UK based.
Adwords is a very good way indeed of marketing your site, products and services. The best advice is to give it a go.
As far as key words are concerned - play around with them. The great thing about adwords is the flexibility to change your settings, ads, words and everything else. If key words and phrases don't work, change them, adapt them, delete them... Use the key word suggestion tool; try every thing it brings up - give them a few days and see how they fare. From there - adapt, adapt adapt.
You'll get the idea after just a couple of days...
Reading Google's advice is one thing, and although it is very good - as is their support (in my opinion) - you just have to dive in there, take the plunge and get on that learning curve (to mix metaphors)...
The many experts here will be able to give you much more specific, and more practical advice about how to implement your strategies. Take their advice, but, in the first instance, just go for it.
Syzygy
Higher ROI and less confusing ad appearance.
G recently changed ad layouts and we are now getting lesser quality clicks as a result, we think visitors are less sure that these are ads.
One final question though - I understand that you have to set a daily budget. What do you guys think is a reasonable sum to start off with? I realise this might depend hugely on the individual company, but if anyone has any advice I would be grateful.
...What do you guys think is a reasonable sum to start off with? I realise this might depend hugely on the individual company, but if anyone has any advice I would be grateful.
HelenDev, you are correct. This question is just about impossible to answer for you, because there are so many factors unique to your business objectives, that come into play.
However, I'd certainly follow this principle: Never set your daily budget higher than you are really comfortable spending per day, as you experiment and learn.
If you're using AdWords for the first time I'd suggest that you consider the following oversimplified list:
* Decide which of your products and/or services you want to advertise at first. This defines how many ads/keywords you'll need.
* Decide how much your company is willing to spend per day on the experiment. This is your daily budget.
* Then create an account that is inline with your spending limits. If your daily budget is small, then build a small account. If your daily budget is moderate, build a moderate account. But I'd avoid building a huge account with tons of keywords, and then giving it a very small budget. (Note: part of the ad creation process will give you suggested Maximum CPC to be competitive, and a suggested Daily Budget for your ads to show often.)
* Then monitor, adjust, improve. If you are not making a profit, then keep making adjustments till you are.
* Once you have understood the program, and what it takes to be successful, then expand. After all, if you're making $1.50 for every $1.00 you spend, then why not increase your budget and spend more?
As I said, these points are very much oversimplified. But I hope this will give you a way to think about how much you should be spending on AdWords.
AWA
