After experimenting with Google AdWords I’ve learned some simple lessons, that probably all of you out there that have at least some experience with this program are already aware about. Nevertheless, because my second campaign was actually very successful in terms of high add relevancy, high click rates and low costs-per-clicks, I’ll post here some simple advices for the ones that don’t have experience working with AdWords.

First of all, in order to obtain good ad performance, keep in mind you’ll need a strong connection between your ad keywords (or key phrases), the ad itself and the landing page. To be more specific, one of my ad-triggering key phrases was “similar music”. The ad itself had the title “find similar music” and the body of the ad contained the word “music”. The landing page, that is, the main page of Taste Kid, has a title that contains the phrase “find similar music”, and these words are to be found on the page’s description and content, as well.

To explain a little, Google has to establish how relevant your ad is. The better this relevancy, the better your campaign’s performance. The only data Google has in order to do that is your ad and your landing page. So, the keywords you define should be relevant, words-wise, to the ad that you have defined, and the ads should be relevant to the page that is targeted. So there should be always a strong connection between these 3: the keywords, the ad, the landing page.

Considering this, the steps for defining an ad group would be:

1.Establish what are the keywords that best describe the page you are about to promote.
2.If necessary, do a little SEO to optimize that page for those keywords (setting a relevant page title, page description, etc.)
3.Define an ad that contains those keywords. Of course, it should also be coherent and appealing. Considering an ad has a limited number of characters, concentrate on a maximum of 3 keywords (two, or even one, may be enough). Try to have one keyword in the ad title.
4.Then, set as keywords in Google AdWords the keywords you have chosen at step 1.

Maybe the most important thing is to find the right keywords. A few simple rules for that would be:

1.The keyword you chose should describe or be related to what your page is all about. Moreover, the page should be optimized for those keywords.
2.The keywords should not be too generic. For example, in my successful campaign I’ve used key phrases like “similar music”, as opposed to “music”, or “find music”, that would have been too generic. Many other sites most probably are already using those keywords and are much more relevant for them.
3.The keywords should not be too particular. You have to come up with keywords or key phrases that many people are searching for on Google. This is why I’ve used “similar music”, as opposed to “music recommender system”, for example. I made the educated guess that much more people will search for things like “similar music metallica” than “ music recommender system website”.

Giving all these things I’ve learned, I’ve managed to define a campaign having a very good performance. Due to financial restrains though, I had to pause this campaign for a while. Actually, I still have an outstanding balance for Google of about 100 euros, that I’m planning to pay as soon as I’ll have the money.

Note: This post has been written in retrospect and posted on September 13th, 2008.