How to write an Adwords ad

Presented live on Tuesday, April 24, 2018

With just 30 characters per headline and 80 characters for your description, Adwords ads (or those paid ads on Google) demand that you cut all the fluff out of your copy. But what should you leave behind? What makes a Google-friendly ad? In this tutorial, PPC expert and cofounder of Paid Search Magic, Amy Hebdon shows you 3 essential techniques for PPC and 3 advanced techniques – then shows you exactly how to write a Google ad for top results.

42:32

This tutorial is brought to you by Paid Search Magic. BONUS: Get the template Amy uses for free here

TRANSCRIPT

Joanna Wiebe: No. All right. Amy?

Amy Hebdon: Yes.

Joanna Wiebe: Amy, how are you? You’re fine. You just flew in. Your arms are tired.

Amy Hebdon: Right.

Joanna Wiebe: We’re going to talk about PPC, which is confusing to me, always has been. Hopefully after this tutorial, will not.

Amy Hebdon: This is the time it changes. This is the time you’re going to walk away from it and be like, I get it, it’s perfect, this is my new business. I’m going to start offering ad copyrighting in addition to everything else.

Joanna Wiebe: I love it. I love that. Cool. What are you sharing with us today?

Amy Hebdon: We’re going to talk about how to write an amazing AdWords ad. Do you want me to go ahead and share my screen now?

Joanna Wiebe: Sure. Yeah, that would be amazing.

Amy Hebdon: Okay. I can do that. I’m trying to rock two different monitors. I’m not super great at doing that, so just bear with me for a second here as I –

Joanna Wiebe: Yes.

Amy Hebdon: Can you see my screen?

Joanna Wiebe: It’s a Google [inaudible 00:00:50], yes.

Amy Hebdon: You can see it? Okay, awesome. Does it say how to write an amazing AdWords ad right here?

Joanna Wiebe: No, it’s some weird photos.

Amy Hebdon: What?

Joanna Wiebe: Just kidding.

Amy Hebdon: It’s photos?

Joanna Wiebe: No, it’s not [inaudible 00:01:02].

Amy Hebdon: Oh no. On my other desktop it actually did pop up like a photo booth thing, so I’m like oh crap. Yes, we’re going to –

Joanna Wiebe: Before we dive in, I need to just … because we were talking before we even started this, so I didn’t give people a real background on you, and someone just called me on that. Because we were talking beforehand, so I still have that conversation in my head about everything you’re working on, but nobody else saw it.

Amy Hebdon: Nobody else did.

Joanna Wiebe: When you’re in a new environment, things are different. Amy, I have known Amy for four or five years maybe, it’s been a while. Amy has just recently, she was head of search. Head of paid search?

Amy Hebdon: Paid media, yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: Paid media at Blast in Seattle, and has just gone out on her own and now runs Paid Search Magic, which everybody should check out. We’re going to have a cool template coming your way by the end of today’s session, and a few other cool resources as well. When it comes to PPC, for years, Amy has been my go to person and she should be your go to person. I’m sorry to interrupt you there Amy before you got right into it, but a little intro.

Amy Hebdon: No, I love it. I have learnt a lot from you about the landing page and copyrighting side, because all this works together really well. Truth be told, people who know conversion copywriting have an unfair advantage when it comes to writing AdWords ads, because they do rely on the landing page so much, like the success an ad relies on the landing page. Also, you are doing your customer research and you know the competitive landscape and everything else so well in order to write those landing pages, and that all serves to your advantage in writing a successful ad. I think there’s a really nice synergy, if you will, for good AdWords and good landing pages just really go together.

Joanna Wiebe: Dig it. I totally agree. Love it. I know you’re going to tear up one of our pages today. I’m looking forward to that.

Amy Hebdon: It is not a tear down, it’s just some friendly advice, that’s all.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you.

Amy Hebdon: I’m going to make a quick change here. I don’t want to use speaker notes, so let’s undo that. Basically, in the next 15 minutes, we’re going to be covering three basic things to know about AdWords, three advanced tips. Then we’re going to be writing a new ad together. We’re going to be writing an ad for the tutorial Tuesday’s landing page, which is right here. This is not currently used for paid search traffic, correct? It’s not optimized for paid search, so we might have a couple of suggestions for what we might want to do if we were to drive paid search traffic to it.

Then because it is not easy to write an ad and go through everything we’re going through in 15 minutes, I also created a template. [inaudible 00:04:06] find it at paidsearchmagic.com/ads-worksheet. This is where you can find the template that I’m going to be using to deconstruct everything and put it back together so it’s in a nice AdWords ad format.

A lot of people, sometimes they don’t know what an AdWords ad is, they can’t really conceptualize it. If you are not someone who knows what an ad is for AdWords, it’s going to be, here we have a picture of a search engine results page. These top three listings are ads. You can tell because they say ad next to it in this little box there. This last listing is an organic listing. It is not an ad. It is not paid. It does not say ad next to it. That’s how you can tell the difference between when you’re looking at a paid ad or a regular listing. Paid ads will always say ad next to it, at least for right now until Google changes things again, but this is what we’re working on right now, it’s the ads.

Three basic things to know. We’re going to look at what quality score is, the goal of the ads you right and the anatomy of an ad. Quality score basically is looking at, do your keywords, your ad and your landing page all match each other? Keywords, ads and landing pages are contained within an ad group and they need to be relevant to one another. That is the basic idea that Google wants to make sure if someone’s searching for something they’re likely to get what they’re searching for and not something that feels spammy or like it’s a promotion.

In this example, we’re taking someone to, this used to be landing page for jeans. Someone’s searching that they want to buy jeans and they see an ad for jeans. This is probably going to have a pretty good quality score. What the quality score means, basically it’s on a scale of 1 to 10, and it’s Google’s way of rewarding you when everything is relevant, so you’re going to get a lower cost per click. It’s an auction model and there’s some different factors that factor into how much you pay. You tend to, on average, get a lower cost per click in a better position. If you’re higher up on the pages, if you have everything working together nice and relevant, you have a higher quality score.

The opposite is true as well. If you have a poor quality score, these things don’t match each other, you’re going to be paying more for your clicks, you’re going to probably be not showing up as high in the results, and you might not even have your ads served at all if your quality score and ad rank are just too low. You always want these things to match.

In our example, we had jeans and that’s a winner. I think it’s funny because this sounds so simple, and if you’re hearing this for the first time you’re probably like, that’s something a three-year-old could do very easily, this can’t possibly be hard.

Professional marketers mess this up all the time. If you want more info and intel on what mistakes they make and what to not do, ask in the Q&A if you want to bring that up because we still have to write our ad. We’re going to go through this part, but I’m happy to revisit that because I do think it’s useful stuff.

Second thing to look at is the goal of an ad. The best ad is going to drive the most value. Click-through-rate measures how frequently people are clicking from the people who see it. It can be a useful measurement, but the truth is you can have a click [inaudible 00:07:24] ad or an ad that doesn’t really speak to what the heart of the offer is, where people click through and then are less likely to convert. That’s really counterproductive when we’re paying, basically everyone’s entry fee to the landing page. We don’t want to pay for people who really have no business being there, we want to pay for people who are very likely to take us up on the offer.

We want to make sure that we’re really looking at the value of the ads and we’re evaluating what basically the performance. We don’t want to just be looking at how high is the click-through-rate because that may or may not be conducive to actual profitability. In our template here, we’re going to say that the goal of an ad, if we were to be paying for ads to go to Tutorial Tuesdays, we’d want people to sign up for them. Not just look at the page, but we want people to actually sign up. That is the first section of the template.

Then we are the anatomy of an ad, and I think Sarah is going to be sharing out this thing as well. Looking at a text ad preview tool. If you can see my screen here, basically this is how I’m going to fill in what goes into the ad. There’s two headlines and a description. This is basically what we’re working with. This is what it looks like over here on the right for a desktop ad and then a mock up for a mobile ad as well. You can get a feel for what those are going to look like.

The headlines are 30 characters each. We want to be really cautious about the constraints. We can’t go over because Google won’t run them. We don’t want to send our clients things that go over because then it we look like we didn’t know what we were doing because we can’t use them. We have two headlines, 30 characters each, and a description, which is 80 characters. This is what we have to work with with an ad. It’s not much. It’s a lot more than it used to be.

Joanna, I know we’ve done trainings before where I basically said, you have your keyword and you have your call to action, and that’s about it, that’s all you have to play with. We have more room now, but there’s a benefit because we get to [inaudible 00:09:36]. There’s also some challenges that come along with this, and I’ll get more into that in the second section here. Before moving on to the advanced step, is there anything that I need to clear out that want clear so far?

Joanna Wiebe: Not so far. No, I think people are just watching, learning.

Amy Hebdon: Okay, cool. Awesome. We’re going to look at the three advanced tips, which are: never write the ad first, attention equals relevancy ,and how to test messaging and positioning. For never write the ad first; imagine that you cut trailers for blockbuster films, and someone comes and says to you, “Well, I need you to cut a trailer for me. I have not filmed anything yet, and I have a vague idea of what the film’s going to be about. But I need you to cut the trailer first and I’ll figure out the film later.”

That would never work and that’s not an assignment you would take. It’s the same concept for paid search ads. The ads are essentially a preview of, here’s what you’re going to get if you click to see the actual landing page. We’re not going to write those before we have the landing page or the author. We need to use those as the substance of what’s going to basically populate the ad for us.

We’re going to start with the landing page, and I’m just going to grab that from here and add that to that little template. All we’re starting with the landing page, we’re going to deconstruct the landing page for ad building blocks. If you have done all your research, you may not need to take this exactly from the landing page because you might have it somewhere else. If I’m using someone else’s landing page, I’m going to go through this process.

There’s basically four categories. I’m going to take the different elements form the landing page and out them into building blocks. We’ve got the brand or the product. Sometimes those are the same thing, but usually they go together somehow. The solution, what the problem that the page or the offer is trying to solve.

Features and benefits; this could really be anything else, whether it’s fascinators or just information, like basic info about what is going on with the offer, and then the actual offer and CTA. I’m basically going to basically figure out what the ingredients are and deconstruct it and put them in my little boxes here.

In the interest of time, I’ve gone ahead and done that in the slide just so we can keep this moving. But notice that anything, if it’s not in the landing page it doesn’t make it here. The reason for that, basically if it’s not in the landing page it’s not true, because if you have something that’s in your ad and it’s not reflected in the landing. Like if it’s something, I’m really interested in that, I click through, I can’t see it, I’m not sure if it’s true anymore, I’m not sure if that’s what I’m going to get. We don’t want to leave people wondering when they get to the landing page about to make that decision, whether that thing actually was accurate. If it is accurate and you want be able to call out in the ad, you want to make sure that it’s supported and substantiated ideally on your page if not somewhere on the website they can also access, but the page is going to make the most sense to include that.

The second tip is that attention equals relevancy, and this is really hard for copywriters. I think of everything we’re going over, this is the most challenging one for copywriters. If you’re familiar with the AIDA formula of that first A equals’ attention, the way that we’re going to get attention for paid ads is, basically we’re going to match the headline to the keyword that someone’s looking for. This a lot of times if you are used to a lot more creative ways to capture attention, this is going to fill like it’s a missed opportunity to really stand out from your competitors.

I’ve heard people, even on stages, just criticize the way us paid search markers don’t understand how to stand out, and like have you ever run ads before? The thing that works is matching that key word in the ad. I’m going to give you a framework to think about this. Imagine that this is your vehicle and you’re not sure if you need to take this exit or if you need to keep going straight.

The exit’s coming right up. The only thing that’s going to have your attention is the person, or sign, or device that’s telling you whether or not to go here. At this point, you do not need someone reminding you of how great it’s going to be to get to your destination. You don’t need any other information other than yes or no, this is what you are looking for, this is the direction.
I think if you can keep that in mind, the person or voice is going to get 100% of the attention. When we’re in that searching for, got to figure it out mode, we’re looking for the thing that matches what we are looking for and that’s it. You don’t need to worry about it not being as grabby or stopping someone in their tracks. If it says what they are looking for, they have that desire, they express that desire to Google, and you just want to show up as that desire and you have their attention. You don’t need to worry about that it’s not super creative.

Then the third thing, the third tip is test messaging and positioning. If you’re familiar with AdWords, you probably also heard that you should always be testing your ads within AdWords. It’s very common for there to be a lot of tests running within AdWords, and a lot of them are really bad tests. The truth is, anytime you test anything you’re going to have a winner, but it doesn’t mean that there’s a reason for that, it is statistically valid, or that it’s meaningful at all. Just having a winner means nothing. What you want to do is, you want to be able to learn about your audience and learn what messaging resonates with them.

In this example, let’s say you have a low-price bookstore and you have a very price sensitive audience. You already know that about them. You know that they are going to be looking for bargain prices. What else can you say? This is where there’s a bit of a benefit of having those additional characters. What else can you say that might be interesting to them? For example, we could test an advert where we would like double down on how lower book prices are, nothing over $10, or we could test that against bestselling titles for less. Most likely people who want low price that’s not their only motivator, they don’t want to pay a lot, they also want something of value to them. You could give a talk about the selection or talk about the quality of the books, and then start seeing, triangulating what’s most important to our customers.

The nice thing is, it creates a really good feedback loop if you can then take those learnings from your test. From just running AdWords you get all this data within AdWords. Then you can start plugging that back into your learning page to tease out the more important ideas, and building a better learning page, because you know what people are most responsive to. It can just help to build more successes across the board.

The other thing to keep in mind, the downside of having the extra character spaces is, it also gives your competitors extra character space. I just made this example up, but like let’s say Krazy Klay has a really nice branded ad, that they have a fun colorful clay for all ages. That works until ColorClay comes along and says it’s the only clay that won’t kill you.

At this point, it’s going to make a lot more sense for Krazy Klay to respond to that, otherwise they are going to look totally toned yup. Well, that’s great you have colorful clay that’s probably also toxic. They might want to consider saying something about how they are 100% safe to combat the message that is being presented also on the search results page. It can get kind of aggressive. Things have definitely moved more towards that direction. We have more space to say something other than choose us, now you can say choose us don’t choose them. It creates a different landscape, and sometimes there’s damage control that you need to do.

Looking at the ad we will be writing for copywriting for tutorial Tuesdays, getting an idea of the landscape is going to make a lot of sense. One thing I noticed on here, one thing that stands out to me right away is, Udemy’s offer of enroll today and get 40% off. Udemy is known. They’re always discounting and so this is going to be valuable for their customers. I would say that the free tutorial Tuesdays is an even better offer, but we don’t mention in our ad building blocks that it’s free because it doesn’t say on the landing page. That might be something to consider if we’re going to start running paid traffic here. Let’s make sure that it’s really clear that it’s free, because probably everyone who’s here knows, but if we’re driving an audience that hasn’t heard of it necessarily, you want to make sure that we can call that out as a benefit.

With that, we have our signups, our goal of signups, we have our landing page that we’re starting with, which is tutorial Tuesdays landing page, and we have our deconstructed ideas. What we are going to do now is, we are going to choose a theme to write an ad for. Our theme is probably going to come, because it’s got to be related to the landing page, so it’s probably going to come from the brand, or the product, or the solution. It’s going to come from this area here.

A big question for a lot of companies is, should I bid on brand? Bidding on brand is a separate question to running an ad, but should you write an ad for brand, is a valid question if you are writing an ad. I do want to just address this quickly because it can be contested. I hate to just say it depends, but like let’s look at Basecamp. In this example, Basecamp, they’re number one in organic. They’re not showing up here in the ads. They’re number one in organic, but they’re number five on the search results listing because they are not have an ad show up.

Whereas their competitors, not only are they showing up ahead of Basecamp and pushing Basecamp down, but they’re also giving all Basecamp prospects reasons not to choose Basecamp. Before choosing Basecamp, thinking about Basecamp try us instead. It really might be to Basecamp’s advantage to participate in this conversation and show up a little bit higher before people have to read through all this before getting to Basecamp. Obviously, if this is an actual client of Basecamp, there’s probably nothing to worry about. They’re not going to click on this and accidentally switch providers, but for prospects, that can really make a difference.

Now, for copyhackers we don’t have that same situation happening. There’s no one who’s bidding on this so it’s pretty safe to assume that, even if we’re not running an ad for copyhackers, we’re still going to win the click. You don’t have to worry about the cannibalization of paying for clicks that you would have had anyway. We’re pretty safe to ignore bidding on brand right now. Then that is going to leave us basically with focusing on the solution of copywriting training.

I’m going to jump into my ad writing tool. Let me see. I’m going to grab, first I will … actually I’ll go here because I know I can get. I’m going to grab the URL. I’m going to add that to my final URL, so you can just kind of see what this looks like. Into the final URL, I’m adding the actual landing page that this is going to. You’ll notice that now in the path, what displays on the ad here, it only says copyhachers.com. It doesn’t actually show anything that’s appended to that, like the actual page, we’re just dealing with the domain here. We can write whatever we want in these other paths.

I could say, I’m making this about copywriting training. This doesn’t affect where something goes, it just affects what’s displayed. If someone clicks on this, they’re still going to go here to the final URL so we don’t need to worry about that. I’ve decided that this ad is going to be about copywriting training. I’ve got my first headline and it’s only 10 characters, excuse me I have 10 characters left, so I have a little bit of space to play with here. I probably don’t want to just leave it with copywriting training because I have more room to say something, so I will. I’m going to say free live copywriting training to tease out some additional benefits from choosing this one.

For my headline too, I need to figure out what I’m going to say here for positioning. What I’m going to do is, I’ve added this to the template. I’ve got some different ideas for positioning and messaging test ideas. What I want to test for our copyhackers ad for tutorial Tuesdays is, one is I want to test the authority of copyhackers because I feel like that’s a pretty strong brand that someone who wants to learn about copywriting is likely to be attracted to that, and click through and sign up because of that. I’m going to test that against basically the ease or the format of the 20-minute long weekly tutorials.

I noticed when I was looking at the other competitors; some of them require much bigger involvement. They are looking at a 10-week course.If someone doesn’t want to take a 10-week course, they just want to learn some tips, then that might be something interesting for them. We’re going to test the format versus the authority. Over here for my headline too I’m going to test the authorities.

I’m going to say, tutorial Tuesdays from copyhackers. I don’t have enough room to say that. I have more room than I used to back in the old days, but I don’t have enough room. I’m going to grab this. I’m just going to work on it a little bit. Copyhackers tutorial Tuesdays does fit. It wouldn’t be my preference of how to say it, but it works. If you’re just looking for information that can work. I’m going to go with that for my ad.

Again, I’m focusing on authority here so when I say, learn copywriting from experts each week. Access; I know there’s a library of tutorials that people can access. The library signup today. This could be my ad for I want to test the authority. Then if I’m happy with that, I’m going to go ahead and create a new version, and instead I’m going to test the, what did I say, the format. 20-minute actionable lessons, and then I want to say learn copywriting in quick weekly tutorials.

Then I’m going to stay access the library by signup today, that’s not changing. I’m also not changing the headline here because it’s for the same basic idea. I’m just changing that additional positioning to see which one is going to work better. That is how I have written an AB version of a test, so I want to see if there’s like any questions. We can definitely go through more, we can go through the different ad extensions, but I want to see where we’re at and if anyone has any questions.

Joanna Wiebe: That was wicked. That was so clear. Amazing. Thank you. You’re ready to take questions?

Amy Hebdon: I am. Yeah, we can definitely take questions.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. This is a pretty tactical one. [inaudible 00:24:45] asks, in Karooya … Is that how you say Karooya?

Amy Hebdon: I think so. I’ve never really heard it said. I say Karooya.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Can you run through the bottom section where there are like check offs?

Amy Hebdon: Yeah. Those are the, they’re called the ad extensions. What this does is, it gives you more space to tell your story. This first part what we just wrote, this is the ad itself, and this is what’s going to run. I’m just going to click off a few and you’ll see a change up here. This is what this looks like we have site links, or this is what it looks like if we have call-outs. It gives you more space. The thing about ad extensions to know is that, they don’t always show up with your ad. It’s going to be dependent on a few things including your position and basically your ad link, whether or not they show up at all.

Each ad you are going to write is different. The ad extensions don’t extend one ad, they extend all your ads in the ad group. Let’s say I have this ad that says, copy hacker tutorial Tuesdays, and I want to add a call-out and I want to say, hey get a 20-minute lesson, because I think that’s great. Well, in the other ad I already said 20-minute lesson up here, so it’s going to be a little redundant. They might not show it all and they might basically read to tell your story, just depending. It’s not overly complicated, but there’s just a couple of things to keep in mind when you add them. For the most part, yeah you’re definitely going to want to be thinking about the ad extensions as well, because those will also help your qualities. Anything you can do.

I like to think of how Google sieves things. Google is going to say, “Hey, this takes up more room there’s more chance that we are going to get a paid click versus a free click. When we get a paid click we make more money, we need to report a profit to our shareholders.” They’re going to do what they can to help encourage people to click a paid listing versus an organic listing, which may sound unfair but that’s the way it works. Anything you can do to build out additional information here, look at how much space this is taking up at this point. There’s just so much that’s here and pushing down the organic listings. You want to take advantage of this and write basically as many ad extensions as are going to make sense for you, and that’s the additional part of how to play the game for writing an ad.

Joanna Wiebe: Excellent. Very cool. Yeah, okay. Joanna asks, “Should all PPC ads go to landing pages? They use PPC ads to just send people to our regular website pages.”

Amy Hebdon: The question is, should you have a dedicated landing page?

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah.

Amy Hebdon: Okay. I’m going to say no and that might be a little bit controversial because I know that like for years, so for a while people were just using paid search ads to drive the homepage because we didn’t have any other option. We didn’t have any dedicated landing pages, and so it’s just like, well this is the page in my sight. That sucked because homepages are often not good. Especially, if it’s just a bad homepage. A good homepage can be fun, but you don’t ever want to drive good traffic to a bad page. The whole movement of having a dedicated landing page or squeezed page or whatever, things that are removing anyone’s attention from taking any other action rather than clicking the call to action, there is a purpose behind that. But it’s not a solution for everything, because sometimes people need a lot of additional information.

Let’s say that you are writing an ad for someone who’s looking to rent a car. They don’t want to just go to one option of one car and say, hey this is it. They want to be able to make a choice, or if they are looking to join a gym and they want to know about what are the locations, what are the options? They want to know everything else before they decide to sign up for a free trial. If you just take them to a page that says get your free trial today, I don’t know enough. Is this going to work with my schedule? Does this have the classes that I want? I don’t know enough about the amenities to be able to make that decision.

I’ve had this like the exact example I just gave you with the gym. When I switched that from a dedicated landing page to get your free trial now, to actually taking you to a robust website where there’s kind of like a popup of get a trial. It literally doubled the conversion rates. You can see there’s a lot more interest in finding out, getting the answers that I need to make a decision, rather than just signing up.

Now, it’s going to be different. Sometimes you just want to reduce the form fills and just get someone to fill something out right away. It really depends on what your audience needs in order to be able to answer that question of, do I want this or not?

There’s not one right answer, but for your specific product, there is one right answer. You want to figure that out and not just go always one way or always the other.

Joanna Wiebe: Nice. That is controversial.

Amy Hebdon: I know.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Andra says, “I noticed every word is capitalized in the ad example. I’ve seen this lots but it’s so counterintuitive and hard to read to me. Is there any data that supports this or this sentence case? Thanks.”

Amy Hebdon: I feel like the most important thing is to get the message right, and if you get the message right and it has sentence case, then you’re fine. Typically, if you’re competing with a bunch of other ads that all have, now I can’t remember what that … that capitalize every word, it tends just to stand out a little bit less, and it feels like less of an offer. I don’t quite know how to explain that, but when I’ve tested both I have found that the capitalization just tends to look a little bit more finished, and do a little bit better. I mean I hear you and especially if you’re just going to especially try to match the organic listings, and a lot of times those will have capital, then it can really be either or, and it’s not probably going to affect things nearly as much as what you’re actually saying.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay, cool. Chuck says, “Free can be a bit toxic in emails, like the word free, just that word. Does Google have any problems with free?”

Amy Hebdon: No, as long as you cannot say free all capitalized. Punctuation is going to matter, and there’s limits on what you can say in terms of you can’t use capitalization unless it’s like for an acronym, you can’t use all caps. You can’t use excessive punctuation. You can’t use exclamation mark in your headlines, like there’s some rules around that. In terms of, if you have a free product and you’re saying free, there’s nothing against that. They will probably, if free does better and gets a higher click through rate, they will reward that, again because click-through-rate is one of the factors in how well your ad does. Again, every time the ad gets clicked, Google gets money. They want to get money, they want your ad to get clicked.

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah. I love the way you think about it. It’s just interesting to get inside that view. Christine says, “We have a very small ad campaign running now for about six months. We have several ads with an okay quality score, sixes and sevens. The click-through-rate was fine. Ads have converted okay. Overtime, the quality score seems to be going down. Most of our scores are now fours and fives. What causes this decline overtime when things started out so well?”

Amy Hebdon: That’s a good question. Your quality score is reevaluated from time to time. There’s no set formula that Google has shared of how frequently they do it, it’s different in a lot of cases. One thing you might want to check on is the performance of your devices, of your sight on mobile. I definitely have over simplified things and tried to fit this into a short amount of time to say that quality scores about relevance, which absolutely is. If someone gets to a landing page that maybe, like in our example, it says jeans, but that takes 80 minutes to load, and it’s not readable on mobile. That is a bad experience and they’re going to dock you for that. You want to have a good experience and not just a good headline or a good theme of your page.

If you could maybe check on how your mobile is doing the site speed of mobile, then also make sure sometimes I’ll go in and its really random, because for some pages this is true some it’s not, things like if you have a privacy policy. If you have certain information available, sometimes that can work against you if you don’t. What you can do is, your quality score is a function of your landing page, your click-through-rate and the relevance. Those three things will each have like about average, average or below average. See what it’s saying is below, why your quality score may have gone down, and then work on fixing that particular thing.

A lot of times, if something just changes, it’s either because your click-through-rate is either going down, or going down compared to competitors, or there’s something to change on your landing page. It’s unlikely that a key word that was relevant to your ad just stops being relevant. It’s either in the ad or it’s not. Those other two things might be something to look at if you’re seeing a decline in quality score. Also make sure you’ve got your ad extensions because those are increasingly more important when it comes to factoring your equality score as well.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Sweet. Thank you. Anonymous asked this about headline two when you were doing the test at the end of your tutorial. “Do you send traffic to different landing pages based on headline too? If you’re maybe testing it, should it be going to the landing pages that then match your new H too?”

Amy Hebdon: In this example, the final URL is something that stayed here. I would be unlikely to test secondary messaging driving at two different pages, but there are absolutely times where that would make sense. I wouldn’t base it on changing headline too, I would probably keep those at the same, I’ll go into the same URL, and having the same … All other things being equal just changing this.

Joanna Wiebe: The landing page.

Amy Hebdon: Yeah. You’ve got your one keyword, and so your one keyword is going to go to a different page just based on the ad that they see. That’s going to screw up your data. I would maybe choose a different keyword set that might make sense to test a different page. If you absolutely need to split tests keyword against two different pages, and I would actually keep the ads the same, and then see which page does better all other things being equal, but otherwise your data’s already skewed just based on the performance of the ad. I typically wouldn’t change both of those at once as a test.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Cool. Raul asked,” Any thoughts on the single keyword ad, which I’m assuming is just one word?”

Amy Hebdon: Probably that’s going to be a single keyword ad group or a skag, which is when you only have … you have an ad group it can have as many keywords as you want. There’s kind of a trend right now in AdWords to say, I’m only going to have one keyword per ad group and then everything’s going to be hyper relevant and I’m going to get a 10 out of 10. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and this isn’t like a vague it depends, I don’t know. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. The thing that that’s going to be dependent on is how much traffic you’re getting.

If you have a lot of traffic and your keyword can be split out and its going to do very well on its own, then yeah absolutely. You can have a single key word ad group, you can have full control over. You’re not trying to make a lot of different ideas fit into one ad or landing page. What happens if you don’t have all the traffic? You’re diluting all the potential traffic you have into a lot of different ad groups, and so you have a lot of different ads that are each only accruing as much traffic as they can.

Again, I think about Google, Google is going to reward the ad that gets most clicks. Instead of having one ad that gets a ton of clicks, now you have eight ads getting just some clicks. There ad rating is not going to do as well, you’re not going to do as well in the auction. It really is going to depend on how much traffic you get.

Some people are not going to agree with that strategy, and they are going to say go ahead and build something else for every single key word. To me that’s just really excessive and in my experience does worse than if you’re willing to break out the things that can justify getting that specific traffic. If it can’t, then just go ahead and have smaller traffic just grouped in similar enough themes that you’re still getting the amount of … basically the history and just the click through rate of those specific ads.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Thanks. Leslie says, “How do you advise people that might be wondering, should I run ads to sell products, or run ads to get new leads? Any tips or considerations on the ultimate goal?”

Amy Hebdon: I’m not sure I understand this question. It’s probably a very good question but I don’t quite follow.

Joanna Wiebe: If someone’s like, I’m going to put an ad together to go into a landing page, I assume this is what Leslie’s saying. Leslie, if you want to clarify further in chat ,please do so we see it clearly. Otherwise, it sounds like should I run ads where the goal is make a sale, or where the goal is get leads that I can later convert into paying customers.

Amy Hebdon: Okay. There’s no reason to not do both. There’s no reason to not have ads that drive immediate revenue, and ads that fill your pipeline. If you have to choose one, I don’t even know. That’s going to be completely dependent on your business model, which one is the most successful, which one has the most potential value. If your leads are for a huge high converting high sales ticket as opposed to something if you had a small cheap thing that you’re offering, there’s your answer. You’re going to want to make ads and get traffic where there’s the most potential value as a result. Whether it’s immediate or something you need lead nurturing for it, either way that’s what you want to focus on, just where the value is.

Joanna Wiebe: Dig it. Yeah, makes sense and good point. Why choose too, right? If you’re not sure and the business model doesn’t dictate, then do both.

Amy Hebdon: A lot of clients are going to do both. I’ve got E-commerce clients that also are driving contest sign outs, because that works really well for them. I’ve got a legion that also sells products. There’s no reason that you can only do one.

Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Let’s wrap up with one last question because we have used up so much of your time. It’s been amazing. This is an interesting one that I think people are probably wondering, I’m kind of wondering. Lana asks, “Is there a best practice recommended amount to spend for PPC? How much should people be spending on this stuff. How do you know how much to spend?”

Amy Hebdon: Yeah, that’s a great question. This is a hard question because unlike a lot of traditional advertising models, you don’t have to know going in, here’s my budget right. It can be very responsive and that’s attractive to a lot of people especially with smaller budgets. You can rump up over time. The thing I caution people against is, because you don’t have to have a large budget, people are like well I’ll go really small, I’ll just dip a toe in.

No joke, my husband one time, after this client he had, he was managing a budget of three dollars a day and sometimes clicks were more than three dollars. So you’d get one click per day and then that was it, and then their budget had been exhausted. You cannot have a viable business if you have one chance of getting one click every single day. You want to have enough budget that can sustain, I want to say lots of clicks. That the challenge here is that, depending on your market.

I’ve had clients where literally the average cost per click was above $40, and clients where the average cost per client goes below eight cents. How many clicks do you get for a budget? If you have $100, that’s two or three clicks for one, and all the clicks you could ever want for the other. It’s really going to depend on if you’re bidding on brand, that’s going to be a lot cheaper, but depending on the competition, is an auction The competition for your market is going to dictate how many potential clicks there are in your budget.

You want to have a budget that can sustain enough clicks that you’re not just dealing with one or two clicks a day. You’re probably going to want to get at least 20 or 30, and then whatever that multiplier is by your cost per click is going to determine that budget. Typically, low and other couple hundred dollars and obviously it can scale up to the millions. If you don’t have $100 to spend, which is three dollars a day, this is probably not going to just have enough volume to get you the results that you’re looking for.

Joanna Wiebe: Okay. Amazing. Amy, that was awesome. Thank you so much. You’re getting so many thanks in the chat as well, and you did earlier too. I know people that had to go but that was awesome. The replay will be available. We have chatted out the links. Sarah, if you could chat those out one last time? One is to the tool Karooya, we think its pronounced, and the other is to get that PDF that Amy was filling in today so you can use it for yourself, your clients, your company, whatever it might be. Amy, you’re also on Twitter @amyppc?

Amy Hebdon: That is it, yes.

Joanna Wiebe: Yes. Is there anywhere else people can find you and learn things from you?

Amy Hebdon: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on our website paidsearchmagic.com. That hopefully will get a refresh, a rebranding very soon, but I’m still there. Even though it’s not pretty, it’s still there right now, you can find it there.

Joanna Wiebe: Amazing. Okay. Amy, thanks again. Thank you everybody for attending and your great questions, and we will see you in our next tutorial Tuesday. Thanks guys.

Amy Hebdon: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Joanna Wiebe: Thank you. Bye.

Amy Hebdon: Bye.