From the example provided its clear to see the location targeted is Australia as the campaign is for the Australian audience. It is easy to miss when starting out as i believe the default would be the US or whichever area you state when first signing up. If your working on accounts across different countries and regions its essential you change this location targeting or your Ad’s for the UK may end up on the American Google search and if your site is only targeting the UK this is a waste of traffic and a waste of Google Adwords spend. Not something i recommend of course.

Locating within Google Adword Editor:

As a huge fan of the Google Adword editor (although it can be ridiculously slow) i would recommend using this for the majority of your Google Adwords implementation stage. To locate this setting within Google Adwords editor you have to locate the campaigns interface and you will be greeted with the following:

Once this is located you can press the edit Button and you will then be greeted with the following screen:

As you can see from the screenshot it provides you with all the locations you can target through Location targeting in Google Adwords. To select more than one location hold down ctrl and click the locations you want to select. Its a very simple but essential fundamental of Google Adwords activity.

Targeting specific locations within a Single Country:

As evident from the above screenshot it is possible to target select locations within a Country. This only works when selecting one country to target.

This can be key when your target audience only involves people from a specific region. For example: If you were a Plummer but only had the capability to target people within a specific region then it would make sense for your Adwords targeting to specify that region only. Jim the Plummer from Leeds can only deal with clients within the Leeds area. He would therefore select the following criteria.

Jim’s Pay per click marketing would then target only search criteria within the Leeds area. This again is another crucial part of Adwords if you are looking to run a small niche Adwords campaign only targeting the select people who fit under the your business strategy.

As you can see from the examples, Google Adwords location targeting is an essential part of successful pay per click implementation. Targeting the wrong areas, the wrong clients and ultimately the wrong clicks can have detrimental affects on your budget. Its the small minor details which make the difference. Having the right criteria in place can help you on the right path to ppc success. Thanks for reading guys,

Firstly i want to say i do not want those PPC experts to throw the book at me and preach the importance of negative keywords. Sure for some campaigns they can be crucial however if the correct research is conducted across the market you are looking to launch your campaigns in then surely we can go without keywords.

Google Adwords data centre offer the following example surrounding negative keywords:

II. Example

The negative keyword –free trial would prevent your ads from showing on any search queries containing the terms free and trial. It would not prevent your ads from showing on variations of these terms, however. It also would not prevent your ads from showing on search queries that only contain one of the terms.

For instance, the search queries one-day trial and free test could trigger your ads, while free one-day trial could not.

No doubt this explains the importance of negative keywords to the beginning however i tend to stay away from negative keywords and research my campaigns in depth in order to cover all potential keyword avenue’s without the use of negative keywords. Let me explain using an example I previously used in my post on the difference between Broad,phrase and exact match keywords.

I recently worked with clients who offer an ecommerce website for water features. I typically research the niche market the campaign is aimed towards and understand the constrains of the clients budget, the average cost per click on the top performing keywords amongst other techniques.

The introduction of the broad, exact and phrase match keywords has enabled us marketers to almost disregard negative keywords. In my humble opinion a successful paid search marketing campaign will discover all the possibilities of search aligned to a specific market. Granted there is the ability for people to misspell certain words however when you are working within a constraint budget its essential that you are targeting those specific keywords and those keywords only. Under these conditions i tend to adopt both phrase and exact match types ad opposed to broad match with negative keywords. This gives a more specific search criteria.

Researching your target market in detail and making sure you target all possible keywords which are typically searched is for me the most cost effective method available. Again i am not disputing negative keywords are important under some campaigns however typically i tend to adopt the use to tailored keywords on both phrase and exact match. This also helps you indentify what keywords are converting and gives a clearer picture on how your account is performing on a keyword to keyword basis.

Thanks for reading guys. Would love to hear your opinions.

Ryan

What is it?
Ad scheduling can be defined down to the minor detail of a 30 minute period. For example: Running a pay per click campaign for a company who’s opening hours are Monday to Friday 9-5, it could be of benefit to tailor the ad scheduling to mirror the opening hours. A business not open at weekends but advertising on weekends could waste marketing funds by having Google Ad’s showing through the weekend.

I am currently working on Paid search for an E commerce company who’s limited budget needs to spread across the month proportionally. With this in mind we took the decision to schedule ad’s to disappear through the times of 9-11:30am and 2-4pm Monday to Friday as these are the times when the majority of potential customers will be working. This scheduling allows the budget to be allocated to times where people are more likely to convert.

How to Schedule Ad’s within Google Adwords:
Scheduling your Ad’s within Google adwords is another simple process however if your unaware as to where to locate this information its a difficult procedure. Everything is simple when you know how.

Logging into your Google adwords account simple click on your Campaigns tab at the top of the website.

You will then reach the campaigns page. From this page click the Settings tab and you will see a list of your campaigns and the following information:

You will see the campaigns,location,language,networks and devices,bid type, budget end date and ad scheduling tabs followed by information relating to each one of your campaigns. Click on the corresponding Ad scheduling option and you will be presented with the following screen.

Click on the day of the week you would like to schedule and implement the times you would like your ad’s to appear. As you can see i have constructed the following:

Once this is completed you can press the OK button and this will schedule the ad’s to appear at the times selected for the day selected. To copy these across the whole 7 days of the week or the 5 working days then click the copy tabs and you will be met with the following command.

Clicking this will allow the scheduling to be copied across the days of the week you desire.

How can Ad scheduling Benefit my account?:
Ad scheduling is a fundamental aspect of Paid search advertising. Implementing Ad scheduling allows costs to be controlled over periods of the day which are unlikely to convert for the type of business your marketing is targeting.

Furthermore the inclusion of ad scheduling allows more of your budget to be used on the times of day where people are more likely to convert. This enables budget to be used appropriately and more effectively in meeting your marketing goals.

Thanks for reading.

Standard Delivery:

Standard delivery option is automatically selected for you when producing a new Google Adwords account. This is best for campaigns with limited budget as it evenly spreads your ad impressions throughout the day so therefore you don’t accrue all your impressions early on in the day and miss out on exposure.

I would recommend this for any start up website as it is the less aggressive of the approaches. It is also essentially important when using broad keywords as the amount of impressions tend to be higher than that of longer tailed keywords, thus having a potentially higher probability of receiving multiple clicks.

Accelerated Delivery:
Accelerated delivery is the more aggressive approach for Ad showing within the Google search engine. This essentially increases the likelihood that your budget will be exhausted throughout the day as Google will show your ad’s as often as possible.

Accelerated delivery is recommended to those high expenditure accounts looking to receive maximum exposure through Paid search. If you tend to use predominantly broad keywords then there is a high possibility you will exhaust your budget with this method over the normal standard delivery.

Where can i find this option?
If you are new to the Google Adwords then you may struggle to find this function.

Firstly by clicking on the Campaign tab followed by the settings tab you will be presented with a list of your Campaigns. Simply click on one campaign and you will uncover the necessary information on this campaign structured as followed:

You will see within the Budget and Bidding section there is a ‘Position preference and delivery method’ drop down. Clicking on edit button aligned with ‘Delivery method’ will reveal the following:

Simple click on the desired method and press save. This needs to be implemented across all Campaigns for the desired affect through your Adwords account.

Why do this?:
Ad showing is a crucial aspect of Paid search management sometimes missed by those within the industry. Although its not a crucial fundamental of paid search production it can help bring your companies exposure to the market quicker and more effectively than sticking with the standard method. I would however stress that this is best placed within the larger organisations who’s budget can mirror the potential exposure they will be gaining from this.

Thanks for reading,

Match types although extremely simple are an important component of pay per click marketing. The difference between match types can be the difference between spending on terms which just aren’t going to convert into sustainable traffic or having the money proportioned to more sustainable keywords.

To start this tutorial we are going to use the Google keyword tool. Which can be found by clicking here.

The Google keyword tool is commonly used within the initial start up period of a Pay per click campaign. Sure you can produce these keywords within your own means however the Google keyword tool helps establish the highly search terms and those broad terms which may cost you financially for the conversion.

For the means of this exercise i am going to search under the term ‘water features’. The results within the screenshot below indicate the search volume of the keywords when on broad match. This can be changed to phrase or exact match by clicking on the ‘Match type’ option in the far right of the screen as indicated below.

So what does this tell you about the different keyword match types? It actually tells us quite a vast amount of information and helps explain what these three terms consist of.

Phrase match keyword example;

Exact match keyword example;

As you can see from the examples these fluctuate with the match type. So your asking the question. ‘What does this determine?’

In a nut shell is the only way to describe these as they are particularly simple. They are as followed:

Broad Match: The keywords using the term broad match can be shown in any order with any other words.

For example. The term ‘water feature’ could be shown with any variation. i.e.: water pump feature, water house feature, feature water house, feature hose water.

Phrase Match: The keywords are used in the order shown with other words for variation.

For example: The term ‘water feature’ could be shown with another word accompanying this term. i.e.: gold water feature, water feature blue, bespoke water feature, elegant water feature.

Exact Match: Exact match keywords are exactly how they sound, an exact match of the keyword searched for.

For example: The term ‘water feature’ would only be shown when that term is typed in.

The exercise of using broad, phrase and exact is an important component of successful paid search marketing. Using the broad match for a term with 4 million searches would open your account up to high expenditure without relevant return. Using the broad match term can typically equate to less conversions but more impressions and clicks. For a client with a endless flow of finances for their online marketing campaign, this may be the answer however if you are looking to target specific terms then broad and phrase match are the way forward. These will decrease your volume of clicks and impressions however the traffic will be more relevant to the service you offer.

Use match type’s wisely. They can be the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one.

Thanks for reading.