You can easily lose your shirt if you don’t keep a careful eye on your adwords campaign. SEM is a jumping off point for a lot of my projects. By testing ads and keywords in adwords, I can easily gauge the interest of visitors and gain a better understanding on product/market fit. You can do customer development this way as well by setting up a PPC campaign and driving your customers to a landing page which collects their contact information. From their, you reach out to them directly either by email or phone. Incentivize the optin so that the visitor gets the most value, by providing something like an ebook or helpful tips.

1. Reproduce the Conversation In Your Customer’s Head

Imagine yourself in the place of a prospective visitor. What types of keywords would you type in? Think about the problems that your customer would like to solve. If they are looking for

2. Use As Many Adgroups as Possible

The reason why you will want to separate the campaign into many different adgroups is because you want each keyword targetted in each ad.

3. Create Alignment Between Your Ads, Keywords, and Product Page

When a visitor types in a keyword to find your ad in Google, do they get exactly what they are looking for? There should be no surprises when the visitor comes to your site. Bait-and-switch does not work when you are trying to build customer value and trust.

4. Use Tools

Use the Adwords desktop editor tool that Google provides. There are also tools out there that help you create adgroups in bulk. Believe me, this has helped save me countless hours having to manually create new adgroups. The best SEM marketers out there commonly use these tools as well as homegrown tools that optimize landing pages, adgroups, and keywords.

5. Do Your Keyword Research

Again, it comes back to reproducing the conversation going on in your visitor’s head. If a visitor types in “solar installer”, they hope to find information about a construction company that installs solar panels on roofs not some solar product or even worse, diet pills. Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. Use the Google External Keyword tool to start your keyword research. There are other tools like Market Samurai that are incredibly helpful in doing keyword research.

6. Write Quality Ads

Start off by looking at what your competitors are doing. What makes their ads stand out? Are the titles eye-catching? Do they outline a certain problem that is common to your niche in the lines 2 and 3? Start off by reproducing ads that work in other industries or competitors ads.

7. Optimize!

In the first week, you should be checking your campaign everyday and making tweaks to optimize your quality score. After you feel that you are bidding the right price range and have a high quality score, start optimizing once every week for the following 4 weeks. After that, make sure to check it monthly or more frequently.