Over the past few weeks you’ve learned about seasonal advertising, understanding your clienteles’ needs, creating a campaign that highlights those needs and addresses them using language that elicits an emotional response. We’ve validated, to some degree, our suspicions about the seasonal trends of our market using keyword trending resources. We’ve discovered which keywords are most often used to search for our type of services and we’ve used those keywords in our advertisement copy. The last step is the testing phase phase of our marketing campaign. Since we don’t have much time left we’ll have to limit our test to 5-7 days. During this testing phase we will of course be driving qualified traffic to our website so it won’t exactly be lost time! Let’s get started.

If you have not already done so, please create a Google AdWords account by visiting http://www.adwords.google.com Once you have your account you will need to create a campaign and a keyword list. Creating a quality keyword list is no easy thing. I suggest you read Google’s help documentation as you set up your campaign. With a local advertising campaign (like yours) you may want to start out with “broad match” keywords.

There are  four keyword matching options that will determine which searches can trigger your ads to appear.

Keywords can have one of the following four settings. The following keyword punctuation examples are standard to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. To use a matching option, add the appropriate punctuation to your keyword:

1. Broad match: keyword
   Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations. For example, if your broad match keyword was dog walking services your ad could be triggered by searches for dog walking business, dog walking service, and even pet sitting services in some cases. It depends on Google’s algorithms and that’s why you must be vigilant in your monitoring of your broad match keyword campaign. If you notice your ads are being triggered by irrelevant search terms you will want to add those terms to your AdGroup or campaign as negative keywords to keep your ads from showing for those searches. For example, if you notice a lot of searches for dog kennels, you might want to ad -kennels as a negative search term, since you don’t offer that service.
2. Phrase match: “keyword”
   Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase. For example, your keyword is “dog walking services”, and someone searches for dog walking services in Los Angeles, your ad would be triggered.
3. Exact match: [keyword]
   Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively. Unlike phrase match, exact match will only match the keyword if it’s entered exactly as the one in your campaign. So a search for dog walking services will not trigger your keyword [dog walking service] because they aren’t exactly matching.
4. Negative match: -keyword
   Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term. As explained above in broad match. For example, adding the negative keyword -kennel to your campaign or AdGroup will stop your ad from appearing when those terms are included in a search.

Depending on the options you choose you will receive more impressions, clicks and potential clients, while others you may get fewer impressions but your targeting will be more precise. There is a lot of testing and I wont pretend that it’s easy to create a winning campaign on your first try. There is some trial and error. I would not advertising in Google’s content network until you have created a profitable search targeting campaign.

So how do I test my ad copy?

Once you have created your keyword list you’ll want to start creating ads. Considering our target market for this campaign you’ll want to craft your campaign around that theme. You’ll want to mix and match headlines, body, and call to action statements. You’ll also want to set your ads to ROTATE. Google’s default setting is to show the best performing ad more often. You don’t want that. You want to see the data for your self and figure out which copy is outperforming the rest, and why. Take a look at this example:

Dog Walking Services
Don’t Let Icy Winter Streets
Keep Your Locked Inside!
www.example.com

or

Dog Walking Services
Don’t Let Icy Winter Streets
Keep Your Dog Trapped Inside!
www.example.com

The above example is testing one word vs. another, “locked” and “trapped” on the negative theme of avoiding ice and winter cold. Another example could be:

Dog Walking Services
Our Walkers Brave The Winter
So You Don’t Have To!
www.example.com

In this example we are testing a variation on the theme which avoids severe negatives like in the above examples. Lastly a more traditional ad would include a direct call to action such as this:

Dog Walking Service
Professional, Reliable And
Affordable. Visit Us Today!
www.example.com

You can then test different variations of each theme. Try substituting different words or ways of saying the same thing.

Once you’ve created your ad variations you’ll want to activate your campaign, setting an affordable budget, and monitor it closely adding negative keywords if necessary. Once you have enough data you can decide which copy is performing better and create some new ads incorporating the best copy from all your ads into one super ad which you will use from that point on while deleting the old ads. This copy can then be used in other advertising mediums such as newspaper, email, classifieds, Craigslist, fliers, mass mailings, etc.