You need to be logged in to a Google account to see it, but if you are, you’ll see that results now start to complete before you’ve even finished typing your query. Google uses what you’ve typed so far, combined with where you are and what you’ve searched for previously, to predict what query you’re trying to make and returns search results accordingly. These results will likely change as you finish typing your search term. The aim is to make it much faster to find the information you’re after by delivering the answer Google thinks you need before you’ve even finished asking the question – Google predicts that Instant will shave between two and five seconds off the average search query.

If search results – both paid and natural – are being returned before a query is even completed, though, what impact will that have on your pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts?

For PPC, let’s take it straight from the horse’s mouth. Google says that ad impressions will be counted in these circumstances:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

So, their thinking seems to be that impressions will still only be counted if there’s a reasonable chance that the person performing the search could be interested in your ad. Great!

At this stage, it’s too early to predict exactly what sort of effect the new system will have on your PPC campaign as a whole. Google’s expressed hope is that things will improve for you as Google Instant “helps people search using terms that more directly connect them with the answers they need”, but the best course of action is to continue to monitor your pay-per-click advertising campaign closely and adjust if necessary.

SEO can be a trickier beast to predict. Google Instant may make it more challenging for SEO experts to use search engine results pages (SERPs) to inform their activities, but at the moment, it’s not thought within the industry that Instant will have a tremendous impact on what you should actually do from the point of view of optimising your website. If you need a refresher course on SEO best practice, take a look at our Bibliography of SEO Resources and our  SEO Tips blog series.

So, for now, it’s carry on as you were but keep a close eye on your campaigns (we hope you do that anyway, of course!). We’ll keep you updated if we find Google Instant has really changed the landscape.

What’s the Google Display Network?

First things, first! Until very recently, this was known as the Google Content Network, and it’s a way to get your advertising out to a broader market than just Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). You can use the network to display text, image, video and rich media ads across YouTube, Google properties, and display partners, so not only are you able to reach a wider audience but if you can rustle up a banner ad or promotional video you’ve a chance to use visual media to get your message across.

Isn’t that a bit of a scattergun approach?

Only if that’s how you set it up! You can target your ads on the Display Network, just as you can target your standard text ads for the SERPs. First, you can use keywords to target your ads to types of website in much the same way as you use them to target ads to search results – Google uses the example of a photography equipment seller using ‘digital camera’ to get placed on photography blogs and camera review sites. Second, you can select specific sites within the network on which you’d like your ads to be displayed – and exclude sites on which you’d rather not be! Thirdly, if you know your customers tend to be a particular demographic, there are plenty of sites within the network that allow you to bid for your ads to be shown to a particular age or sex. Finally, you can try remarketing. We’ll talk in more depth about this in a future blog article, but essentially you can use remarketing to ensure your adverts are displayed to people who have previously browsed your website, keeping you at the forefront of their minds and encouraging them to prise open their wallets.

How do I get started then?

Off to Google AdWords with you! Assuming you already have an AdWords account and have already thought a little about the types of ads you’d like to include on the Display Network, you’ll need to create a new campaign for your new activity. Generally, this works as it normally does – set your keywords, bids, ads and budget as normal – but when you add the new campaign you’ll see the following under ‘Networks and devices’:

We recommend that you select ‘Relevant pages only on the placements and audiences that I manage’ if you want maximum ability to fine tune, but ‘Relevant pages across the entire network’ will give you a broader reach and may be a good way to learn what works best for you. You’ll see there’s a ‘Networks’ tab in your ‘Campaigns’ page, too – you can check things out in more detail there.

Google also helpfully include a Display Ad Builder tool that you can try.

How do I measure and manage my Display Network activity?

Once you’ve got your campaign up and running, you can measure its effectiveness and hone your approach just as you can with standard paid search activity. We suggest that it’s worth heading to the Reports section of AdWords! For starters, once you’ve been up and running for a while, exclude any website which hasn’t generated any conversions – what’s the point in showing ‘em your ad if they’re just not interested in buying what you’re selling? As with standard PPC, of course, you can use negative keywords to exclude types of sites which aren’t relevant, adjust your bids according to performance and budget, and so on.

Interested in learning more?

Take a look at what the experts have to say – here’s some information straight from the horse’s mouth about the Google Display Network and about remarketing.

Happy that your carefully thought out ad campaign is live? Ready to put your feet up and wait for the sales to come rolling in? Well, if you want to get the best results from PPC (and spend your precious budget wisely), you can’t just launch your campaign and forget about it – you’ll need to keep on top of it. So, here are a few things to think about when managing your campaign.

Pruning

Once your campaign’s been up and running for a little while, you’ll be able to figure out which of your creatives and keywords are doing well and which aren’t. Go through your campaigns and look for keywords which have generated a cost but no sales/leads and put them on ‘pause’ to stop you burning money on keywords which don’t result in a conversion to sale/lead.

Take a look at the performance of your creatives and pause anything which has a very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and/or conversion rate. If the CTR is low, it means that for whatever reason that creative is just not grabbing the attention of the people who see it – so, time to rethink. If you’re getting the clickthroughs but the conversion rate is poor, people were interested in what your ad said but not persuaded by what they found on your website. Put your brutally honest hat on and ask yourself a few questions: are you overpromising in your ad so that people are arriving at your site and finding out the tempting offer isn’t so tempting after all? is your website as clear as it could be? have you made sure that the creative links directly to the relevant page rather than tipping them in at the home page and making them rummage? do you need more of a feel of ‘you can trust us’ about your website (e.g. clear design, recognisable partner and/or payment provider logos, a postal address and phone number, testimonials, clear delivery/returns/privacy policy information, etc)?

Expanding

Now that you’ve paused the things which aren’t working, you should have a bit of budget freed up to push towards the things which are. So:

- Where keywords are generating leads at a good price, bid up and see if you can grab a bit more of the traffic

- While you’re at it, if you’ve got keywords which are generating cost-effective leads, think about how you can expand upon them. Can you create new keyword phrases which are similar? Perhaps consider relaxing the match type from ‘Exact’ to ‘Phrase’ or even ‘Broad’ if you’re confident your budget can cope and you want to expand your reach?

- You’ll have some creatives that are working well and have good CTRs and conversion rates, which should give you a feel for what entices your potential customers to both click on your ad and, crucially, make the purchase. Try writing new variations of your creative using these as a guide.

- Use the Search Query Report (here’s Google on how to set that up) to identify possible new keywords to add to your campaign. You can also use it to identify negative keywords that you can add.

Negative keywords?

Yep! As well as adding keywords for which you do want your ads to appear, you can stipulate keywords for which you don’t want your ads to appear. Why would you do that? Well, imagine that you sell clothing but only stock womenswear and your footwear range doesn’t include trainers. There’s no point in your ad appearing to people interested in trainers or menswear as you’ll just be racking up clickthrough costs when you don’t stock the product the searcher was after and so won’t make a sale. If you add ‘trainers’, ‘menswear’, ‘y-fronts’ etc to your negative keywords list, you’ll guard against this and thus make your campaign more efficient.

Here’s a bit more from Google about negative keywords.

Interested in more about PPC?

And that’s the end of our walkthrough for setting up and managing a pay per click advertising campaign – I hope it’s been helpful for you! But, it’s such an important (and sometimes mysterious!) subject that there’s plenty more I could talk about. I could happily waffle on about random aspects of PPC, but this is the perfect opportunity for you to direct what I talk about by asking those niggling questions. So, do you have any burning questions about PPC? Is there something which has been confusing you since you first logged in to Google AdWords? Leave a comment and we’ll use your questions as the starting point for the next PPC article.

Previous articles in this series:

An Introduction to Pay Per Click Advertising

A little about PPC match types

Writing your ads

Budgets for PPC campaigns

How deep are your pockets?

First things first – how much money do you have available for your PPC advertising campaign? If you’ve claimed your Google AdWords vouchers, free with web hosting, Virtual Private Servers, online shops and instant websites, you’ll have a bit of a head start for the launch of your campaign  That aside, though, for the sake of keeping track of your finances you really need to be thinking in terms of a monthly budget.

So, what can you spare? Figure out from that how much you want to spend per day. You’ll see that Google recommends a daily budget based on your keywords – if your budget is lower than this, Google aims to deliver the ads when demand is greatest, which means you should have presence at the busiest times but your ads won’t be available to be seen 24/7. The trick is to find the best possible balance between what you can afford and what the market will deliver.

Here’s a bit more from Google about campaign budgets.

Setting your bid prices

You’ll also need to give some thought to bid prices. For each keyword, you’ll need to consider both what you can afford to bid and what the market price is – if other people are paying over £1 per click your ad won’t get displayed if you’re only prepared to pay 50p. Inevitably, some keywords will cost more than others because they’re more popular so you’ll need to balance the higher cost per click against the higher potential rewards of a popular search term.

Here’s a bit more from Google about bidding.

It’s time to launch your campaign!

Now that you’ve built your campaign and sorted out your budget it’s finally time to go live! Once you’ve done so, you can check that your ads are appearing without racking up impressions at: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Don’t just fire your campaign off into the ether and leave Google to it, though – to get the best results you need to keep an eye on how all your keywords are performing. We’ll talk a bit more about ongoing campaign management in the next article.

Earlier Articles in this series

Part One – Generating your keywords

Part Two – Keyword match types

Part Three – Writing your adverts

Differentiate yourself

There’s a lot of competition out there, so have a think about what makes your particular products and services unique – are you the cheapest in the market? Do you have the widest range of widgets? Do you have an amazing price promise? Try to get these features into your ads to help you stand out from the crowd.

Keep it brief.

You’re limited to 25 characters for your headline, 70 for the main body of your ad, which will be split across two lines when it appears in Google, and 35 characters for a display URL (this doesn’t have to be the full destination URL if that’s too long, but it should be on the same domain and look relevant). You’re looking for snappy, concentrated little sales pitches. If you can’t say everything you want to say about a particular product in one ad…

…Create variations.

Since each ad has such limited space, you can’t expect one ad to appeal to all people or promote all aspects of your product or service. Three variations of each is a good start. This is the place to experiment with different approaches to promoting the same thing – you’ll be able to view the sales stats later on and see which is the most successful.

Keep your headlines relevant.

You’ve already identified your keyword search terms, so make sure you match your headline to the search terms within each ad group.

Include a price in the headline

People are always enticed by a strong pricepoint, so if yours looks competitive there’s a good chance you’ll get the clicks. But there is a bit more to it than that – if someone clicks on an ad with a price in it, it’s likely they’re happy to pay that price – which means you won’t be paying for clicks from people who’d rather pay less. Plus, everyone loves a discount so if you’ve got a special offer running then phrases like ‘save now’ and ‘X% off’ are a great idea.

Don’t forget your call to action!

Your ads will work better if you tell people what you want them to do, so include active phrases like ‘reserve’, ‘research, and ‘discover’. A sense of urgency helps, too, so try phrases like ‘Book now’, ‘Buy now’ and ‘Sign up today’. As Google points out, ‘find’ might be relevant but it doesn’t actively encourage a sale!

Target your links.

You’re much more likely to get conversions from your ads if they send customers directly to the most relevant page than if you send them to your homepage and expect them to rummage for the information they were after. Our general web hosting ads, for example, send people directly to the web hosting section of the website rather than pointing them at the www.daily.co.uk homepage.

Here’s a bit more from Google on creating your PPC ads

Next time, we’ll be delving into the money side of things with some thoughts on bid prices and budgeting. As ever, leave a comment or drop us a line if there’s something you’d like us to cover.

So, what’s next?

Within Google AdWords, there are several different settings for keyword match types – these determine the searches for which your adverts are likely to appear, so it’s important to understand what they all do. They are:

Broad match
This is the default setting for all keywords, and means that your ads may be displayed if the search is made using any of your keywords or phrases, in any order or combination. Your ads may also be displayed for searches whose keywords are similar to those of your keywords on broad match.

Leaving all your keywords set to broad match is certainly quicker, and will cast the net wide. But you should be aware that it’s the least finely targeted setting, and because of that you may burn through your budget more quickly.

Here’s a little more from Google on how broad match works.

Phrase Match
Phrase match narrows the reach a little. Your ads may be displayed any time someone searches for the exact words of your keyword phrase, in the order you have them.

Here’s a little more from Google on Phrase Match.

Exact Match
Exact match basically does what it says on the tin. If you choose this match type, your ads will only apply when your exact keyword phrase is used in the search, without any other words in the search. It does narrow the field considerably, but the real benefit is that the people who are served your ads are the very people most likely to be interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, your money will be spent targeting the people most likely to part with their money in your direction!

Here’s a little more from Google on Exact Match.

Negative Match
It’s also possible to use a negative keywords to prevent your ads being shown for any search which includes certain undesirable terms, say, the word ‘free’ if you never offer your products or services for free and don’t want people just clicking through to you in hopes of a freebie

Here’s a little more from Google on Negative Match.

So which match type to choose?
Good question! You’ll need to play around with your campaign to figure out how to deliver the best results for your money, but a good place to start if you have only a limited advertising budget is to launch all of your keywords on exact match only. If in time you want to increase your traffic and you have the budget to play with, add a few phrase matches in and see how it goes. Similarly, if you find you’re getting loads of traffic but no sales via a few keywords, add them to your negative keywords list.

Hopefully that’s given you a bit of an overview of how some of the nuts and bolts work on AdWords. Next time, we’ll take a look at how to write your ad creative. Also coming up in the series: setting your bid price, your daily budget, tracking, launch and management. If there’s something specific you’d like us to include, drop us a line at blog@daily.co.uk and we’ll see what we can do.

Well, if you’ve built your website with SEO in mind you’re off to a good start (and if you haven’t, here’s our trio of articles about search engine optimisation to guide you) in terms of organic traffic, though that won’t be immediate. So now you need to start thinking about actively advertising your site. One of the quickest, and arguably the most measurable, routes is Pay Per Click advertising: think the sponsored links at the top and down the right-hand side of any Google search you do. It’s quick, you can track where every penny goes, and it’s targeted at people who are already looking for something you provide – frankly, if you’ve got some budget to spare (or a free voucher with one of your Daily.co.uk services), why wouldn’t you do it?

So, where on earth do you start?
Don’t go running off to Google just yet – the most effective PPC campaigns are carefully planned, so you need to do some thinking before you sign up. You’ll be needing keywords to target, and it’s going to make your life much easier if you’ve thought about it in advance. The general consensus here is that the first things you should do when you’re considering a new campaign are to settle down with a cuppa and open up a brand new spreadsheet!

That done, you need to do some pondering and some research: think about what sort of keywords and keyword phrases you think people will use to find whatever it is that your website offers. Some things to try:

• Imagine you wanted to buy your products. Now do several searches for them (yes, all of the products or services you want to promote -it might be time consuming, but at least you’ve got a cuppa handy to keep you going!). Similar businesses show up? Fab, you’re on the right track. Make a note of what seemed to work.
• Take a look at the competition – explore their sites and find out what keywords they’re using in their site titles and description. Use these for inspiration
• Is your business specifically local? If so, don’t forget to include your place name – if you’re a hairdresser based in Northampton then ‘hairdresser’ on its own probably isn’t going to get you very relevant traffic, whereas ‘Northampton hairdresser’ is likely to be used by people who live nearby and are after your service: in other words, your target market.

Make a note of everything you’ve come up with so far. This is your starting point.

Expanding your keyword list
Now you’ve got your basic list, you can use online keyword suggestion tools to expand upon it. There’s a good one at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, but it’s also worth checking out http://www.google.com/insights/search for seasonal trends and related terms.

Impose some order on the chaos
By now, you’ve probably got an enormous and possibly unwieldy list of keywords and keyword phrases. So, how are you going to impose order on the chaos? Start by identifying some broad themes – for us, for example, it’s product types: Web Hosting, Domain Names, eShops and so on. These will form your ‘Campaigns’.

You’ll probably then want to break each campaign down further into several sets of related keywords – so, our Web Hosting campaign also includes ‘Linux web hosting’, ‘Windows web hosting’, ‘Low cost web hosting’ and so on.

What next?
You should now have a huge but well organised spreadsheet full of keywords and keyword phrases. This provides the basic structure of your pay-per-click campaign. I’d make sure you’ve got backups, if I were you!

Next, you’re going to need to decide on your preferred keyword match types, write some compelling creative and set your budget and bid prices. We’ll talk you through all of this, plus tracking and campaign management, in future articles, so subscribe to our RSS feed or keep checking back for updates.

If there’s anything specific you’d like us to cover, just drop us a line at blog@daily.co.uk and we’ll do our best!