Artdomain Art Marketing Blog

In my first article ‘Google AdWords to Promote your Art’ I looked at why you may want to use Google AdWords to promote your art to a larger audience.  In this second article, I will walk you through how to get started with AdWords, choose your keywords, bid on those keywords, and set your adverts up and running.

To start with you need to set up a Google AdWords account.

1. Set up your AdWords account
    
   Go to Google AdWords  and click on the ‘Start Now’ button, then select ‘Starter Edition’ and click ‘Continue’.  At the next page you need to ‘Create Google Account’.  Choose the first option if you already have an email address and password you already use with Google services like AdSense, Google Mail, Orkut or iGoogle.  Choose the second option if you don’t, and fill in your email address, chosen password and copy the visual verification word on display.
    
   Click on ‘Continue’ then choose the currency in which you want to pay any charges on your Google AdWords account, then click ‘Continue’ and your account info will be processed.  Check your email and click on the link in the ‘Google AdWords Account Verification Email’ to activate your account.
    
   Now sign into Google AdWords account using the email address and password you have just set up.
    
2. Choosing your Keywords
    
   Don’t launch straight into the ‘Create your first Campaign’ option yet because, if you do, you will be creating a campaign without any research on what your keywords will be.  Instead, from the green bar at the top of the page, choose the ‘Tools’ option, then choose ‘Keyword tool’ on the left hand side.
    
   Now enter one keyword or phrase per line in the white box that describes your art i.e. oil painting, figurative (each on separate lines), then click ‘Get Keyword Ideas’.  This will result in quite a number of suggested keywords.  Now click on ‘Add’ beside any that you think is relevant to your art work.  If you make a mistake just click on ‘Remove’.
    
   Once you’ve been through the list and chosen all the keywords relevant to your art, then click on the drop down box ‘Match Type’ and change from ‘Broad’ to ’Phrase’:
   
   Now go through your list again adding the same words as previous to your list.  Change the drop down ’Match Type’ box to ‘Exact’, and repeat the previous steps.  Basically you can specify your search-targeted keywords as broad matches, phrase matches, exact matches or negative matches. These options can help you refine your ad targeting, spending less on irrelevant clicks so that you increase your return on investment. Here’s a link at Google AdWords Help to give you more info on Keyword Matching Options.
    
   Lastly you want to choose from the drop down ‘Match Type’ box the ‘Negative’ option.  You now go through and choose the words that do not relate to what your art is about i.e. in the figurative oil painting keywords example above, you could choose the words ”reproduction”, “cleaning”, “classes” etc.  What you are doing here is telling Adwords what your web site is NOT about, to ensure that your advert is not displayed for these searches.  The reason you don’t want this is that your advert will not be relevant to the searcher, and will not be clicked on, or if it is clicked on the searcher will ‘bounce’ straight back to the search page to continue looking for what they wanted.  Both of these actions lower your ’Click Through’ rate and advert relevance score (more later on the importance of Click Through rates!).
    
   Once you’ve got all your keywords listed on the right hand side, choose ‘Download these Keywords: Text’ option.  This will attempt to download the words into a Text / Notepad file.  If your computer automatically stops downloads, just click on the box that pops up at the top of your screen saying ‘click here to allow downloads’.  Then you may have to click on the ‘Download these Keywords: Text’ option again to start the download.  You will be asked if you want to open or save the file - choose ‘Save’ and save it to a location where you will be able to find it again.
    
   Ok, you’ve got your keywords.  Now it’s time to…..
    
3. Create your first Campaign
    
   Click on the ‘Create your first Campaign’ button.  Choose the language(s) your customers speak.  Next choose where your customers are located.  To choose more countries click on the ‘Change Targeting’ link and you can then choose from individual countries and country bundles i.e. North America.  You can remove individual countries by clicking on the cross next to the country name.  Once you are done choosing click the ‘Done’ button then click on the ‘Continue’ button.
    
   Now you come to the ‘Create an Ad’ page.   Before you get cracking creating the text for an advert you want to do a bit of sorting of your keywords, so open that keyword text file that you saved earlier on your computer.  The essential thing to do when creating an advert is to break your keywords up into relating groups, then design an advert around each of those groups.  For example, the keywords gathered for the ‘figurative oil painting’ example were:
    
   figurative
   figurative artists
    
   figurative painting
    
   oil painting
    
   oil painting artist
   oil painting artists
     
   oil painting on canvas
    
   oil painting portrait
    
   oil paintings
   oil paintings for sale
   oil painting for sale
    
   original oil painting
   original oil paintings
    
   I’ve separated the keywords with a line break once the keywords change theme slightly i.e. ‘oil painting artists’ is different from the ‘oil painting for sale’ theme.  These are your Ad Groups.  You will want to create a separate advert for each group.  The reason is that Google makes the searched for words bold if it finds them in an advert.  So if someone is searching for ‘oil painting artist’ then your advert with the title ‘Oil Painting Artist’, would all be highlighted in bold and would be more eye-catching to the searcher, therefore more likely to be clicked on. 
    
   Here it is a good idea to open a new browser window and do a search on Google for some of the keyword combinations you are targeting.  So carrying on the example of ‘oil painting artist’, when this is entered into a Google search, you can see what adverts come up top.  You can see that the words ‘oil painting’ are all highlighted in all the current ads.  It is a good idea to review the top ads and use the best adverts as inspiration for your own advert text.  
     
   Ok, back to the ‘Create an Ad’ page.  Starting with your first keyword group from your list that has the words ’figurative’ and ‘figurative artists’.  For our first ad we want to create the advert text around these keywords.  On your other open browser window, check on a Google search to see what the competition is doing, then enter your own text into your advert using your keywords in your title and in the body of the text if you can incorporate.
    
   The display URL (web site address) and the destination URL don’t have to be exactly the same but they do need to be the correct web site, with the destination URL possibly referring to some folder or file within the site.
   
    
   Next click on ‘Continue’ and Google will analyse your advert and bring you to a ‘Choose Keywords’ page where it will give you loads of keywords based on your advert and the website you are advertising.  Open your keywords text file that you have saved on your hard drive and paste in the few keywords that you are targeting with this advert.  Remember to include the phrase matches, exact matches or negative matches relevant to your keywords i.e. for our example figurative and figurative artists that we are targeting with this advert, include figurative, figurative artists, “figurative”, “figurative artists”, [figurative], [figurative artists], -language, -sculpture, -techniques. Look through AdWords suggested keywords to see if any are relevant to the title of your advert, but don’t get carried away with any other keywords that are not relevant to the title.  If you see any that you like drop them into another Notepad text file and create a specific Ad Group around them later.
    
   The most important element in creating an effective AdWords campaign is to get your targeted keywords in the title and advert text, as these will be marked in bold by Google to help the viewer see the searched for words on scanning the search results.  Secondary to that, the text should read interestingly or entice the viewer to click.
    
   Click on ‘Continue’ and you will get to the ‘Set Pricing’ page.  Enter your daily budget for your AdWords campaign. Start small until you get a hang of what you are doing.  Enter the Maximum CPC bid - this is the maximum Cost per Click that you are willing to pay.  You can enter here 0.09, then click on ’View Traffic Estimator’ link and a box like the one below will appear.
   
    
   You will see from our keyword examples that the word ‘figurative’ is inactive for the search because the bid of 0.09 is too low and the minimum bid is 0.10.  You can then go back up and revise your bid to 0.10.  You can change individual bids once the ad is active.
    
   Click on ‘Continue’ and on the next page review your AdWords selections.  If you are happy with the selections you have made then click on ‘Continue to Billing’ where you will set up the way you wish to pay Google for the Clicks you purchase.  You can choose ‘Post pay’ billing to pay after you have received Clicks, or ‘Pre pay’ billing to pay a certain amount from your bank or debit / credit card and receive Clicks up to that amount.  This may be your preferred option to start with if you want to ensure total control over your spending.
    
   Once you have completed this, your advert will be live (may take some time to show up in search results) and you will be navigated to the Google AdWords Account snapshot page.
    
   There is an important thing to do now.  In the green ‘Campaign Management’ tab, click on the ‘Campaign Summary’ link.  Further down the page you will see the name of the campaign you created - click on the tick box beside your campaign name and then click on the box that says ‘Edit settings’.  At the right hand column all the boxes will be ticked in the Network Section.  You want to uncheck the box beside ‘Content Network’.  This will automatically uncheck the box beside ‘Content Bids’.  Then click on ‘Save Changes’ at the bottom of the page.
   
    
   The reason you want to do this is because initially, you only want to be receiving clicks from viewers actively searching on your search terms via Google search, and not from viewers of Google’s content network i.e. news pages and blogs, as these viewers are surfing the web rather than actively seeking solutions / products on the web.
    
4. Create New Ad Groups
    
   So from the above step 3 you have created your first Campaign.  You may now want to rename the Campaign to something meaningful to reflect what all your keywords are about.  In this instance we could call it ‘Figurative Oil Painting’ as this was the initial words we used to create our keywords.  So go back to your ‘Campaign Summary’ page and click on the tick box next to the default Campaign name to change it.  Once you’ve done that, click on the new Campaign name to view the Ad Groups within this campaign.  It would be helpful now to also change the name of the first Ad Group you created, which, in our example, we based on the keywords ‘Figurative’ and ‘Figurative Artists’, so change the default Ad Group name to ‘Figurative Artists’.
    
   Now you want to create a new Ad Group for your next group of keywords, which in our example is ‘figurative painting’.  You would go through step 3 again for this group of keywords, creating the advert around this, and including the broad matches, phrase matches, exact matches and negative matches.
    
   You would continue doing this, setting up each Ad Group until you have done all the keyword groups - in our example you would have 8 Ad Groups with names such as Figurative artists,
   Figurative painting, Oil painting, Oil painting artists,  Oil painting on canvas, Oil painting portrait, Oil paintings for sale, Original oil paintings.
    
   You don’t have to keep setting your daily budget as you have already set this in your Campaign.  This budget covers clicks on all your Ad Groups within that Campaign. You would just have to set the CPC for each keyword i.e. 0.10.

Okay, that’s your AdWords campaign up and running.  In the next Installment of ‘Artists & Google AdWords’ we will look at how to work Google AdWords so that you are paying the least amount possible for the maximum clicks.
 
 
Related Posts: Google AdWords to Promote your Art - Artists & Google AdWords Article Part 1