In How to Sell Art Online: Adwords I talked about what Google Adwords is and why it’s important. Today I want to talk about the first step in setting up your Adwords advertising campaign: Keyword Research.
Yesterday someone asked me how companies know where to put their advertisements. It’s a great question, and unfortunately most small-business owners fail to ask themselves this question before they start spending their money. Many small-business owners choose to throw their money at the radio, television, or newspaper ads, without doing any research to see if their customers use those media as a place to find things to buy.
As an artist and small business owner you cannot afford to make these mistakes. You want to make sure that each dollar counts for something, right? Search engine marketing is arguably the single most cost effective and measurable form of marketing out there.
The Adwords Keyword Tool
You already set up your Adwords account, like I told you to, right? Go to the keyword tool, which you get to by clicking on the dropdown menu under Tools > Keyword Tool. You should get a screen that looks like this:
If you don’t have an Adwords account yet, you can access a stripped down version of this tool by going to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
What do you sell?
In this case we’re going to pretend that we sell bronze figurines. Type “bronze figurines” (no quotes) into the empty field and you’ll get this.
There are hundreds more results below this display that show all the different ways that people search for “bronze figurines.” These alternates include bronze horses, antique bronze figurines, cast bronze figurines, and much, much more.
Doing this a few times will give you some ideas for some of the most common ways people look for what you sell. You can write these down or use the export tool on the left to download a spreadsheet. I would recommend starting with a list of about 10 keywords/phrases until you get the hang of doing this kind of marketing.
Planning
The next stage of getting your Adwords campaign running is planning for the long term. If you only sell one kind of product this is fairly easy. If, however, you sell bronze figurines, marble fountains, and gold leaf statues, then you’ll want to do a little more planning.
Campaigns
Google Adwords allows you to create several different ads and group them together as campaigns. I recommend setting up each of your products as a separate campaigns. You might also set up a separate campaign for holidays like Christmas or Valentine’s Day.
The easiest way to create new campaigns is by clicking on the drop down menu below “Active campaigns” on your home menu page.
Once you’ve created your first campaign, you can create an ad group that is targeted towards your specific product within the campaign. For example, if you’ve created a campaign called Bronze Figurines you might create an ad group within that campaign for horses and another one for oxen.
It can take up to several hours to get a properly organized Adwords campaign entered. Once you have done this you will be ready to enter your bids, activate your campaign, start experimenting with what works, and selling your art online!
In the next installment we’ll talk about how the bidding process works as well as how to read the data that you get in your reports to effectively optimize your campaign.
If you have any questions about keyword research or campaign organization, please let me know in the comments below or contact me directly.
More on keywords and SEO here:
SEO for Artists: Winning Strategy, or Useless Waste of Time?
How to Write Awesome Product Descriptions for Your Art
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