Many people think of Adwords strictly as a direct-response tool for driving conversions. While it certainly does an admirable job of accomplishing this, treating that as its sole function is a disservice to the platform as a whole. One of the most underutilized functions Adwords can serve is Market Validation. Adwords is a fast, affordable and efficient method of subjecting your ideas to a huge audience. By doing this you can gather massive amounts of data, split test variations, and get results on an incredibly short timescale. If you’re interested in this kind of Lean Adwords Marketing, the first step is to set up an account.
- First Steps
- Firstly, you need to have some form of landing page, offer, or value proposition. This is going to be the actual idea that you intend to validate. Obviously it doesn’t have to be in a final form or perfectly realized, as part of the Marketing Validation process will involve streamlining and refining the idea. However, you need at the very least a place to start from.
- Whatever the idea is, it needs to have at least a basic form of landing page. This should describe the idea in enough detail that a potential customer can feel informed about it, and should have a basic form of data capture included on the page. The more fleshed out this page is, the more useful your data will be.
- Additionally, you need to have an idea of where your customer base lies. You need some knowlege of their wants and needs. In order to proceed, this will be your “test field”.
- With the above items, you will place your idea in front of what you believe to be your ideal customer, attempting to address their wants and needs, and gather data about their reactions.
- Get Your Credit
- Use the coupon you’ve already received, or feel free to contact SearcherMagnet to receive an Adwords coupon. Google encourages experimentation by granting these trial coupons to Adwords Certified Partner Companies. With this, you’ll receive $100 of free Adwords credit after you’ve spent $25 on an account. This allows you to test out 5x the traffic for the same cost! The individual steps to redeem this coupon are detailed in the video above.
- Important note: You will need a Gmail account that is not already linked to Google Adwords in any way in order to take advantage of the coupon. If you don’t have one, feel free to contact aaron@searchermag.net to receive a different coupon offer compatible with your account.
- Activate An Account
- Go to Adwords.Google.com and it will guide you through the initial steps of creating the account. After that, things can get a little complicated. There are a huge number of settings, questions and forms to be filled out. This video is intended to make that process as simple and painless as possible by translating this entire process into layman’s terms.
- Set up your:
- Daily Budget – Divide the amount you intend to spend over the number of days you are running the test campaign. Our recommendation is to divide the $125 budget associated with the coupon over 14 days, giving you a daily budget of $8.92
- Locations – For the purposes of validation, unless you have an extremely compelling reason not to, we suggest you target the United States. Anything broader than this may give you useless data, and anything narrower may not be able to provide the scope you need for your test.
- Networks – For validation, you’re going to avoid Display Network, so make sure to disable that option. The Display Network is a fantastic tool, but it can eat up a lot of budget very quickly, and it can be more difficult to judge customer intent.
- Keywords – These keywords are going to be derived from your Landing Page. Google should be able to do a good job presenting you with some keywords to start from. Go through and prune the suggested list of anything that you know isn’t applicable to your business.
- Bidding Strategy – With this particular use case, you should stick to Automatic Bidding. Once you’ve seen some results and become more familiar with Adwords, you may be able to track some of those trends and use them to refine your bidding strategy. For now, Adwords knows best since all you’re looking for is volume of traffic.
- Text Ad – This is going to be tricky, and can easily eat up its own entire video of best practices. For now, pay attention to the suggestions Google makes. There are some things that should always go in the headline, such as some of your keywords.
- Test!
