Google Ad Building

Link Building with Google Ad 2021. So we spent $1,245 on Google Ads to see how manybacklinks we could get and to see if PPC advertising is a viable link building strategy. And if you want to see the process and results,then stay tuned. [music] What's up everyone? Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, and this is the finalpart of our 3-part series on creating a stats page and actually building links to it. So, if you're new to this series or just likethe sound of my voice, then let's go through a quick recap. In part 1, I showed you how we created ourSEO stats page. At face value, it looked like any other stats page. But we strategically chose the data by lookingthrough our competitors' backlink profiles. And in short, we were looking for link-worthyand outdated stats. And this led us nicely into part 2, which wasall about link building through email outreach. And in this video, I showed you every last detailof our link building campaign from our process, to the email pitch, and of course, the results. And here we are today in part 3,link building with Google ads. And how appropriate is it that we finish offwith this tutorial? Afterall, this entire case study started witha PPC experiment to build backlinks. So today, I'm excited to share the results fromtwo PPC campaigns that I ran to generate links. Now, before I show you the campaigns, it'simportant that you get some context as to how this whole series began.

About a year and a half ago, we publisheda study to find out how many new backlinks top-ranking pages get over time? And in that study, we wanted to find out iftop-ranking pages rank high because they get lots of links, or do they get lots oflinks because they rank high? So Tim introduced a concept called "the viciouscircle of SEO," and it looks something like this. People search for something and read the #1 result. Some of them will link to that page from theirown websites. And because of the new links, that #1 pagestays at the top, creating a virtually endless loop of total domination. Now, when I read this, a lightbulb immediately went off. If people are actually linking to top-rankingpages, simply because a) it's the first page they clicked and b) the content was goodenough to satisfy their immediate needs, then why not just focus on creating greatcontent and pay for ads to be at the top? Sure, Google doesn't show ads for every searchquery, especially those that lack commercial intent, but from my experience, they'll stillshow them enough to get decent exposure. But hey, I didn't want to just burn throughmoney on an unproven concept. I needed to find enough proof that these adswould lead to links. So I went to Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer andsearched for "stats" and "statistics

Finally, I wanted to see which queries hadads in the SERP. So I clicked on the SERP features filter andselected "Adwords top." From here, I searched for one of the queriesin Google that would show a typical stats page and then I clicked on the ad. Now, since Google ads always have trackingparameters in their URL, I wanted to find a common footprint. And the one I found was GCLID, which standsfor "Google Click Identifier." So to see if this page had actually earnedsome backlinks from ads, I took that URL to Site Explorer and pasted it in. Next, I went to the Backlinks report. And finally, I entered the "gclid" footprintin the Include filter. And sure enough, they had gotten three links asa result of their ads, but not from very good sites. So I searched for more queries like "remotework statistics," and saw Harvard Business Review's article. I clicked on that, took the URL, and did thesame thing I did before in Site Explorer. And this page had six links, three of which lookedpretty decent. Well, I looked at all of the domain's backlinksand 142 of them included the gclid footprint, some that aren't bad at all. Now, it's important to note that the majorityof people will actually clean up the URLs before linking to them.

The fact that there was a good chunk of linksthat included the ugly URL told me that there was something here, and I had to explore further. So, a quick side note before we continue. You can't just create any page and expect toget links from ads because other pages did. You don't know how much people spentto get those links. The main purpose of the first experiment was totest this theory on so-called "link-intent queries." The fact that people were actually linkingto the same type of content where we could confidently attribute it to Google ads wasjust the icing on the cake. And I talk more about the power of keywordintent in part 1 of this series so I've linked that up in the description. Alright, so in the first experiment, I didn'twant to create new content because I felt we could validate the idea with a data studywe had already published. So I created a duplicate version of this postand just like for our outreach campaign, I noindexed the page to make it completelyinvisible to everyone, except those who saw and clicked the ad. Then I set up a simple search campaign inGoogle ads and basically just added a list of queries like "digital marketing statistics," "seostatistics," "seo facts," and so on as phrase matches.

So the ad ran from the week of February 24thup until March 30th, 2020. And in total, we had 447 clicks to our pagewith a CTR of 7.05%. That works out to an average CPC of1.69 Singapore Dollars. And the total ad spend for this campaign was754 Singapore dollars, which works out to around $540.83 in USD. In total, we got 13 backlinks from unique websites. That's a cost average of $41.60, which isreally cheap in my opinion. And if you do the math, that means that 2.9%of people who clicked the link were actually linking to this page. That's bananas! Now, if you think these were a bunch of blogspotlinks, you'd be wrong. Here are the links we got to the page from the ad. All 13 links were from pages about SEO or content marketing. And our best link was one from WPAstra, whichhas a Domain Rating of 91. In fact, five of the 13 websites have a DR 50 or higher. Now, it's important to note that two of the13 links were scraper links. Meaning, a couple low-quality websites justrepublished the article from WPAstra. One has a DR 31 and the other has a DR 0. So our true count from ads is actually 11referring domains, which would bring our cost per link to $49.17, which is still super-cheap. Now, let's look at the 11 linking websites' domain-level traffic in Ahrefs' Batch Analysis tool. And we're left with seven websites that had at least 100 monthly organic search visits to their site.

So assuming that these are the only sevenlinks that would really do anything for our site, the cost per decent link works out to $77.26. Still super-cheap considering it was a fullypassive and ethical link building campaign. Now, there was an interesting thing I learnedfrom this experiment. The time for someone to actually link to ustook anywhere between two and half weeks to three months. As I already mentioned, we started the campaignon the week of February 24th, 2020 and ended the campaign around a month later on the weekof March 30th. Now, if I sort the backlinks report by FirstSeen, you'll see that Ahrefs found our last link on May 22nd, around three monthsafter the campaign had ended. And our first link was found on March 12th,which is around two and a half weeks after our campaign had started. So if you plan to do any kind of advertisinghoping to earn backlinks, then don't expect to get instantaneous results. Alright, so overall, my first PPC campaignwent very well. So I messaged Josh on Slack and I was like… "Yo! This campaign is working out pretty well." And he was like... "Not bad…" And I was like… "If we had a list post of SEO or content marketingstats instead of a unique data study with just one stat, it'd make a lot more sense, especiallysince we'd be matching search intent." And he was like… "I think it would work super well fora list of stats actually. So why don't we test it with a page thatmakes sense?

And so it began. And I won't go through how we created thepost and actually built links to it since that's in part 1 and part 2 of this series. So fast forward and we now have an SEO statspage strategically designed to build links. And a huge difference with this page isthat it now matches search intent. So both Josh and I were extremely optimisticabout this campaign, considering the results from the first one. So basically, I did the exact same thing withthe PPC ads. I loaded up some keywords, threw some moneyinto it and here are the results from our Google Ads campaign. So the ad ran from the week of April 13thto the week of May 11th. So the same timeframe as our first campaign. And in total, we had 1,217 clicks, which is2.7 times more than our first campaign. We had a CTR of 10.31% which worked out to0.81 Singapore cents, which is less than half the CPC of our original campaign. And the total cost for our ads campaign wasaround 983 Singapore dollars, which works out to $704.96 in USD. So we spent around $164 more on this campaignbut got way more clicks. Now, the total number of referring domains… Just 9... Meaning, we spent $78.33 per referring domain,which again is pretty good. But as you know…there could be some scraperlinks, low-quality pages etc. So the number of decent links we actuallygot was four.

And in my opinion, these four links are way worsethan the links we got in our first experiment. So that brings the cost per link to $176.24,which I'd say is still kind of cheap depending on who you're talking to. Now, the question is why did our links cost2.3 times more for our optimized page? Now, while I can't say that my answers arestatistically sound, here are my best guesses. #1. Visitors to our page were linking tothe source rather than to our article. As I mentioned in part 2, at least five peoplewe contacted linked to the original source rather than us. And these are people who actually respondedto us telling us that they linked to someone else. So there were probably actually more than five people. So I think it's reasonable to say that a goodchunk of people who clicked our ad linked straight to the source rather than to us,especially since we were targeting more or less the same keywords in our ad campaign. On top of that, we made links to the sourceextremely accessible. And no regrets there because theydeserved that recognition. Now, the key difference with our first experimentis that we used our own data. So we were the source. And the second reason is just good old lady luck. While it's easy to think that most peoplesearching for queries like "seo statistics" are dying to find a page to link to, thatisn't necessarily true. It's a numbers game. And because we don't know exactly why eachperson clicked on our ad, the most reasonable explanation is that we had some worse luckcompared to our first campaign. Now, would I recommend running adsspecifically to generate links? The answer is - it depends.

It's impossible to truly measure the impactof our ads campaigns. For example, did someone read our SEO stats post,then read some of our other posts, linked to them, and maybe decide to become a subscriberto our software? What about the people who clicked throughto our post and signed up for our newsletter? What's the value of a newsletter subscriber? Basically, we were paying for exposureand the result of that were some links at a reasonable cost average. So would we do this again if we had a topicthat would be worth getting exposure and could potentially generate links? Absolutely. So if you're currently paying for links in a waythat could be frowned upon by Google, it might be worth experimenting with ads andtargeting queries with so-called "link-intent." It's completely in-line with Google's WebmasterGuidelines, and from our small but mighty sample of links, the quality has been quite good comparedto grey-hat links I've seen in other marketplaces. So of course, we're going to redirect thepages to combine our links and in total, we got around 43 solid referring domains to ourSEO stats page, which I think will be enough to land us a top 2-5 position for our targetquery as soon as those links are given credit. But who really knows?

Now, I'd love to hear what you thought aboutour case study, and if you'd like to see more content like this, where we share real practicalexperiments and processes with you.