Dangerous Thinking

Like most people, I’ve never found much of a persuasive case for advertising on the Google Adwords Content Network – the conversion rates are normally pretty pitiful.

However, this new feature may just change all that:

Show your ad only when both keywords and placements match. You’ll get the benefits of keyword targeting while also limiting the places where your ad can appear.

For instance, set your campaign to appear only on your favourite soccer fan site and only when the site content matches the keyword soccer shoes. You may see less traffic, but AdWords contextual matching will help to make sure your placement pages are highly targeted.

I’ve not yet tried it. Maybe you have.

An alarming number of people and companies using Pay Per Click (PPC) are quite happy to just buy traffic. Maybe even up to £2000 a month just to get people to glance at the site. And that’s a lot of money for a small business. Why aren’t they taking it that step further and measuring the returns on their PPC investment?

I mentioned this to my old university chum Peter Purton last week, when we were talking about Internet advertising, and he seemed less perturbed than me. I guess, as a person with a background in dead-tree publishing, he feels more comfortable with his observation that people are used to not knowing whether their advertising works or not. And that mindset is simply carried over into the Internet (and hence into Google’s bottom line, I added), where they buy traffic blindly.

My advice is, at the very least, to set up conversion tracking in Adwords or YSM and keep an eye on the cost per conversion. Compare that to your profit on each sale. You may be in for a shock. In Pete’s former newsletter business he’d have been looking at the lifetime value of the customer, though, so you may want to compare the conversion cost with the repeat business you’d be expecting from them.

Even better, set up a Google Analytics account, and some Goals and really start to understand what’s happening with your PPC – and other online marketing – spend.

Now that Google Adwords is so picky about the quality of your advertising – from key phrase, through advertisement to landing page – wouldn’t it be good to know what Google thinks of your advertising without waiting for the results from running your campaign?

There’s actually a hidden column in Adwords that tells you just this. If you haven’t discovered it – and many people I’ve talked to haven’t – log in to your Adwords account and drill down to open an Ad Group. Click on the Keywords tab and look towards the middle of the screen for a link that says Customise columns. Click on the link, then on the pull-down menu, and choose Show Quality Score.

A new Quality Score column will appear. It’ll tell you how good your advertising is, key phrase by key phrase, and the minimum you need to bid on that key phrase. If you’re not showing mostly Greats, with the occasional OK, you’re probably spending too much on your AdWords click-through.

You’ll need to do some work on your campaign to get those Great ratings.

And don’t forget to switch on the Quality Score column for every one of your Ad Groups.

A half a century or more ago, an investor called Benjamin Graham came up with Rule #1 of Investing – Don’t Lose Money. The idea is that, no matter how good your profits, your losses can obliterate them. So make sure you minimise or eliminate your losses.

It’s a rule that should be applied to your Pay Per Click campaigns, as your losses can soon kill your bottom line.

Don’t get carried away with your successes, take your eye off the ball and continue buying loss-making clicks. Buy more clicks that pay off and eliminate those that don’t.

Test, monitor and measure. And if, after a reasonable period of time, you’re not getting any return, look elsewhere.

In a word, no. Consider the nature of the battlefield. Google is king of the Web – more than 70% of searches worldwide are on Google. And, in the B2B sphere, probably more.

Google actually prefers older, established sites – it even largely ignores new sites by ’sandboxing’ them for 9 to 12 months. The big hitters have been there for 10 years or more, and they have thousands of mature links, many of them inevitably of good quality. They’re the kind of sites that will be entrenched in the top positions on popular searches.

Now do you want to take them on? Do you have the budget, stamina and time? Or will you find a better way?

Read the full article Only pick a fight you can win – the first rule of successful Web marketing at Web Positioning Centre.

The role of landing pages continues to be a bit of a mystery to many people who run PPC campaigns.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised quite how much of a gotcha they can become for some people. You see, as someone trained as a direct marketing copywriter, I naturally think in terms of how a person will make their way from initial contact through to sale.

When you use PPC, the route looks something like this:

SEARCH ON KEY PHRASE -> CLICK ON PPC AD -> LANDING PAGE -> BASKET/ORDERING SCREENS -> CHECKOUT

The landing page can be the home page, but it’s just as likely not to be. If you’ve developed enough content to properly match up with the interests of your visitors – sell to your prospects – you should have some copy that matches with the key phrases you’re buying traffic on. If you find yourself directing traffic from all your ads to the home page (or any other catch-all page), you should be asking yourself why there isn’t any copy to satisfy those specific interests.

Without that fit between search and landing page, you’ll be causing yourself two problems. Firstly you’ll be failing to manage your visitors’ expectations effectively, and they’ll be very likely to just go back to the search page because they cannot see what they’re looking for. You’ll have paid for a click and not done anything profitable with it, so pushing up your cost per conversion and having a disastrous impact on your ROI.

Secondly, you’ll be running the risk of attracting the wrath of the Google Adwords system (and if my reading of Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest rules is correct, most of these points also apply to advertising on YSM). If Adwords believes the landing page is not relevant to the key phrase traffic being bought, it will just refuse to run your ad; if it believes the landing page content is marginally relevant, then you’ll end up paying more for your clicks. So you may be blocked from buying the traffic you need, or your ROI may end up being affected through paying more for clicks – even if you do manage to move the visitor on from a less-than-relevant landing page through to purchase.

Another implication is that PPC has become less of a standalone add-on, something you can just fire up and point at your home page. Many of the marketplaces I look at are getting more and more difficult to make good margins in because costs per click (CPCs) are regularly hitting £1 plus. So that means you have to do everything you possibly can to buy traffic at as low a CPC as you can, and then engage with your visitors as effectively as you can.

Proper landing pages can help with both these issues.

One of my favourite tricks with PPC campaigns is to use negative key words to refine the traffic to a client’s site.

Why do I mention this? Simply that many of the campaigns I take over or consult to fail to use them and end up buying unneeded traffic. Suppose you’re selling outdoor clothing for adults, you could bid on ‘breathable jacket’ but use ‘boys’, ‘girls’, ‘childs’ and other related words as negative key words if you only sell adult breathable jackets.

It really depends on what’s being searched on – your ongoing key phrase research will tell you, of course – as to whether it’s sensible to use negative key words or just bid on particular key phrases.

On Tuesday, Google announced a New Version of Google Analytics (henceforth Analytics).

We will be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for an email from us and keep an eye on your settings page.

Well, our main account has been upgraded, and my look around the new version this afternoon put a huge smile on my face. Google must have been listening to my grumblings and finally put its house in order!

Google summarises the upgrades as follows:

Here are some of the improvements:

* Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
* Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
* Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
* Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and Conversion University tips are available from every report.

At first glance, the most exciting thing is the ability to e-mail and export personalized reports. So Analytics is not now dragging its feet behind Adwords – always very frustrating when trying to sell the benefits of Analytics to a client, and having to point out that, by the way, they can’t have those reports e-mailed.

I’m very much looking forward to spending some more time with the new Analytics. It looks as if I won’t be saying ‘Google Analytics is good for the price’ any more.

De Vos & Jansen Market Research and Search Engine Mediabureau Checkit have published a report on how Buyers and information searchers view search results differently:

Search behaviour conclusions

1. Consumers view a search result for 1,1 second.
2. 98% views the organic search results.
3. 96% views the top (three) sponsored search results.
4. 31% views the sponsored search results on the right.
5. Buyers view more search results (10) and take more time to view the results (11,4 seconds). They also focus on familiar brand names.
6. Information searchers view less search results (8) and spend less time on a result (9,4 seconds). They pay more attention to contents than to brand names.

Interesting stuff, but little here to really surprise. However, it’s always good to have some research to back up experience.

One thing I would say, though, is that using Google Analytics to dig into what actually happens to Adwords-based visitors has shown me that the most profitable traffic doesn’t always come from the three sponsored links above the natural results. The sweet spot is often somewhere on the right, where you can really save budget on those CPCs.

How buyers and information seekers view search results differently.