Life would be so much easier if everyone who visited your website did exactly what you wanted. But of course they don’t. And if you own an e-commerce store then the proportions can look quite scary. For instance think 3% do what you are aiming to achieve leaving the remaining 97% to slip through your pages, leaving only a trace of session history in your Google Analytics accounts before they are off.
Nevertheless the positive part in all of this is that those 97% did at least arrive. Just by completing this action they are naturally one step closer to buying when compared to those that stayed away.
Remarketing helps you market to those who took that single step as they trawl around the Internet looking at other “stuff”. For instance you can remarket to these visitors while they are browsing videos on YouTube, reading a message within their Gmail account or just visiting one of the millions of websites that allows Google’s advertising to display.
Sound all a bit “Big Brothery” to you?
Well it is.
That’s why Google ensures you follow their simple guidelines to ensure you don’t step over the mark and push your potential customers away rather than enticing them back.
Once you have updated the Google Analytics tracking code on your site, Google also tells you to that you need to update your Privacy Statement (you do already have one don’t you?). This change is to include easy to understand commentary on what you have done, how people can opt out and a link to the browser supported add- on Google has to make the opt out process a breeze.
And there’s more. Google also stops you from using re-marketing when you may use sensitive information about your visitors to build your remarketing audience. For instance say you run a medical supplies website then you couldn’t re-market to those who visit certain product pages based on the assumptions that they have the ailments solved by the products they have seen.
Once the web “paperwork” is done and the strategy fits within Google’s guidelines then you are off. First up you need to design the audience that you want to remarket to. Perhaps it’s everyone with a pulse who visited your site. For them remarketing could include creative links to special promotions that run through the year.
Or how about those that came and purchased. Here you could have special customer offers that are too good to open up to a wider audience. Perhaps those that came to you via Facebook so you can present your remarketing in a way that fits with their use of social media. As you can see there’s a number of ways to go about creating an audience and then picking the right strategy and design to match (contact us for more details on which options may best suit your needs).
Once all the design and strategy work is done then the Google magic can begin. You add the single line of code to your Google Analytics tracking code, build the audiences you want to market to and then “push” the data through to your linked Google AdWords account. Currently we are told that you need more than 100 unique cookies (visitors) for the audience to be marketed to.
Next up you need to produce your ad content. Google gives you a range of banner image sizes you can apply as well as the vanilla search text ads. Some of the image ads are more effective than others. So it pays to take time to figure out which ones have the greatest likelihood of converting and to design around them.
So you have your audience and your ads – all you need to do now is to get the two to meet by presenting your advertising on the right websites. This can be the greatest challenge of re-marketing. Up to this point it’s been relatively straight forward. Consumer product / service people may find this easier than their business to business cousins. For example YouTube could be an option, remembering your ads will only be shown to previous web site visitors means you can pick some high volume sites just like this with safety.
Nevertheless, stalking your visitor for ever as they move around the Internet is not a good option. Google helps you to avoid this by limiting the amount of time your ads can run for – say 60 days after the visitor became part of your remarketing audience. Plus they also allow you to cap the frequency the remarketing ads are shown so your ads are only shown 10 times per week. “Ad fatigue” is a problem here so ad creative is best re-worked on a frequent basis to ensure this doesn’t occur.
And the results?
We’ve seen clients achieve a cost per click that is a fraction of their search campaign alternatives and to then produce a significantly reduced cost per conversion. Of course your results may vary but the logic makes sense to try to bring back those that came before in conjunction with plans of creating that first visit. Contact us today to learn how this strategy could work for your business.
Imagine this scene. You have just spent the whole day walking up and down Auckland’s Queen Street trying to find those interested in learning more about your product or service. Most said no, but a few were keen to hear more. To these you handed a ticked to free show you had running at the Civic theatre, just up the road. You worked hard and by 3.00pm you had the placed full to capacity. All 2378 seats had an interested person sitting on them. This was looking good.
So come 3.01pm, the lights dim and the curtain rises. Show time. For just 15 minutes the crowd is treated to a interactive presentation on all things good about what you offer. You tell them everything new about what you do, customer videos are presented and a whole range of valuable tips imparted to help those buying for the first time.
You have their attention for the full 15 minutes as the content really hits the mark. The house lights come up and you stride onto the stage and thank everyone for coming. You close by telling group that your sales people are stationed by the exits ready to get the details of those interested in knowing more.
How many business cards would you expect your team to collect?
Now remember this is a qualified group of people. They said before that they were interested in learning more. And they had taken time out of their day to listen to what you had to say. And finally that your sales people weren’t there to take orders – just to collect their details so a conversation could happen later on.
So what would you expect?
100,250,50 or even a measly 10.
I don’t think that 10% wouldn’t be an unreasonable expectation. This would leave your team with a credible 240 prospects to follow up on. (And you with a feeling of some good work done, sore feet and a desperate need of a cup of tea and a sit down.)
But what if you only got 10, or say just 1.
Now that would be a completely different story. All that work, all those interested people and just 10 said yes. You would be left struggling with a whole host of questions. Did we bore them with the wrong message? Perhaps we don’t know our market? Or even, did I mumble my last instruction about cards by the exit rows? No doubt there would be a list of things to fix and a willingness to get them sorted asap.
Which is all very interesting especially when I expect the same result occurs each month to many websites in New Zealand with very little done to fix it.
It doesn’t take a lot to get to 2378 unique visitors each month. And of those that do very few would achieve anywhere near a 10% lead conversion rate. The difference being that a) those that do probably don’t have any analytics running off their website so they are blind to the numbers or b) they know the visitor counts and but for some reason they don’t relate this to a vision of what these figures represent.
For instance a website that attracts 6000 unique visitors seem an OK busy sort of website. That is until you sit in a packed Aotea Centre and realise that this count relates to the amount of people around you – multiplied by three. Or how about you visit Westpac stadium in Wellington on a rugby sevens event when it is also full to the brim. Think of this amount of people times two and you have a close count to the 75k of unique visitors that most medium sized websites receive. And finally my current favourite – a client website that brings in the population of Dunedin each and every month – yep around 115,000 unique.
So job #1 should be to translate these analytics figures into real world counts. Think in terms of packed nights at the Aotea Centre or Eden Park Stadiums filled with your website visitors. Then I want you to do something very simple.
Expect more from this group.
Just as you would feel distraught after presenting to 2378 people and receiving only 10 leads. Ask big searching questions like those I offered at the start. Does our website show that we know our market? Are we presenting what they are looking for? What can we do to turn the 10 into the 240 it should be?
If this doesn’t get me banned from Face book then I don’t know what will.
Last week I had two good days at a client’s conference in town. They did an exceptionally good job of selecting the presentations; the venue and the catering. The only low point was the obligatory 45 minutes presentation on Social Media.
Please if have to sit through any more Power Point slides that extol me to “be genuine”, “be honest” and “be there” then I’ll no doubt reach down, pull off a sneaker and hurl it towards the stage. I’m truly over it. I must have heard the same or similar message, said in the same earnest way more than a dozen times in a dozen venues by a dozen different speakers. The subject matter just hasn’t moved on.
With my smattering of grey hairs I remember being involved in the launch of professional email marketing solutions in New Zealand back in 1999. There was much of a fanfare then, lots of people spoke about best practices and principles and then we were told to leave the room and do stuff.
The result?
Email marketing campaigns spouted left right and centre. What had been mailed was now emailed and as a result marketers bathed in an absolute glut of measurement data that their printed experience had previously lay hidden. After 18 months there were case studies a plenty from a wide range of industries all doing great things to improve their marketing and as a result their businesses all because of email marketing. Now we were well and truly out of the land of principles and well into the detail stuff of tactical delivery.
I think I heard my first evangelical social media story two years back. Then, like the start of email, we were served a platter of tasty principles and theories and told to get stuck in. And that’s where the story changes. What came next was very, very different. Still we are hearing of the same principles to be applied and the result? Just a minor smattering of local case stories of business success in social medial land.
So what’s wrong? Well basically when it comes to the merit of using social media as a reliable and predictable way to improve your own marketing and therefore your bottom line for a lot of companies the message is a sham. For some it will work, but for the vast majority it won’t.
Think of it this way. Say you removed the reception in your building and in its place you put a nice trendy cafe, complete with barrista, comfy chairs and the latest newspaper. Now don’t get too excited this isn’t for you – it’s for your customers. Here they can come, meet, mingle and chat away with each other. So how many of your customers would drop by?
Now if you were say the NZSO with their passionate and discerning fans the space could be quite cluttered. Likewise if you were Les Mills with their group fitness classes then there could be a bunch of fit and friendly people mixing and mingling in a place like this. (In fact in every Les Mills gym there is a space just like this already.)
But say you were an accountant or a hotel or say a manufacturer of office furniture then things would be different. Enticing people inside would be a challenge. If you were really keen you could bribe them with free stuff just to enter. Which is fine until you realise that to keep them there the bribes need to keep on coming.
Funnily enough both the NZSO and Les Mils have vibrant social media experiences. And bribing (become a fan to go in the draw stuff) is exactly what businesses do when they try to make social media work when naturally it shouldn’t.
Look I know the cafe thing is a weak analogy – but it’s close. And just because it’s easy for some to make a success of social media doesn’t make it a logical strategy for everyone when time spent here would be a waste. But if you can imagine your own cafe full of customers chatting away to one another then I strongly suggest you start to make it happen. Otherwise give social media a pass and try considering another strategy. Maybe something that has broad application across a wide industry group and with a strong chance of success – like email marketing perhaps:)
Let’s say you’re a large multinational operation with branches spread all over New Zealand and each and every branch manager is keen to get started with their own Google AdWords advertising campaign – all sending traffic to their part of the one website. In a number of ways this is all good news. However in a similar volume of reasons this could be the start of a massive headache for all – unless it is managed properly.
So with the goal of wanting to remove any undue stress from a Branch Managers life –here’s my take on the good – and not so good – parts of the opportunities that lay ahead.
So let’s tackle the good stuff first.
OK by getting this far there’s obviously some widespread belief that online advertising could well do some good. This in itself is a major achievement. I have been involved in situations where half of a national group are keen – a third is not and the rest are have no opinion at all. Unfortunately in most situations like these the default status of doing nothing tends to get the vote. It can be a lot easier to say why something shouldn’t be done than why it should. Fortunately that hurdle has been passed.
Which leaves the final test of actually putting some money behind the idea. And like the saying goes – talk is cheap. Nothing tends to clarify the mind as much as allocating some hard earned marketing budget into an “idea”. Once a group has collectively reached this stage – especially one that spans the country – then they are a few rungs ahead of the competition.
So this leaves what may been seen as the easiest part, getting the job done and buying some Google Advertising. This is where it all could unravel into a complicated and expensive mess.
Some see the next obvious step being for each location to set up their own Google AdWords account and begin to manage their own budget and ads. The Google advertising system would make this a breeze to do. Non technical people will have an account, some keywords, a few ads displaying and a credit card sending money to Google in less than 15 minutes.
And all of it will be the WRONG choice for a situation like this. Here are four reasons why this is the case.
Reason #1. Broad match keywords = Bidding Confusion
Before I start let me tell you that this reason is probably the most complex of the four to get your head around. But the effort is worthwhile. Once you understand this one then you will see why a distributed AdWords Account solution is such a problem.
OK let’s start. Google allows you five different ways to bid on the terms prospects use when using their search engine in. For sake of simplicity I’m just going to cover two here – exact match and broad match. So if you have the exact match keyword of “Auckland Flower Shop” and someone types the search term “Auckland Flower Shop” and then your ad would show. And conversely if you had an exact match keyword of “Flower Shop” without the Auckland part then the ad would not show.
Follow so far?
OK now let’s deal with the second option – broad match. This is the type that Google has you pick by default when setting up a new account. Most newbie AdWords advertisers have accounts full of this match type of keyword.
A broad match keyword of “Flower Shop” will show your ad for these search terms “Flower Shop Auckland”, “Flower Store, “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”. Think of it as Google’s way of stretching the meaning of your broad keyword to ensure your ad is shown to as many people who are searching.
Now if you are an Auckland Flower store then using this match type in your advertising account then the first two search terms are worth their click cost. The other two – “Flower Shop Wellington” and even “Flower and Vegetable Shop”- are a waste of your money.
Now if you have a dozen flower shops around the country all running their own Google advertising within their own accounts and all using the broad match term of “Flower Shop” then you can just imagine the confusion. The Auckland shop could be displaying advertising for the search term “Wellington Flower Shop” and the Hamilton store could have their advertising showing for those typing in “Auckland Flower Shop”. And every store could have their ads shown for “Flower and Vegetable Shop” when none of them sell vegetables.
Fixing all this mess is made a lot easier by gathering all the keywords together into the one Google advertising account and diligently using the correct keyword match type to ensure the most relevant store’s advertising is shown for each searcher.
Reason #2 You are only allowed to advertise your domain once for each search result.
Google makes available about 10 places for paid advertising next to its search results. The less scrupulous advertiser may think that by setting up 10 different advertising accounts they could place ads in each space and block out their competitors. Not so fast. Google only allows one advert to be shown for each website domain for any one keyword result.
And in situations like I mentioned before – where multiple accounts are trying to bid on the same keyword and sending clicks through to the same web domain – guess which ad Google decides is the best one to show?
The one that makes Google the most money.
So by bidding as separate entities for the same keyword each advertiser from the same domain is effectively bidding against themselves and by doing so increasing their advertising costs. Not so smart.
Reason #3 Negative keywords taking longer to surface
Earlier I told you about the different match types Google lets you use mentioning two of the five that are available. This time I need to cover one of the three left – negative match. This is a keyword that you want to ensure your ads don’t display for.
So using the last example of the flower shop the term “Flower and Vegetable Shop” fits into this category. In this list could also be terms like –“setting up a flower shop”, “flower shop signs”, “flower shop jobs” – all relevant search terms but highly irrelevant to a normal flower shop wanting to sell flowers.
Most new Google AdWords advertising accounts don’t have any negative keywords in them. People just don’t think of them when starting out. Later on – if the advertiser actually takes the time to look into their account to – they are added as they come to surface in the actual click reports Google provides. Which is the issue – they take time to surface. The more clicks you are buying the faster these details come to hand and therefore the quicker the account becomes optimised for the right types of keywords.
Final Reason #4 – Spreading your Google Account Love too thinly
Providing relevant advertising to searchers is a key goal for Google. The more relevant your advertising is in the eyes of Google the greater the benefits they will provide you. (And for “benefits” think “cheaper bid prices”.)
You can find out how “relevant” your advertising is in the eyes of Google by looking at the Quality Score they have allocated to each of your keywords. This is a value between 0-10 that is based on the relevance to the searcher of your ads, keywords and landing page
From what we have been told and seen, Quality Score, is also attributed at a Google Account level too. So if you own an account that delivers a steady stream of high quality (in Google’s eyes) advertising then some Google love in the form of rising Quality Scores for your keywords will come your way. And obviously the more advertising you buy and properly optimise, the greater your chances of building an account like this.
So there you have it. Four reasons why setting up an AdWords account for each and every branch is not the best way ahead and how the one properly managed Google AdWords account by a central source, will do this job so much better for all.
“Buying Google clicks is just too expensive for us so what other online marketing options do you have for us to consider? How about renting an email list – can you guys help with that?”
There I was sitting in a prospect’s office in Auckland’s central city, listening to the story of why they were looking for Google AdWords Campaign Management services from someone like us. It was just a few minutes into our discussion when – Bam – out came this bombshell. A failed AdWords experiment was there sitting across the table from me.
Now, some would miss the opportunity a comment like this can bring. They may jump into the many reasons why buying an email list was probably the least favourable of all options worth pursuing. But not me. Nope, this was just gold. So I started to question exactly what they had experienced with AdWords and how their failure here could reveal some startling truths about the overall health of their online marketing.
I asked some more questions and my prospect shared all he could, in all its tragic detail. How their cost per click was in dollars not cents. The AdWords budget was in thousands not hundreds and after all this there were pitifully few leads produced at what ended up to be an abhorrent individual cost per lead. The first two parts of the story were actually good news of what could lie ahead – that I will expand on later. But losing money with Google is never fun to experience for anyone, so I took my time to explain what this all meant and how it was worthwhile to take on Google again – but perhaps with a few tweaks to their methods of engagement.
I began with why the strategy was worth pursuing. You see, your ability to run a successful on-going Google AdWords campaign is a real-world gauge of the lead generation effectiveness of your website compared with all those of your bidding competitors. Yep, your ability to purchase clicks at a profit can reveal how effective your website is at turning traffic into leads – compared with everyone else in your market who tries to do the same. This in itself is some quite cool live data with which to benchmark your business against others.
I followed this with a few words on why expensive keywords are a good thing to find when you enter a bidding market like the one AdWords operates. Let’s not think cents here, nope we are really looking for those keywords that are worth dollars per click. For instance, Google and its Keyword Tool can tell me that for the keyword “cash loans nz” I should be prepared to pay around $4.00 per click. This is an amount that would make most online marketers think twice before paying. Nevertheless, trust me, it’s a good sign. Prices like these reflect what competitors are prepared to pay day in and day out because for them the investment is worth the return. And in most cases, large dollar clicks are there because for the majority of bidders they are producing large dollar returns.
The prospects behind those clicks have a strong need that they want met AND they are prepared to take action online to help them find a solution. In comparison, super-low click costs – say sub 10 cents – are warning signs that you are possibly entering a troublesome market. Here you may find clickers but those willing to take some action – and a profitable one at that – may be a bit more elusive.
As an aside, for those interested in knowing their keywords bid price but who are not yet running an AdWords campaign, fortunately Google makes it relatively easy to get a guide on this value. Just head over to the Google keyword tool, then login to your AdWords account (you don’t need any campaigns running – just an account set up) and search the keywords of your market in your region. You should see something like the image to follow.
So by now we had discussed how his keywords were in the costly part of the market and how this was a good thing. And just by looking at who was bidding on these words we could also assume that others in his market were living with these costs. This left the simple question of whether he wanted to make the necessary changes to enter the market and survive.
Well, with 90% of NZ searchers using Google as their tool, he really didn’t have a lot of options. That left the task of finding out the areas he needed to focus on to make these dollar clicks start to pay. Here’s a short overview of just four of the points we covered.
Conversion rate was the starter. Yep, the hard truth could be that your bidding competitors may own an e-commerce website that converts at 4% while yours struggles to get above 2% for exactly the same items. Or for those of you in lead generation land, your competitor’s offline sales process could be twice as effective as yours. It could be their lead follow-up, their phone script or even their face-to-face presentation. Any one or all of these could be a good rung or two above your own, which ensures they convert twice as many leads into customers as you do. Even though their lead quality is, once again, exactly the same as yours.
Next up was the method by which his competitors were valuing the total of each sale or lead and then allocating a proportion of this to marketing. For instance, they could be valuing each sale just on its initial amount. So when a typical first-time customer may spend just $100 then a proportion of this amount would go towards their AdWords costs. Now it could be that over the next 11 months these “typical” customers will purchase another nine times. And if all goes well after this they will do the same for an average of three years, moving their lifetime value to $3000 rather than the paltry $100 of the first sale.
Those who are super-confident in their customer retention strategies can afford to invest with the $3000 value in mind, leaving the rest to struggle, trying to compete in a world where their sale begins and ends at $100. With work, they could look at each lead not as $100 coming in the door but as $3000 of long-term value. Strategies to move your world beyond the first sale include an email newsletter, a rewards program, or whatever it takes to transform single-purchase customers into multiple-purchasing machines.
Following on from the economic power that comes to those with a strong customer retention plan there’s also the hard fact that your competitor could make more money per sale than you do. So while you may both bid on and sell item A, your bidding competitor could then go on and sell to the same customer items B, C and D, none of which you offer. This pushes up their average revenue and therefore profit per transaction. Maybe even to a value that allows them to sell item A at a loss, knowing that the other products will make this up and then some. Not such good news for those who only sell A :((.
Unfortunately, it may well be one or all of these strategies at play with your high-bidding competitors. It would be so much easier if you could wave a magic wand and have revealed exactly what they are doing to make it work for them when it doesn’t for you. Nevertheless, there are some very crude maths you can run to help reveal how far you have to go to get things back on track.
So to follow on from my cash loans example – here we have an average $4 per click amount. Allowing for a fictional goal application conversion rate of 5%, the cost per application would be $80. The first question is, if you operate in this business, could you live with this cost? And if not on your first sale, could it work if your looked further down the lifetime of your customer? If the answer is still no, then what conversion rate would it work with and is this realistic?
We answer questions like these during our Online Marketing Review process. It’s the first step we take new customers through when they are looking to join Permission. Yes, it’s a paid service but comes with some performance outcomes that ensure you only pay for what you want. Call us today if you would like to learn more about this first step.
Google AdWords – Speed isn’t always your Friend
Google makes starting a new AdWords campaign a very easy task indeed. Within minutes you can gather together a selection of keywords, write an small text ad, load up your credit card details, and “baboom” – start sending them money and your website traffic. Most should achieve this in 30 minutes or less. At first this seems like good news for the time-starved executive. You are now advertising online on the country’s most visited search engine. Time to sit back, relax and just wait for the phone to ring or the email inbox to fill up with contact requests. Ideally both.
This must happen for a few. Otherwise, those happy images of satisfied customers Google portrays on its AdWords home page would be false. Nevertheless, the Google advertisers who walk through our doors for the first time rarely share stories of drowning under a torrent of leads as a result of their 20 minutes of campaign set-up.
A few turned up at Permission with different stories last month. Well established and successful business people who were spending hundreds of dollars a day with Google and were a) not seeing much benefit from it, and b) not sure if this was typical of the experience of others.
Fortunately, each of them had agreed to complete our initial online marketing review process and because of this we had the necessary time to take them through their AdWords account, pointing out the good and not so good parts. The bits that were great for them and Google and likewise the bits that were not so friendly to their wallet.
Now, I firmly believe that Google has the interests of the advertiser at heart when they designed their account set-up process. They had to allow for a time-starved user with limited attention and, based on the complexity involved, the process does a great job. So all the big things – like keywords, budgets and ads – decisions the advertiser HAS TO INCLUDE to get going are covered in an easy to understand way. Meanwhile, what seem to be relatively small things – like keyword match types, choice of advertising networks and optimal account structure – well, Gooogle decided that these are best done AFTER the account was live.
Unfortunately, it’s these AFTER bits that can make all the difference. Which was why I found myself and my client peering into a web browser at an AdWords campaign, picking over a campaign that had been removing thousands of dollars from his bank account each week and providing very, very little in return. Fortunately, we had this under control after a days work, but still, the money that was already spent was wasted.
So, in the interests of ensuring readers of this newsletter avoid such a situation, here are some of the fundamental AdWords Campaign Set-Up basics that apply to any campaign that is successful (for both Google and the advertiser).
Fundamental basic #1: Take control of your keywords
The underlying resource of any AdWords campaign is the keywords you chose to bid on. The Google Keyword tool is a free resource (just Google it) that will help you see which keywords attract the highest search volume for the regions you want to advertise within. So if you are an Auckland-based mortgage broker, after you have used this tool you may find that “Mortgage Brokers Auckland” is a keyword worth bidding on.
Google enables you to bid on this keyword in four different ways. These are called match types. There is broad match, modified broad match, phrase match and exact match. (For the sake of accuracy there’s a fifth type called negative match that I’ll cover later on.)
When you set up your account for the first time, broad match is the default option. Remember the set-up process is all about speed. So the time taken to educate you on the other match options and then let you pick which suits is put in the AFTER bucket. This is a shame because the default option can cause a lot of problems.
You see, broad match allows Google to present your ad for terms like these:
Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Home Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Refinance Brokers
Finance Brokers
Reviews Mortgage Brokers Auckland
Mortgage Brokers Auckland Business Set Up
Some of these are good, a few not so. The other three match types help you refine the way in which your keywords match against what the searcher types in. It starts with the highly refined exact match. Then it gradually becomes more flexible – as each match type is used – until you arrive at the last option, the broad match choice, which opens your keyword up to a mass of terms that may or may not suit your business.
To follow is an image from Google that helps to show you all this in a friendly graphic for the search term formal shoes.
Fundamental basic #2: Know your negatives
The fifth keyword match type is a negative match. This is for keywords that people may use within the phrases you want to bid on but by doing so automatically discount them from being valid search terms. So in the previous graphic from Google, perhaps you didn’t sell any black shoes, or your shoes were just for men. In these cases, the terms “black” and “women” would be in your list of negative keywords.
These types of keywords can be applied to your whole campaign or to just one Ad Group. So when we see a campaign that only uses broad match terms and has no negative keywords then there are problems ahead.
Fundamental basic #3: Don’t mix networks or regions
Google can place your advertising next to their search results and also on websites that host their advertising. One key difference between the two is that one audience is actively searching for what you offer, while the other is passively reading about it. These are two very different environments to advertise within.
Nevertheless, when setting up your account (again, in the interests of time) your Google AdWords campaign is set up to run in both. This is usually not the best option for those starting. Our recommendation is to always focus on searchers first and then, once you have figured out how to make this traffic stream work, begin work on convincing passive readers to click your ads. Trying to do both will muddy your results and make what is already a hard task even harder.
Fundamental basic #4: Carry on the conversation, deliver people to the optimal page
This brings me nicely into how the underlying structure of your account can either work for or against you. Think of it like the commonly used “house foundation” analogy – build on solid foundations and you improve your chances of future success. The foundation for an AdWords campaign is the ease with which it allows you to carry on the question raised by the searcher.
For instance, say they type in the keyword “black formal shoes male”. Just by chance they see your text ad that includes text like their keyword term. And, when they click on it, they are taken to the page on your website that presents them with your full range of black formal shoes for guys. So easy for them – a bit of work for you.
To achieve this experience your campaign needs to contain a lot of Ad Groups. An Ad Group is a Google term for a distinct collection of keywords and the text ads that work for them. Most new campaigns set up at speed have just the one. This will be filled with lots of keywords and perhaps only one or, if we are lucky, maybe two ads. When clicked, these will most likely take you to the home page.
If you run this type of campaign and the searcher types in “black formal shoes male” or even “brown formal shoes female” or possibly “white formal dance shoes male”, they are shown the one ad that talks generically about formal shoes. If they click this ad they will arrive on the home page of the website and have to find the right shoes for themselves. People rarely do.
Fundamental basic #5: Track how well your money is being spent
My final fundamental basic. The online marketing space is littered with opportunities to track and measure. The problem is usually the vast amount of data available, not the lack of it. The Google AdWords system is no different. And while, once again, setting up “conversion tracking” is something missing during the speedy sign-up process, it’s in your account waiting to be turned on.
Once engaged you will be able to see how much money you spent to achieve whatever conversion you want to measure. This could be newsletter sign-ups, e-commerce sales or contact requests – they can all be counted. Some of the data may make you smile, others may not – but at least you will know what does and doesn’t work.
So there you have it. Five fundamentals that are missed during any super speedy new account set-up. Yes, it will take you time to do all five BUT, once done, your account will work so much harder for you. Speed isn’t always your friend. Look here for more on our Google AdWords Campaign Management Services.
For some reason, this would seem to be the month for prospects to contact Permission seeking help with their Google AdWords Campaign Management. In nearly all cases they have arrived after having had someone manage it before and do a less than perfect job. So much so that they are quite motivated to make a change.
Usually these motivations are driven by things going bad financially. Either they have ended up paying too much per click or their monthly budget has been sucked up with high management fees that they struggle to see the value in.
There’s a strong element of trust when you engage someone to take on the management of a solution you may know little about. It’s like dropping your car in for its annual service and not understanding a jot of what the mechanic tells you has been done – except that it cost you a lot more than you thought and took longer than expected.
Fortunately, there are some attributes of the poor set up of a Google AdWords account that are easy to spot for the new marketer. Here are a few that should be easy for the business owner to pick out and see if things are going awry.
Firstly, all the ‘optimizing’ work should be done on Your Google AdWords account. This is something I thought was pretty obvious until I realized that some management companies used their own Google AdWords account to manage campaigns for their clients. This may suit them but is a big problem for you.
Your account contains all your advertising history with Google. Do things properly by them and this history can help you reap some strong rewards in how Google treats your advertising spend, which would be hidden from those competitors who open their account years or even months after you.
Plus there are the benefits that accrue when you link your own Google AdWords account with your Google Analytics account (assuming you use this as your website’s analytics tool). Once the two accounts are linked you can receive click cost data, which makes it a relative breeze to produce your AdWords ROI down to a single keyword level.
Following on from the theme of tracking, I for one never like spending money without knowing what I will receive in return. Therefore, setting up your AdWords account without spending the 5 to 10 minutes to install its built-in Conversion tags on your website is as bad as sending Google a cheque each month with no idea what they are providing for your money. You should know how much Google ‘charges’ you per sale, newsletter registration, or webinar download – whatever the conversion options your AdWords traffic can deliver on.
The likelihood of you receiving any conversions is usually predicated on your account being established with the view of the searcher in mind. For example, let’s say you sold widgets. Blue, green, white and black were all available. As were fast, slow and medium speeds. Big and small were options you carried, too. Then along comes a Google searcher looking for a Big, Fast Black one. They type in that term and are met with your advertisement that says “Widgets for Sale” and a link that takes them to the home page of your website.
Now selling widgets is a competitive market. So with this ad they also see around it other ads – some say “Black Widgets for Sale” – then there is a “Big Widgets for Sale” ad. And then, near the top, is the one that captures their attention – “Big Fast Black Widgets” – exactly what they are looking for and ‘click’, they are gone from the page and directly onto the exact page that sells Big Fast Black Widgets. Bingo! Moments later a new widget is purchased.
A well set up Google AdWords account ‘wins’ this click by offering the advertiser the most relevant ad for the keyword they type in (Big Fast Black Widget). It achieves this by containing just the right number of AdGroups that in themselves contain the smallest number of keywords for the ad text(s) they can. This could be as simple as one keyword phrase (Big Fast Black Widget) per each ad text.
In contrast, a poorly established account has one AdGroup containing all possible keyword choices and just the one ad text. This single ad text has to account for all the different keywords being used to ‘fire it up’ so it does what it can and sends the visitor to the home page. On the other hand, the targeted ad text only has to allow for one keyword option so it can send the visitor to the most relevant page for that keyword.
Therefore, if you look at your account and see just one AdGroup chocker block with keywords then you have problems. But that’s nothing new – you probably already knew this from the low click volumes and high costs that this account structure frequently delivers.
So if you are not sure if your Google AdWords account is being managed the right way, then ask yourself these questions:
A ‘No’ answer to any of these questions points to some problems that warrant a bit more digging.
The Popcorn in Your Google AdWords Account
The price of movie theatre popcorn continues to defy any recessionary trend if my recent Christmas holiday family visit was anything to go by. Last year, I remember reading how that, while these concessions account for only about 20% of a theatre’s gross revenues, they represent some 40% of a theatre’s profits. Apparently, while ticket revenues must be shared with movie distributors, 100% of concession revenue goes straight into an exhibitor’s coffers. Hidden inside those big buckets of mostly air is quite an important economic result for every movie theatre you visit.
Movie theatres are not the only places where seemingly small details of the service, like popcorn, can make a disproportionate difference to the success of the enterprise. Google AdWords has its own batch of hidden economic treasures too. And like movie popcorn, they are frequently missed as one small part of the full solution, when in reality they are responsible for a sizable part of the service’s revenue (for Google that is, not you).
One of these details is the option Google gives you to use broad match keyword terms in your keyword list. It’s their default setting and, not surprisingly really, it provides them with the most control over your final ad spend.
Broad match keyword bidding done badly can remove any reasonable chance of making your Google AdWords spend pay its way. However, conversely, when managed properly it can be the one factor that ensures your campaign succeeds while your competitor’s sucks money day after day. It all comes down to how much control you let Google have over how your broad match keywords are used.
So, let’s cover some background details first before I dive in and provide you with the knowledge on how to make broad match bidding work to your advantage.
But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how ‘broad match’ bidding works. Google allows you to choose three ways to bid on your keywords: broad match, phrase match and exact match. It’s easier if I cover these in reverse order, so here’s some explanation on each.
Exact match is what it says – you bid on [flowers] (with the hard brackets around the keyword in your keyword list) and only those people who type in this exact term will see your ad. Exact match bidding works when you know ‘exactly’ what people are going to type in. Naturally, this is a hard strategy to use on its own – guessing all those keywords can be a real challenge when you are starting out.
Phrase match makes things a bit easier. This is where you bid on a term like “flowers auckland” (now with quote marks around it to denote this match option). This lets your keyword show for terms that include this exact word BUT with additional words either side of the phrase. For instance, cheap flowers auckland, or flowers auckland delivery Epsom.
Broad match takes phrase match and expands it in two ways. First, it allows other search keywords to be placed between any multi bid keyword. For instance, say you are bidding on the multi keyword phrase – wedding flowers – then you will also have your ad presented for these terms: wedding spring flowers and wedding without flowers options.
That should be all quite logical and nothing too scary to worry about. Now here’s the ‘popcorn’ bit. By choosing the broad match option you also allow Google to extend the term using synonyms it thinks are appropriate. It’s a function called ‘expanded broad match’ and can be a problem when you use terms that have many synonyms that you don’t want your ad to show for. For instance, say you are bidding on the single broad match keyword of flowers, you could also have your ad shown for the terms roses, plants, florist, tulips, carnations and even orchids. Now, you may only provide cut flowers and never purchase orchids, which means the last option would be incorrect and would bring the wrong traffic to your page. (That is after someone had spent your money by clicking on your ad after searching for this term.)
Google’s take on using expanded broad match keywords is that they are helping you by showing your ad for keywords that they think are relevant. My take is that this type of matching is not what broad match was originally meant to do and, while it has been around for a few months now, I recommend all those using broad match to be aware of it and take steps to limit its capability to generate costly wasted clicks.
So, how do you find out if this type of matching is causing you a problem? The first step is to find out how much ‘expansion’ is happening with your own broad match terms, and then limit this by deploying the fourth keyword match type – negative match.
Hidden within your Google AdWords Report section is a report called ‘search query performance’ (see the picture below).
This will reveal the exact search terms people typed in before they clicked your AdWords ad. By running this report you will see all the terms that were entered compared with their original broad match keyword. For instance, the broad match term could have been “Auckland florist” and they may have typed in “Auckland business for sale florist”.
Now, you may have a florist business but you may not want to put it up for sale so any terms that relate to this are incorrect and don’t need to fire up your ad. Hence, you are best to make the term “business for sale” a negative keyword (you do this by placing a negative sign before it, i.e. “-business for sale”, and adding it to your keyword list.) Your negative keywords can be at either an Ad Group or Campaign level.
Here’s an example of the power of spending time working on this process. The image to the right shows a snapshot of results for a Google AdWords campaign we took over a few months ago. This is for a business that sells only part of a range of a widely used product. They were bidding on a lot of broad match terms with hardly any negative keywords. Each month they ended up buying traffic for searchers looking for the part of the range they didn’t stock. What’s more, the synonym match algorithm was causing problems. It was a bit of a costly mess.
Note how after adding a long list of relevant negative keywords we were able to drop the impression count by 88.5%, increase the click through rate of the ads by 250%, and slash the spend in half by ensuring the ads were only shown for product keywords the company actually stocks.
So there you have it. It pays to be aware of how Google treats the broad keywords you have in your account. Why not run the search query report today and see what it turns up? You may be unpleasantly surprised.
How well you use the 95 characters spread across three lines (25-35-35) that are available within your Google Ad Text can be all that separates your campaign from being an ongoing costly expense or a cost-effective provider of valuable new prospect leads. However, knowing what copy to write can be a challenge when you are starting out. How can you distil your core benefit down to so few words? And should you lead with a benefit or a feature? All this can cause unnecessary concern and confusion, and result in the creation of those first few ads being a rather haphazard affair.
But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to share a simple process you can follow to make this ad creation easier. All you need is a few moments of concentration and the use of a tidy FREE online tool from Google. Combine the two and you should be scribbling down good copy ideas in seconds.
The true power of this system comes from its ability to show you an ‘over the shoulder’ view of your prospects. Remember that your searching prospects don’t see your ad in isolation – it is part of a complete page of results (both paid and organic). Both of these areas can change on a frequent basis, especially the paid area, which can change on a daily basis as new advertisers come into the market. The Google ads that are written with an appreciation of the other advertising and copy that sits around them tend to be the ones that lead onto great things. So how do you ensure you can see what your searcher sees?
Well, if you live in the same area as the prospects that your Google AdWords campaign is targeting then it is as simple as keying in your search keyword and noting what comes up. However, things are a bit more difficult for those advertising in markets outside their own location. Fortunately, this is where the free handy tool I mentioned comes into play.
You can find it here: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool. You will need to have a valid Google account to make it work, but once you type in the keyword you want to search on, the location of the Google search engine and the location of your searcher, and then submit the form, all will be revealed for you. For instance, see what I find when searching for the keyword ‘laptop computers’ when looking for the .com search engine for those searchers in the US.
If you run a computer store in New Zealand that sells laptops and are wondering what ad text might work you in your Google AdWords account, you could do a lot worse than taking your ideas from those shown in the hyper-competitive US market. Sneaking a look over the fence at others trying to do the same marketing as you but in other markets is just one way you can use this great tool to help make your ad writing an easier task. Here are two other ideas you may want to pick up on.
Look for answers to the problems your prospects have. You may have a strong idea of the key problems your prospects want to solve when they start looking for your product/service. Study the paid and non-paid search results behind your top keywords and see if the true benefits behind these problems are being addressed. For example, people don’t purchase walk-in wardrobes, they purchase storage solutions. I have found that, for some reason, it helps to print out the results page and mark up the areas where these problems are being addressed.
Trick Google into showing you only the high click-through ads. When you are presented with a full page of AdWords ads it can be hard to differentiate which ones are the high click-through winners and as such are worth paying more attention to than the others. You can help yourself here by tricking Google into only showing you the strongest ads. You do this by forcing the Google ad serving engine to show you a broad match result for your target keyword by searching with a term that will always provide a broad match result. For instance, if you are interested in the term mentioned before, ‘laptop computers’, you can reveal the broad match result by entering ‘laptop 8855hyy computers’. See the image to follow for how these results differ slightly to the ones shown previously.
There are many other ways you can use these ‘over the shoulder’ views to further hone your ad copy. By following these few steps this simple tool should ensure that a) you are never stumped for an idea when kicking off your Google Ad text again and, more importantly, b) you produce ad copy with the same view in mind as your prospect sees. Have fun.
Hourly reports from Google Adwords can help to reveal some interesting facts about when your searchers are looking for what you offer. Where are the clicks and impressions going? Is your product a daytime or evening seach subject? And why waste your clicks on low traffic times? go here for more from Google.