Author Archive
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
The psychology of what is going on here is easy to see. Marketing is difficult and many in the market want the easy way to success. So Google offers a program that fits that want but it cannot serve the need.
Here is Google’s description of what AdWords Express is: http://www.google.com/awexpress/
What It Is
AdWords Express is the easiest way to advertise on Google. Creating your ad takes just a few minutes, and that’s it. Everything else is managed automatically, ensuring your ad is only shown to people looking for what you have to offer. Now you’re advertising to an audience that’s already interested in you.
Who It’s For
AdWords Express is for local businesses looking for local customers. It’s for business owners who want the benefits of a targeted online ad campaign, without having to spend time managing it.
End of Google site content.
Marketing is not simple and that did not suddenly change because Google changed the name of the product from Boost to Express. The name was changed to protect the not so innocent because the results of many tests we saw of Boost where like watching a train wreck in slow motion. We saw clients pay ridiculous amounts of money for some of the worst qualified clicks. What Boost was very good at doing was spending money but that is not typically a goal of our clients. The only thing express about this is the transfer of money from your credit card to Google’s bank account. There are so many things wrong in Express that we hesitate to waste your time detailing all of them but at its core Express is trying to target traffic without knowledge of the business.
Google is a great company, but the reality is that marketing requires a level of thinking that is currently beyond all software in the market today. Google is trying to take a keyword model assembled without knowledge of your business or your customers and produce traffic that benefits your business. That is a nice goal but it is not possible in today’s world.
AdWords is a giant step forward for advertisers but it requires thought and planning to make it produce results. If your business specializes in something other than AdWords and you need an AdWords Expert on your team please contact us.
Tags: AdWords Express
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in AdWords Express | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
 While our business is focused on the design and management of Google AdWords, there is no doubt that our clients value results not traffic. AdWords drives traffic volume to the landing page, but 99% of the response comes from the web experience. The collection of response elements on the landing page are the key variables involved and in this article we explore the challenges we commonly see.
1. Trying to talk to everyone
The statement that “Everyone is a prospect for my business” is a clear sign that the page is going to have a message problem. Even if this was true, and it almost never is, the fact is you have to know your audience to write compelling copy. Without an understanding of the audience you have no way to understand what motivates them to action. Talking to one audience will often alienate another so even if you have the perfect product there probably is not just one reason people buy it. If I want to buy performance and you want to sell safety the odds of success are not good because we have a message to benefit mismatch. To create compelling copy for your business you have to understand the values, experiences, and perceptions of your audience.
2. Failure to remember the goal
My old First Sergeant had an expression; “When you are up to your ass in alligators it is hard to remember the goal was to drain the swamp.” I think this visual is really good for web designers because they get so wrapped up in the colors, images, and technology that they forget the goal is to start a relationship with the visitor. Response design is about introducing your business and moving the relationship to the first step. When you look at first response goals you have to consider that the visitor probably does not know who you are and has no reason to trust you yet. The goal is to make a good first impression because there is no second chance to do that.
3. Failure to continue the conversation
The web experience needs to be thought about as a conversation that started with a search followed by ad copy that indicated you have an answer to their information need at the landing page. When they enter the website experience you need to continue that conversation. Do not attempt to shift messages on them without transition copy. An example of this would be a general retailer that sells Italian Shoes. The search was buy Italian Shoes, followed by an ad for Italian Shoes, and the next page better be about Italian Shoes. If you drop this person on the home page several clicks away from Italian Shoes I can guarantee you will not be happy with the results. In this example message shifting would be to land on a page about shoe polish. These two items are related but you need to transition the conversation from shoes to polish (buying to maintenance). A simple transition like this one you might be able to do with the ad copy but most of the time shifting the topic requires more than the 95 letters and spaces you get in an Adwords ad.
4. Failure to ask for the order
One of my early mentors in marketing taught me to ask for the order early and often and once they give you the order shut up. Asking for the order in website context equates to a response action that stands out on the page. Often we see beautiful designs where the color scheme flows together creating harmony in the design that fails to convert. While designers might want harmony we want the eye drawn to the major response element and that often means contrasting the element so it stands out on the page. If the page is blue then we want the response element to be red so it immediately draws the eye to the element on the page. We want the response element in the center of the primary reading zone of the page and in most designs this is center right above the fold.
5. Too many options
Landing pages are often designed with too many options and the visitor gets confused and leaves. It is common for us to see a landing page with 5-10 responses or more yet the most successful landing pages have 2-3. I recently reviewed a page with conversion problems and they had over 100 options on the page and the visitor was simply overwhelmed. This is a case where more is not better, better is better. If your page has more than 10 options you need to rethink the page and go back to your audience profile.
6. Trying to box in the Visitor
Let’s face it most of us are control freaks and we try to control the web experience to the extent we can. The challenge is we have zero control and the visitor has ultimate control so this is a battle we cannot win. If you try to box the visitor in they will simply use their doomsday device (back button or close window) – one click and they are gone. We often see squeeze-pages with what we call a “my way or the highway design” with no connection to extended content or alterative conversions and normally traffic does not respond well to this design. Given one option the person will often just leave because they often like to make choices and this requires comparison. This does not mean squeeze pages do not work because, as much as I dislike them, in some cases they are the right tool. If you feel you have to use a squeeze page make sure you are not losing some secondary value that you can get from that visit.
7. Failure to consider the source of traffic
Not all traffic is created equal. Traffic from the Search Network is normally much further along in the purchase cycle than traffic from the Display Network. Your conversation style needs to change based on this audience assumption. Search traffic copy can be much shorter and focused largely on your product or service advantage in a comparison mode. Display traffic is less qualified since they just ran into your product or service this means more copy that justifies the value of the solution in general. Traffic segmentation is much more complex than just the broad source and you have to decide how granular you want to get in your segmentation.
8. Asking for more than you need
Ask for what you need and nothing more. With every item that you ask for from your visitor you run the risk of reducing your response rate. All of us have seen huge response forms that are intimidating and that increases the barrier to response because it looks like a lot of work. After saying this I know that there are businesses that need to gather lots of information on the lead and in those cases it is normally best to design a multiple stage response so you can reduce the initial reaction to a difficult form. The key to this process is to make sure that you get the most critical information on the first screen. We recently worked with a client that had a long application form and breaking it into two pieces increased the conversion rate by over 500%. On the first response we gathered the phone number or email, and the zip code. This was followed by the rest of the application and we recorded the lead after the first form. This did result in some partial applications but with the contact information already gathered the sales team could follow up on those and they recovered many of them.
Sub rule A is; never ask for data you already know. For example if you ask for the zip code there is no reason to enter the city or state. Any programmer worth their salt can translate a zip code into the city and state and the savings to the user can be impressive. As an example my business is in Grover Beach California and the zip is 93433. You can make me enter 20 keystrokes to type out the city, state, zip or translate the zip and save me 75% of the typing. The easier you make it on the visitor to give you the result you want the better your results will be.
9. Dumb Error Handling
This should be a crime punishable by some sort of horrible pain because there is no reason for this to ever happen but it does. I recently tested a form for a client that give me a response that said “Correct Entry” and it highlighted my email address. My address was correct and after an investigation, that 99% of the population would never do, I discovered the error was that I already had an account and it wanted me to sign in.
Error handling is often an afterthought and error message texts are written by programmers that are not known for their great communication skills. They assume knowledge that the audience does not have they often think that if you can make the transaction then it works properly. It works properly when the visitor can make the transaction happen in a fast, easy, and intuitive way. That last one of intuitive is for the audience not the programmer. It makes me crazy when I run into pages with extensive entry that do not save my work when something goes wrong or force me to comply with a formatting that the programmer could easily handle such as phone number formats. When visitors run into an error it increases the likelihood that they will leave when they want to convert.
10. Forcing Visitors to Register
I have more passwords than I care to admit to and there are several studies that show that forcing visitors to register results in LARGE losses in business. What is really crazy about this process is that in most cases signing into the site is of zero value to the visitor so we have to ask why do we do this at all. In most cases it is because the shopping cart works that way so we force people to create and remember a password. Shopping cart technicians will tell you that you have to do it like that for security and I am sorry but that is just wrong. If you have customers that frequently return to reorder products then a registration process might make sense but if you are like most small businesses reorders are infrequent enough that reentry of the data is less work for the visitor than finding the password. If you are still not convinced that forced registration is a dangerous practice http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button/read this article about a business that reclaimed $300 million in sales by dropping this requirement.
In Closing
Response design and website design are fundamentally different worlds. In response design we are creating a conversation with someone who is interested in a specific solution as indicated by the source of the traffic. The website is designed to talk to the entire world and you have to consider prospects, customers, vendors, business partners, media, and other audiences. In response design it’s about suspects and prospects because if your customers find you from a search for what you do you have more problems than a landing page can cure. The page and copy design have to assume that this is a person who has never seen or heard of your business.
Disclaimer
We are not designers nor are we copywriters. Our job, as AdWords Experts, is to find and segment traffic and route to the best web content and measure the results. When a design fails to produce the results needed we are part of the team that works through those issues because we have the data and comparative experience that most designers lack.
Tags: Landing Pages
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in ad copy, landing-page-design | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
![Where Does Google Make Its Money? [ infographic ]](http://www.wordstream.com/images/where-does-google-make-its-money.png)
The 20 keyword categories with the highest search volume and highest costs per click, thereby netting Google the most money, are:
- Insurance Loans (example keywords include “consolidate graduate student loans” and “cheapest homeowner loans”)
- Mortgage (example keywords include “refinanced second mortgages” and “remortgage with bad credit”)
- Attorney (example keywords include “personal injury attorney” and “dui defense attorney”)
- Credit (example keywords include “home equity line of credit” and “bad credit home buyer”)
- Lawyer (“personal injury lawyer,” “criminal defense lawyer)
- Donate (“car donation centers,” “donating a used car”)
- Degree (“criminal justice degrees online,” “psychology bachelors degree online”)
- Hosting (“hosting ms exchange,” “managed web hosting solution”)
- Claim (“personal injury claim,” “accident claims no win no fee”)
- Conference Call (“best conference call service,” “conference calls toll free”)
- Trading (“cheap online trading,” “stock trades online”)
- Software (“crm software programs,” “help desk software cheap”)
- Recovery (“raid server data recovery,” “hard drive recovery laptop”)
- Transfer (“zero apr balance transfer,” “credit card balance transfer zero interest”)
- Gas/Electricity (“business electricity price comparison,” “switch gas and electricity suppliers”)
- Classes (“criminal justice online classes,” “online classes business administration”)
- Rehab (“alcohol rehab centers,” “crack rehab centers”)
- Treatment (“mesothelioma treatment options,” “drug treatment centers”)
- Cord Blood (“cordblood bank,” “store umbilical cord blood”)
Top section of this article is the work of Larry Kim and was first published at: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2011/07/18/most-expensive-google-adwords-keywords
End of copied article.
I think Larry’s research is good but like any data you have to be careful with what you think it means. For example we know that Attorney keywords are much more expensive per click than Insurance, Loans, and Mortgages. All of these are highly competitive and big money to Google but the value of a client, in general, is much lower in finance than legal. This report is really total revenue per keyword category not the cost per click but that headline probably is not as strong.
There is no doubt that this is a list of highly competitive and expensive keyword categories but the data is hidden in averages and categories. As anyone who has taken “How to lie with statistic 101” can tell you the best way to lie with numbers is to average them. On the other hand we have to average lots of things in this industry because dealing with all the details is just impossible. Within some of these categories like Attorney are words like mesothelioma that are being averaged in with lower value words in the same category. We have seen several examples of specific keywords with cost per click levels above $100 and in most cases they were worth the money. The truth is that the cost per click is market driven so it is set by the competition. Since the competition varies largely by market there is really no way to accurately report this data.
This type of analysis is impossible for anyone other than Google to perform because of the variables like quality score and market location. If we are looking for raw cost per click it is probably something generic like “mesothelioma” with a 1 quality score and a first position in NYC; that click is probably ridiculously expensive.
For a most expensive keyword list there are some missing items like Bail Bonds, which is a good example of an emergency service. These words are the type that the only position to target is #1 and that drives the costs up quickly. If you think about it on an emergency service like Bail Bonds, Emergency Plumbing Repair, Locksmith, or many others the only position worth having is the first one and that drives the cost up quickly. The other possible missing item here, based on total revenue, is Travel although the cost per click is less because of limited revenue per transaction.
Classifying keywords is at best difficult so I respect the work done here but if we are doing keyword categories I think Attorney (#4) Lawyer (#6) and Claim (#10) are really in the same category. Combining them would not move the results but it would bring legal much closer to the top of the list. I believe that legal keywords are expensive because lawyers are by nature highly competitive people. Add to that the high value of the clients in certain segments and you have the elements of a perfect storm in cost per click.
The most expensive keyword we have personally managed is Bail Bonds in a major metro market and the cost per click was well north of $100 but I have seen comments from others of legal class action words above $200.
Tags: High Cost Keywords
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in adwords, Adwords Auction | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
We advise clients to compete on both the paid and organic traffic and now we are adding social media to that recommendation. Social Media needs to be part of the marketing plan strategy, even if the plan is to do nothing other than listen and learn right now. With an audience of well over 700 million no business can completely ignore this. Social Media is rapidly evolving and it is fundamentally different than advertising or PR because it is a two-way conversation and it’s time to get social.
Google and FaceBook are at war with each other and it is tons of fun to watch from the sidelines as the titans clash on the worldwide playground. The latest shot over the bow of social media is Google’s +1 and Google+, which are intended to compete with FaceBook and their Like button. The twist with Google is that they are integrating this with both organic and paid search results. So what should advertisers do now?
First let’s get the ridiculous out of way. We do not think anyone, other than someone trying to game the system, is going to vote for an ad so input at that point is dumb although output there does make sense. The input point of this is going to be the web page and there a vote is both likely and reasonably placed. This process is likely to be important to both your ad and your organic rank.
One only needs to look at the train wreck that is Buzz to see that not every Google experiment works well. Based on this we need to be careful with how much we invest in this in the very early stages. The +1 process is typical Google magic with several components but no details when you get to the implementation. One of the first things that you realize with +1 is that it is URL based so you may want to rethink your landing page, redirects, and page canonicalization.
We try to follow everything Google so we did get an early invite to the beta for Google+ and our observations are that it is functionally similar to FaceBook. The system does not have the critical mass of users that it needs to face off with FaceBook but Google is not without resources so I would not immediately disregard them. In the first few weeks the network grew to 10 million but this is still a long way from FaceBook numbers of 700 million plus. The challenge in social media is the network size not the software so Google has a huge uphill battle, but the integration with gmail is a big advantage.
At this early stage it is probably a good idea to get involved in Google+ and to implement the +1 button on your site but we think it is too early to invest your internet goodwill in the development of your contacts and circles on Google+.
Tags: google, Social Media
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in google, Social Media | No Comments »
Friday, June 17th, 2011
 “In service to the searcher”
The first priority of AdWords is to create the best quality SERP (Search Engine Results Page) to serve the searcher. AdWords controls 50% of the most valuable Internet real estate on the planet and our job is to pursue SERP perfection. We are not fools so we are very aware of the fact that obtaining perfection is impossible, but it is the pursuit that is important.
You might think something like “I am paying for AdWords and I want it to serve my needs first.” This is a nice thought, but a failed concept. The value you get is from the interaction with the searcher. You can only get there if you serve their informational need first. The value of traffic is created by the engagement of the searcher with the value statement of your business. We must serve the searcher before that value can be created.
We get calls from people all the time that are trying to control the market and the reality is that the market is a thousand times more powerful than the business. Control is an unlikely outcome in a mismatch like this. The strategy needs to be in service to the market, not in an attempt to control the market. You cannot win if you try it the other way around.
There are lots of system manipulations, some of them work once in a while, but none of them work long term. You can trick a person into clicking on an ad with deceptive copy, but it is unlikely you will hold the upper hand all the way to the finish line because they hold all the power. I will be the first to admit that there are businesses that work on a one-sale model, but our clients need the recurring business and the long term relationship to build a good business. For that reason they need to get the right traffic to their site and that means serving the searcher first.
To be in service to the searcher we need to make sure that the ads on the SERP are the highest quality match to the searcher’s query. The magic of AdWords is the keyword model of both positive and negative words to connect directly to the searcher’s need. Since 1994, when I started working in web marketing, I have yet to meet a person that did not know their keywords. It is a rare person however that knows their negatives. To serve the searcher the ad needs to appear when it serves their informational need but no other time. You might think that there is no cost to the extra impression of your ad, unfortunately that is not true. That impression goes into the quality score which is multiplied by your bid to calculate your rank so it really does cost you in the long run.
We like to think about the search process as the start of a conversation. The searcher enters a few words as a clue of their interests and we match that to the keywords related to the ad copy which is our response to their query. You say hello and I say Good Morning, it really is that simple. The really tough part here is when they click on your ad you need to continue that conversation on your landing page or the only thing that will happen is a charge to your credit card.
Tags: adwords
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in adwords, Quality Score, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, June 3rd, 2011
 First it was Microsoft and now Google is getting into the Privacy Policy Enforcement business. Microsoft has been rather heavy handed and inconsistent on their policy enforcement shutting down accounts for what it deems to be a problem. It seems if your page takes input from the visitor there is very exact language required in your privacy policy.
Here is Google Blog Posting from Inside AdWords on this:
If your site requests payment, financial, or personal information from visitors, please review the new requirements and make any needed changes to avoid having your ads suspended.
- Clear, accessible disclosure before visitors submit personal information
Our existing policy requires you to clearly describe how any personal information you solicit will be used. Soon, we’ll require that your description must also be easily accessible before site visitors submit their details.
- Option to discontinue direct communications
In the same description of how personal information will be used, you’ll also be required to describe how people can opt out of future emails, phone calls, or other direct communications.
- SSL when collecting payment and certain financial and personal information
Many websites use what are known as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connections to encrypt sensitive information that travels between the user’s browser and the website’s servers. To help ensure user safety, AdWords policy will require all advertisers to use SSL when collecting payments and certain financial and personal information (like bank account and social security numbers).
Source: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/05/upcoming-adwords-policy-changes-to.html
Microsoft’s policy appears to be very similar especially on item 2. We had a situation with them where they shut down two accounts over the exact words in the privacy policy. It seems that the magic words are “You may opt out of any future communications including but not limited to emails, phone, or mail. By sending a notice to via email to <email address> or by mail to <business name and address>.
Both Google and Microsoft are requiring that the advertiser states in their privacy policy that they will obey the law. The CAN-SPAM law specifically requires that you honor an opt-out request within 10 days. It seems that Microsoft and Google are now assuming the role of the Government in this area. The timing is such that I wonder if the Government is pulling the strings on this one.
For the SEO only people in our audience you have to wonder. What they will do to your organic score, if you do not have a privacy policy? My gut tells me that it will not be very pretty.
The bottom line here is if you have no privacy policy and have any input on your site you need to fix this before something bad happens to your site. If you have no policy http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/ can generate a policy for your site and it’s free.
Tags: privacy policy
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in adwords | No Comments »
Friday, March 4th, 2011
Just for some balance and to show that we do appreciate the good things that programmers bring to us, here are some recent at-a-boys for our developer friends.
Negative Word Lists
In the past there were only ad group or campaign level negative keywords but now Google is supporting keyword lists that can be applied across multiple campaigns. The process is simple to implement and it starts by building the negative keyword list in the Control Panel and Library section. Here you create the list and add the keywords, then at the campaign you attach the list in the negative keyword section. Now you can add a keyword to your list and have it applied to all the connected campaigns.
Better Mobile Targeting
 Mobile targeting was greatly enhanced by a new campaign level setting that allows for targeting the device type and the carriers. Everyone knows that mobile is rapidly expanding and changing and not everything works for everybody so now you can control this to a much finer level. If your site uses Flash you probably want to turn off iPad and iPhone traffic since we know that Apple does not support this. If your web site isn’t designed for a good mobile experience you may want to turn off Andriod, iPhone, and Palm, but keep the iPad traffic since the screen size is large enough that a desktop design works just fine. Carriers are another item to consider, especially in a very localized campaign.
Display Network Bidding
In one of the great non-events of recent time the split bids between managed and automatic placements has been consolidated. We are not sure why they ever split this up to begin with but it is no longer the headache that is was. Now we have only search and display bids as it should be.
Top Ads
You have probably noticed some changes in the Top position ads with longer than normal headlines. This is controlled by including a period, exclamation point, or question mark on the first line of body text. When this is there and the ad qualifies for a top position above the organic, the line will be appended to the headline with a dash and the punctuation will be removed. This is a big deal to several of our clients and we have begun a full review of all accounts to leverage this change. While we are very excited about the potential of this for many of our clients the early testing shows there are some bugs to be worked out. If you do this yourself make sure you test the outcome of the change!
Ad Copy Conversion Optimization
Google rolled out a new change to the Ad Rotation settings for campaigns extending the optimization based on Conversions rather than Clicks. We have been asking for this for years and the problem is so old that it was a chapter in our first book several years ago. We have some testing underway to see if this operates as you would expect, but the fact that it exists means I can take this off my Christmas Letter to Saint Google.
Tags: ad optimization, mobile ad targeting, negative-keywords, top ads in google
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in Adwords Changes, adwords expert | No Comments »
Friday, March 4th, 2011
 A system user’s bug is often a programmer’s feature, and this month we thought it would be fun to talk about functions that are just dumb. I was inspired to write this because of a conversation I had with a person at Microsoft AdCenter support regarding budget changes. Here is the situation.
We had an account that was running higher than the client wanted so we think to ourselves no problem just adjust the budget – but life is not that simple. It was late in the month and the account had already spent more in the current month than they wanted to spend next month. This is actually a very common situation but guess what in AdCenter you cannot do that because of a feature/bug. Here is the error screen:
 (more…)
Tags: AdCenter Bugs, ppc challenges
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in adwords expert | No Comments »
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
 A wise person once said “Half of my marketing dollars are wasted; I just do not know which half.” This is actually an optimistic statement because depending on how you measure success the waste could be much higher. In the direct response business a response rate of 2% is not uncommon and that translates to 98% waste. The challenge with finding the waste is that success and failure are not always clearly visible.
Think about the last time you had a first transaction with a company based on a single impression from that business. Depending on who you listen to each of us is exposed to thousands of advertisements each day so it is incredibly rare that we respond simply on one impression. While a direct response can happen in the vast majority of businesses it takes many impressions before a prospect makes a measureable transaction. Consider the following:
The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.
The second time he does not notice it.
The third time he is conscious of its existence.
The fourth time he faintly remembers having seen it before.
The fifth time he reads it.
The sixth time he turns his nose up at it.
The seventh time he reads it through and says “Oh brother”
The eighth time he says “here’s that confounded thing again”
The ninth time he wonders if it will amount to anything.
The tenth time he will ask his neighbor if he has tried it.
The eleventh time he wonders how the advertiser makes it pay.
The twelfth time he thinks it must be a good thing.
The thirteenth time he thinks it might be worth something.
The fourteenth time he remembers that he has wanted such a thing for a long time.
The fifteenth time he is tantalized because he cannot afford to buy it.
The sixteenth time he thinks he will buy it… someday.
The seventeenth time he makes a memorandum of it.
The eighteenth time he swears at his poverty.
The nineteenth time he counts his money carefully.
The twentieth time he sees it, he buys the article or instructs his wife to do so.
The over use of the word he and the last item are probably good clues that this list has been around for a very long time. According to the best information I have this was published in– Hints to Intending Advertisers; By Tomas Smith, London – 1885. While this list is 125 years old you can see that people really have not changed much. When you ask the question where did you hear about us the answer will always be the 19th or 20th step but in reality many areas are never credited with the transaction. Since we are AdWords Experts we would like to point out that the keywords associated with each of these steps are probably different. So if you never advertise for the early stage keywords how are you going to get the majority of the audience to this final step?
I propose that this list is not far off in many situations and it explains why we get the results we get. Were any of these 20 contacts wasted? My position would be that each step was part of the process and it simply took 20 actions to complete a visible reaction. At any point in the purchase process you could have hundreds or even thousands of prospects at the various points and this process is not purely linear. An individual prospect could skip or repeat steps because these are people not machines. I would propose that you can reduce this list by doing a better job of communicating your value and telling your story clearly and with emotion, but your prospect is still going to evolve over time not just instantly transform.
Think of your personal experience today. Studies vary but most indicate that you will be exposed to thousands of advertisements before you close your eyes tonight. Out of those thousands you might respond to one or two. If you are like most people 90%+ of your purchases today will not be based on advertising but on some prior experience or relationship. You will buy your coffee at the same place, get gas for your car at the same station, and buy a sandwich at a place you have been before. We are creatures of habit so the fact that advertising fails at a very high percentage should not surprise us. The challenge is that as a business you must reach out to new people consistently because if you fail to develop new business you will ultimately fail.
At my core I am a systems person that loves impossible challenges and that is why I work in marketing and my goal is to fail less often.
Tags: marketing budgets, sales
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
Believe it or not this is one of the most common questions we get. People hear about AdWords, but they are not really sure of what they are or why they should care. This is Google’s fault because they really are not great communicators. Their mission is to organize the world’s information but like the cobbler’s shoes they either struggle with or simply do not care to communicate the value of AdWords. You would think that Google would try harder since AdWords is their golden goose and Microsoft is now in the second position nipping at their heels in the search market. Here is my attempt at a simple description of AdWords:
Adwords is an auction priced self-service advertising system that delivers ad content relevant to the other page content.
Google’s primary goal is to provide advertising that enhances the search experience and, in Google’s eyes, this mission is much more important than your money.
Let’s take this statement apart piece by piece.
Auction Priced: One item that throws people new to the system is that unlike other advertising where the cost is set by the publisher, in AdWords the cost is set by the competitors seeking the same ad space. Because keywords often cross over different industries you will often be competing for ad space with businesses that are not your normal business competitors. Your bid is not what you pay. What you pay is one penny more than the competitor behind you. This is how changes by competitors drive your costs up.
Self-Service Advertising: Adwords is a computer system that requires on-going maintenance and there is no auto-pilot button. Your campaigns use a keyword and bidding model built and maintained by the advertiser. How well it works depends on how well engineered the models are.
Relevant Ad Content means that Google is looking to deliver the best ads associated with the actions of the searcher. They view the ads as an extension of the natural listings and they rank them in a very similar fashion. They want to deliver ads that are likely to be of interest to the searcher based on the keyword match or the content or actions of the searcher. They take this extremely seriously and will not display ads that are a severe mismatch no matter how much you are willing to spend on that position.
Advertising that enhances the search Experience: New advertisers often fail to believe how serious Google is about this. Other Publishers will sell their soul to close the deal and collect your money; Google is not like these other publishers. Google places the priority of producing the best quality SERP (Search Engine Results Page) well above your money. Given the option between improving the SERP or increasing immediate revenue they will pick the SERP quality every time. This surprises Advertisers. It really shouldn’t though because the secret to Google’s success is the quality of their SERP. This is a core corporate value and not a marketing slogan.
The heart and soul of AdWords is the keyword matching and its simple appearance is misleading at best. The process includes phases of eligibility and ranking. For eligibility there are four positive and three negative forms of keywords used to match to the searchers search query and multiple statuses that create a test for display eligibility. After eligibility is established quality score and bid are used to determine the ad rank. Assuming the keyword met eligibility and ranked high enough to make it to the page the ad is displayed. This is, of course, a very high level view of this process and the devil is in the details. In the matching process it is important that you fail the eligibility for searches that do not apply to you. In a pay per click world impressions might seem to be free but if you follow the system you will find that you pay for those excess impressions later. They drive down your click through rate lowering the quality score and increasing your cost on future clicks.
Why should we pay you to run AdWords?
The other form of this questions “Why can’t I just run AdWords myself?” and the answer is you can just like you can prepare you own taxes. Businesses that are large enough to have a full time accounting staff still engage CPA firms that specializes in taxes because they know it a full time job just to keep up with the changes and the latest strategies. When it comes to rapid changes in policy and practice the IRS has absolutely nothing on Google. Changes at Google are non-stop and according to spokesman Matt Cutts they average more than one change per day and that is just what they admit to. At least the IRS has Congress to slow them down! After working with Google AdWords since 2003 I can tell you that you are always one click away from discovering some new function or feature that was not there yesterday. It is a rare day in our office when there is not a new discovery for the entire day. While I do not propose that AdWords is as complex as the US tax code, it is certainly not simple. At a basic level almost any business person can set up an AdWords account, put in some keywords, write a few ads, and get results from the system. The problem with this is that the campaign is not going to run at maximum effectiveness and it can leak money and opportunity at light-speed.
AdWords is where marketing, systems, language, and people collide in cyberspace and when played at a serious level it is complex and competitive. It is complex enough that Google has not one but four certification tests for its certified partners. There are three major networks including Google Search, Search Partners, and Display and each of these networks is complex enough to write a book on. Its competitive enough that businesses spent $22.8 billion in 2009 and its on track to increase 22% for 2010 based on results through Q3 (reference: http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html). Add to this the analysis of how the traffic acts after it gets to your web site and it’s time to engage serious people for your team.
Tags: adwords expert
Posted by Bob Dumouchel in adwords expert | No Comments »
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