Adword Monster

Does Your Site Load Fast Enough for Adwords?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Thu, 08 May 2008 22:28:00 +0000

Google has already announced that page loading time was going to be a factor in Adwords quality scores, but now you can see if your landing page is quick enough. The change is supposed to go into effect in mid-June. The Inside Adwords Blog announced today that you can now view load time evaluations on the Keyword Analysis page.

So how do you get to the Keyword Analysis page? It's pretty easy once you know where to look.

Start at the Ad Group level and make sure your keywords are visible.

Next to each keyword is a magnifying glass icon

Click on the icon to receive the following box and click the "Details and recommendations" link.

This brings you to a breakdown of quality score elements. You can see your landing page load time at the bottom of the box.

In theory this metric becomes an official part of the quality score next month and it has an impact on both your position and your cost per click! If your web site is not loading fast enough now is the time to assess why. Is there too much junk on your landing page? Is your hosting company doing you wrong? There could be numerous reasons as to why this could be happening, but the bottom line is you should fix it anyways! Your visitors will thank you.

Ask not what position your ad is in but what position best serves your business

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:27:00 +0000

"I want to come up first in Google"

This statement echoes in my head because 90% of the time it's in the first few words of each phone call I get. This statement creates great conversations on the business, products, services, market areas, and other key elements of the marketing strategy. This helps us understand the businesses we are serving but it does not address the issue of search engine position.

I rarely address the "I want to be first" statement directly because it is fundamentally flawed and not in line with the real business objectives. Business people are by nature competitive they want to win and they want to be first. Being first serves our egos but it's not necessarily the best place for your business.

Position counts but you cannot get so focused on one attribute of the game that you lose focus on the big things. Advertising needs to feed your business in balance with the budget and your ability to serve new business. We have seen examples of too much new business where clients have had us throttle back to give operations a chance to catch their breath. In other cases we reduced the client's position bids because being first made the sales unprofitable. If it costs $100 to generate $50 in gross profit you do not want to do that too many times.

Golden Rule of Positioning #1: Position your ad as high as necessary but no higher

We like to look at this from a business objective standpoint, so we often ask clients how much is a new customer worth to your business? This is often a thought-provoking question that creates a great dialog. If the client decides that a sales lead is worth $100 then the process becomes one of finding the maximum number of leads that you can generate with a cost at or below that number and within budget. There is a relationship between the cost of the lead and the quantity of leads you can generate. In most situations the more leads you generate the high the cost per lead since you are getting into less qualified traffic with lower response rates or you are paying more to be in a higher position.

Another limiting factor in this game is the budget, and yes, everyone has one.

There come times in Adwords Management when the daily budget is regularly stopping ad delivery because there is more traffic than money. In these cases the last place you want to be is first because your marketing goals just changed. The goal in this case becomes getting the cheapest clicks possible resulting in the most visitor per dollar.

Like many business decisions position is a ying and yang challenge with position, click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and budget. The general rules are:

The problem is that these statements are not 100% correct although they are generally true. Did you see how I talked out of both sides of my mouth at the same time? Higher position does not always create a higher CTR and a more visitors do not always create more business. What you have to do is find the right balance for your business and then consistently execute that strategy. A healthy web site has a good balance between its direct, referral, paid, and organic with a steady growth.

Does This Ad Group Make My Campaign Look Fat?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:54:00 +0000

Google Adwords can be a beautiful yet dangerous mistress... her seemingly targeted traffic, easy going daily budgets, and conservative broad matching. As you get to know each other and start to build what you think is a trust-based relationship, she slowly goes completely crazy. Like bad movie psycho girlfriend crazy (I'm looking at you Ben Stiller). Make a wrong move and she'll set your wallet on fire with bad content network traffic, ridiculously liberal extended broad matching, and possibly throw all your clothes out the window onto the lawn because she caught you messing around with Yahoo Search Marketing.

You know Adwords isn't perfect but she's the best you can get. Sure there's other fish in the sea, but that MSN chick has a lazy eye and a handlebar mustache... and who knows where those skanky banner ads have been.

Since you can't buy your Adwords account flowers, what can you do to keep the romance alive?

Do What You're Told!

Adwords holds all the cards in this relationship so don't push your luck. Adwords tells you to use small focused ad groups yet you insist on a bucket. Adwords tells you to match the landing page to your ad and you send traffic to the home page. She tells you to not leave your socks on the floor in the living room... no, wait that's my girlfriend... well you get the idea. You could make your life a lot easier if you just did what you were told. Adwords tells you how to do it right, listen!

Ask Questions

Have you ever screwed up big time with your special lady friend, and now she won't talk to you? Seeing as you're not even sure what you did, it's time to do some reconnaissance with her best friend to figure out what just happened. I'm kind of like Adwords' best girlfriend for a living.

My company gets a lot of calls from people that have been running their own Adwords Campaigns and the basic gist of most conversations is "what the hell happened to my account?" Adwords will tell you if you just ask the right way. A Search Query Report can call attention to huge amounts of waste due to the occasionally faulty logic of extended broad matching. Or a good Placement Report will show a few sites that are impressively unrelated to your business are sucking up lots of money through the content network. Adwords is full of lots of good data; you have to figure out how to turn it into information.

Put Some Effort Into Your Relationship

To be successful at anything you have to put some work into it. Keeping an Adwords Account up and running seems deceptively simple, and it is if you don't want the best possible return out of your spending. Make plans for a date with your Adwords account on a regular basis. Light a candle, add some keywords, put on some make out music, look for inactive keywords, freshen your ad copy, look at your account from top to bottom and see what you can do to make it over. If that doesn't work, talk about your feelings... chicks dig that.

Try Not to Talk About Money

I'm not saying Adwords is a gold digger... she's just very opportunistic when it comes to your declared assets. Adwords has some settings that are supposed to be fun and easy and are labeled with cool words like "automatic" and "optimizer." When Adwords wants to automatically optimize something for you, run for your life! Features like the budget optimizer are a way of getting you to fess up to how much you're willing to spend and then taking it from you.

With a little work you and your Adwords account can be happy together for a long time, but if all else fails send Google Flowers... you never know :)

Expanded Broad Match Speaks German Now Too? Scheisse!

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 21:53:00 +0000

Break out your Google-hosen, Adwords speaks German. Today I am impressed/worried about how smart broad match is becoming. I was reviewing a Search Query Report when I can across this: "arbeit von zu hause." I might have been a linguist in a past life, but I'm not bidding on German keywords in this campaign.

It's fair to say that broad matching isn't the most beloved Adwords feature for a lot of Search Marketers. Personally I kind of like broad match, it is not without purpose. I find it inspirational. You can get a clearer view of how people really search... the creativity of the general public with a blank search box is not to be underestimated. It helps me find good new keywords and lots of negative keywords too. Plus I think you're pretty conceited if you believe you can sit in your office and conjure up every possible combination of words that will drive profitable traffic to your web site.

On the one hand I'm impressed that Google made a multilingual leap that was correct. It's not like the phrase is off topic, it's dead on, but how did Google put this together? Are they using translation software somewhere? Did somebody else bid on this in an ad group containing its English counterpart and Google connected the two...? I mean seriously, it's another language. The organic results are all in German.

The part that I am worried about is what happens if they are making poor translations. English isn't an easy language to start with, a lot of the meaning of words in our language and others is based on context. Does this mean in the future I'm going to have to translate half of my search query report and figure out if it's good traffic? Are my negative keywords going to look like this: tton-i ap seo-yo, sa bai di mai, ta mina pengar...

Well I guess this is just one more thing for me to keep an eye on! At least it looks like being a quintilingual Military Intelligence analyst is going to pay off after all :)

Getting Google Slapped

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:53:00 +0000

It happens to everyone and you just have to learn how to fix it. A Google Slap is when Google suddenly wants a lot more money for your keyword. The typical story is a keyword that cost .50 yesterday is suddenly $5 or $10 and the word is "Inactive for Search" until you increase your bid. That's a Google Slap and it hurts and raises a red welt on your wallet and traffic flow.

To understand what is happening you have to understand the world according to Google. Google is seeking to improve the search experience because they know that is what drives the value of Google. The Google Slap is nothing more than one part of the cycle of improving the search experience. What is happening is that Google's system has detected that your keyword may not be contributing to that experience. The way they tell you that they are unhappy with that word is they simply increase the bid to a pain level that will get your attention. You have to admit that increasing your marketing expense by 10x is an attention getter.

Nobody really knows exactly what triggers this process or what the specific rules are but we do know what the general rules are. Google calculates a quality score and shows you the results of that calculation in a very broad sense. On your keyword detail page you will see the quality score range. This is not the default so you may need to customize your display to show the quality score. Here is what that looks like.

Google does not tell you what the quality score is but rather what broad range your score fits into. These levels are: Great, OK, Poor, and Poor + Inactive. While details of this quality score are cloaked deep inside Google we can tell you that quality score and organic page position are very closely related and share many of the same evaluation attributes. If you improve your quality score you almost always improve your search engine optimization. Conceptually what Google is looking at is how does the keyword connect to the ad copy and the landing page. If they think that your ad contributes to a better search experience then your quality score will be great but if it detracts from the search experience get ready to be slapped.

So you have been slapped, now what? Well the options are improve your quality score, delete the keyword, raise the bid, pause the keyword, or do nothing. Google never points out the pause or do-nothing option but they do exist.

Improving the quality score requires rethinking the keyword, ad copy, and landing page. In tests that we have performed its seems that the landing page is the source of most of the quality score but Google is looking at the whole series (keyword-ad copy- landing page) so simply changing the page will not fix the problem. Look at the other keywords in the ad group and consider how this keyword fits with them. If the adgroup is just a bucket of keywords without a theme then you have to reorganize them. When new clients come on board with us this is one of the most common tasks in the first month for those with an existing Google account.

Deleting the keyword is easy but it hurts if you need the traffic from that word. If the connection to your business for this keyword is weak then deleting it will improve your overall account. However, if the connection to your business is strong you have to think very seriously about how you deal with this and deleting the keyword should not be on the top of your option list.

Raising the bid is an option but only if that traffic is really worth the cost they want. If the word is worth that much then you really have to think about improving your quality score. As we noted above this is closely linked to your organic position and Google is telling you point blank that it does not think your page is related to what you think is an important keyword. We advise clients to listen carefully to Google on this. Raising the bid might be the way to handle this immediately but remember you are overpaying for that keyword and hurting your organic traffic by treating the symptom rather than the cause. If you have a poor quality score you can bet that you also have a poor SEO position for this keyword.

One low impact way of dealing with this is to delete the keyword and start a new adgroup focused on that word. Then connect that word to the best supporting landing page for that word on your site. If your quality score increased to OK or Great level then the keyword will live to create traffic another day. Quality score problems are often caused by adgroups with too many keywords with weak associations between the words. Breaking these into smaller more focused ad groups often will fix the problem and save you lots of money.

Most accounts have hundreds or even thousands of keywords. We commonly will pause the word and let the number of paused keywords grow then try to find ways to resolve several keywords in one pass. This saves tons of time and often you find that once the first word gets slapped others play follow the leader. Our most common approach to dealing with this is the pause, accumulate, and act strategy. During these regular reviews we examine the poor rated keywords because that is a warning level that you are about to be slapped. It's very rare that a word goes from great or good to a slap without a pit stop at poor. The expectation to that is when we know that the keyword is one of the major conversion producers. With those keywords we drop everything and work through the details until we have it resolved.

Don't let getting Google Slapped make you mad. Treat it as a learning experience and use what you learn to improve the search experience of your visitors. Ultimately this is what Google is after and you should be too.

Online Reputation Management, a Cautionary Tale

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:20:00 +0000

Business owners are very careful about managing their reputation but for some reason they have not come to realize the risks involved in the Internet or more specifically what is called social media.

I would like to tell you the story of Kevin, and trust me there is a business story here, but let's watch the train wreck first.

Meet Kevin

This is a true story and an absolute Reputation Management Disaster. Kevin, who happens to be pictured here in a dress, carrying a wand and a fine malt beverage, lost his job and embarrassed his employer with a quick post intended for his friends and peers. Kevin was an intern at a large New York bank. He sent his boss an e-mail letting him know that he had a family emergency and would be out for a day or two. In reality Kevin blew off work to go to a Halloween party back home and take some unfortunate pictures. Wanting to share the excitement of his Halloween costume with his friends he posted the picture to the left on his Facebook Page. By the time Kevin got back to work the picture he posted had already made it to his boss' inbox. Kevin, as you would expect, got fired.

But our story doesn't end with the indignity of getting fired. Kevin's boss forwarded the e-mail exchange to a few people with the attached picture. It ended up making Kevin an overnight Internet sensation. Social bookmarking sites like Digg.com and Reddit.com picked up the story and it became a viral hit with hundreds of thousands of readers enjoying his pain.

Kevin went from being a guy with a bright future and a good internship to being famous for dressing like a fairy godmother, lying to his employer, and getting fired. Not exactly the legacy one would necessarily desire. Not to mention at this moment every Google search for his name is dominated by this story, and he even made the front page for his employer's name!

Anybody nervous yet? Is your mind racing wondering what your employees have ever done online? Or how that might play in front of the next big client proposal? Need to do a Google Search? It's cool I'll wait...

Now for the business angle... How would you like to be the business behind Kevin's story? Oh sure you would get lots of hits on your web site, but those would also be hits to your reputation. Managing your reputation online is serious business. Many prospects will do a search on your business name before they ever contact you and is a drunk kid with a wand the image you want to share with the world? Here are a just a few of the issues to discuss at your next management team meeting.

Do you understand what social media is?
What is your policy regarding posts in social media?
Have you trained all employees on this policy?
What if you hire the next Kevin and the story gets away from you?
Should you proactively manage your brand in social media?
What is the policy of employees using the business name/brands?
How should your business be represented in social media?
Are you leveraging social media or just watching the world go by?

In closing we recommend that you proactively manage your reputation or it will manage you. Things happen fast on the Internet and you need to stay ahead of the curve or you could be the next train wreck.

Explore Social Networking at SLOCAMA

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:01:00 +0000

*UPDATE*
The links and presentation from last night are available at : www.smsrd.com/slocama.html

Tomorrow I am going to be speaking at the San Luis Obispo Creative and Marketing Alliance's (SLOCAMA) monthly meeting about Social Networking. SLOCAMA is pretty cool for a trade group, the people are a lot of fun, and the meetings are always a good time. This month's meeting is at Aspect Studios, 755 Fiero Lane, Suite 110, San Luis Obsipo and the in-person networking starts at 5:30.

I am going to be covering Social Networking first at a high level to make sure everybody understands the basic concepts, and then a little more in depth on a few of the larger networks (Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn).

If you're a SLOCAMA member I have set up some places for us to congregate online that I encourage you to join.

If you have the chance to come out I hope to see you tomorrow night!

SMEC Adwords Presentation

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:37:00 +0000

Last night Bob and I had the chance to talk at an event put together by the Santa Maria Enterprise Center and SCORE. We had a great discussion on Google Adwords, and I hope everybody learned a lot last night.

As promised we are posting the PowerPoint from last night online as a PDF. Click here to get a copy of our Adwords Presentation!

Google Budget Optimizer - The House Always Wins!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:00:00 +0000

Think about it for a minute... you walk into a car dealership with $20,000 dollars cash. You're greeted by a salesman, and you tell him that you can spend up to $20,000 dollars and everything else is his call. That doesn't sound like the best idea ever does it? It's entirely possible that you will roll out of there with the world's first $20,000 used Toyota Tercel (but c'mon it has spinning rims!). So why would you go to Google and tell them "here's all my money, could you spend this for me however you see fit?"

Could you punch me in the face, but not make it hurt?

When you turn on the Budget Optimizer, you're pretty much asking for it. I recommend that you never, ever, ever, ever, ever use the Budget Optimizer. Its job is to spend as much of your money as you tell it to, that's it. It's not thinking "hey $8.79 per click can't be right, let's think this through." It's thinking "hey I have $8.79 left in my budget, maybe right now is a good time to bid my way to number one on a tangentially semi-related but irrelevant word."

I've inserted a screen cap from one account that we took over recently that was getting absolutely abused by the Budget optimizer. They do have a very competitive market, but it's not $9.38 auto bidding competitive. Google Was eating up a $1500 per month budget at $5.00 per click on its own, we have the same amount of traffic down to about $2.50 a click right now.

Wow, Google-centric Optimization sounds awesome, what else can they do for me?

The other optimized option that bothers me a lot is the Ad Serving Optimize option in your campaign's advanced settings. It sounds like a good deal, Google makes sure that the better ad is always showing (by the way it is the default choice). The problem is the metric they measure with is Click Through Rate (money in their pocket), not the actual conversion cost (money in your pocket). Is it easier to just let Google pick? Yes. Should you actually just buck up, pay attention and do the work yourself? Yes.

So how do you turn off this not so handy optimization feature? It's pretty easy; you just have to know where it is. This is a feature that is set at the campaign level in the same place you set your daily budget. Click on "Edit Campaign Settings" at the campaign level and then scroll down to "Advanced Options." At the bottom of that box you'll see the box I've inserted below, Choose "Rotate." From there you just have to pay attention and control your own split tests.

The thing to remember with Google Adwords is that it is self service advertising. They want you to succeed and to get traffic, but they also want your money. Someone has to do the work, and if you leave it up to Google you are going to get burned.

Traditional Media is "Not Dead Yet"

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Predictions of the death of traditional media by evangelists of new media remind me of the famous statement from Mark Twain "I am afraid that the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." The media of print, TV, radio, mail, and many others will be with us for long time but they do need to learn to play well with the new kids. The truth is that businesses need to balance their marketing strategy based on how each media-type works with their specific target.

I was recently invited to be part of a Marketing Experts Panel by Softec, a local technology trade association. The event drew about 45 people for dinner and a discussion on marketing their business and there were some great conversations. The organization is largely technology-based businesses, but the subject of the evening was marketing and you could tell that it was a challenge to many.

The panel consisted of Dave Cox, CEO, Barnett Cox & Associates, Lynne Biddinger, CEO, 20/20 Creative Group, Starr Hall, CEO, 2 Point Media and myself. As I reflected on the discussion it struck me that within the marketing field we really have brand leaders and brand followers. Dave and Lynne fall into the category of a brand leader and our business is very successful being a brand follower.

While the brand leader might be more glamorous, the marketing team needs good brand followers within their niche specializations. This is clearly where Google Adwords belongs in the marketing team. We need to bring data back to the brand leadership in a form that they can use to make good decisions. Adwords is a direct and measured channel and the brand managers need to understand what that data says. We have to transform the mounds of data in to actionable information. We also need to tune the AdWords system to support the overall brand strategy because if our tuning is "off-message" the results are not pretty.

We have business relationships with both Lynne and Dave, although both are indirect. I never got a chance to make a point at the event, so I am doing it now. In Dave's case we are running a Google Adwords campaign for a client that he managed the branding of for many years. That organization enjoys a great search engine position largely because of the overall marketing plan he designed. This site now gets great paid traffic because the brand is clear and well managed making it very easy to extract highly targeted traffic. Without the traditional media support and comprehensive marketing plan this site would not consistently be at the top of Google with expanded placement for their highest volume keyword.

Lynne is the brand manager for another client and that client has the best performing landing page in our entire business. As of this morning this page converts at an amazing 36%! The results are actually even greater than that because the primary response design is for phone and we only measure the back-up response by email form. The reason this converts so well is because the landing page and Adwords model are exactly on message. 20/20 did the branding and landing page design for the client; we just got the right people to the page.

The brand leader can be internal or external but their job is to be the brand cop. They need to up hold and communicate the brand standards and the core messaging. The brand follower on the other hand needs to excel at their specialty and work within the brand. When structured properly with everyone knowing their respective roles this process works great. Lack of brand leadership is a problem but so is excessive leadership.

As I look at the clients that have enjoyed the most success there is clearly a relationship between their brand leadership, clarity of message, and the success in their Google Adwords campaigns. When your message is clear it is much easier to get highly targeted traffic.

Is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:45:00 +0000

Ideally when you are proactively marketing a business, a product, or a concept you want to see measurable growth in money, fame, or popularity day after day. The reality of the situation is that every market has some sort of cycle to it and it is natural to have good days and bad days that average each other out. When watching the trends within your own business and within your Adwords account, sometimes you have to step back and look at things from a higher level.

A free and simple to use tool that we use fairly often to get a general feel for the popularity of a search term is called Google Trends (www.google.com/trends). It allows you to enter a search term (note: this works mainly just with broad keywords) and see the search volume history on Google.

To illustrate ways this can be used, and reiterate my assertion that Google is the new phone book, I took a Google Trends screen cap for "Google Adwords" and one for "Yellow Pages."

You can see that Google Adwords has been climbing steadily in popularity since2005, but it does see a dip every year around Christmas. The Yellow Pages on the other hand has been steadily declining in popularity since 2004.

Google Trends can also be used to anticipate when you may need to start ramping up your marketing if you are tied to a seasonal event like Christmas Shopping. You know how everybody jokes that Christmas seems to start earlier and earlier each year... according to Google it is! You can see that each year that the query "Christmas Shopping" starts to get traffic earlier and earlier each progressive year.

Or if you ever wondered why your CPC shoots up certain times of year a trip to Google trends can help you understand when and why it happens. For example if you are selling Flat Screen TV's summer is going to be slow but the traffic will probably be cheaper, but if you want to play from Thanksgiving to New Years you better get out your check book.

Now remember Google Trends isn't gospel, but it is a very useful tool for web marketers. Plus it's free! So the next time you're in a slump or your Adwords account seems to be acting a little weird, check out the current trends and see if it's the entire industry or if it's just you!

Ask SMS Your Questions at the Softec Marketing Experts Panel

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 00:43:00 +0000

Softec, the Central Coast's Technology consortium, has invited me along with 3 other local marketing experts to speak on a panel about the challenges of marketing and how to develop more business. Bring your questions with you because this is set up as a Q and A panel!

The event is at Pelican Point Restaurant in Pismo Beach on Wednesday, January 23rd 2008 from 6:00 to 8:30PM. Cost is $30 for those that pre-register and $35 after the pre-registration deadline or at the door.

For more information on Softec and the presenters go to softec.org. You can also sign up for the Softec newsletter if you want to keep up to date with the group.

EVC Business Webinar...

Not to be outdone, Rob is the man behind the scenes of the upcoming San Luis Obispo Economic Vitality Corporation Webinar titled "Starting or Buying a Business - Practical & Legal Considerations" and it will be presented by June McIvor of SJLM.

The webinar is scheduled for January 17th from 6:00 to 7:30 and is provided for free.

Register for the EVC Webinar!

Join SMS's CEO in the Santa Ynez Valley!

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:13:00 +0000

As we've mentioned before on the blog we keep active in the community and do a fair amount of public speaking on topics like Internet Marketing and Google Adwords. Last month Rob and I spoke to a marketing class at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo, and this month I will be speaking in Santa Ynez.

The Santa Ynez Valley Visitors Association has invited me to talk about Google Adwords and how they can positively impact your business. The meeting is next Wednesday, January 9th at 8:30 a.m. at the Santa Ynez Valley Marriot Hotel (555 McMurray Road, Buellton). The SYVVA is a nonprofit group focused on the promotion of the entire Santa Ynez valley as a year round tourist destination. Admission to this event is free and open to the public, so I encourage you to come out and join us if you are in the area.

For more information, you can see the full press release at syv-online.com

Adwords Triage Checklist

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:57:00 +0000

Bob and I are both Army veterans and one of the things they drill into your head starting in Basic Training and continuing on through the rest of your career is how to evaluate a casualty (FM 21-11 if you were curious). As I was evaluating a new account that had a fair amount of history I realized the same steps applied to an Adwords account.

Remember with your accounts, much like a casualty; don't do too much until you figure out what is actually wrong!

Responsiveness - Are you generating impressions? Are people seeing your ads?

If your account doesn't have a pulse start looking for problems with your bids, are they too low? Or maybe your keywords are too obscure. Also check your geographic settings maybe they're too tight.

Breathing- Are you getting clicks?

Ok so you're getting impressions but no clicks. Check your ad copy, is it any good? Are you running a price ad that is higher than the prices offered by your competition? What position are you coming in? If you're not even on the front page you need to reevaluate your bidding.

Bleeding- Are you hemorrhaging money?

Are you getting too much traffic that isn't converting? Do you have a rogue keyword spending all your money and not converting? Has the Content Network gone out of control? Does your landing page just suck? Figure out what the problem is and stop the fiscal blood flow while you regroup and re-strategize.

Shock- "I spent how much for one order!?!"

At the end of the day ROI is what matters most. Make sure you track your orders and your ad spend to make sure that you're making your business money and not just helping Google's stock prices. If your shock problem is of a more electrical nature, stop putting USB cords in your mouth... it's bad for you.

Fractures- Are your links broken?

Getting clicks but no visits? We've seen this before on a site run on a content management system. The CMS went through an upgrade and changed the naming conventions for all of this client's URLs. Once that goes into effect basically every link in your Adwords account is broken! They had no idea this change had happened, we were the ones that caught the error! Make sure your links work on a regular basis, especially if there has been recent site changes or upgrades.

Burns- Are you getting a disproportionate number of clicks from one area or ISP?

We don't see this too often, but click fraud does happen. Google is smart enough to catch most of this stuff, but if your account takes a major turn for the worse that can't be explained by the steps above you might be getting burned by a competitor or Adsense fraudster. Start investigating and looking for suspicious trends.

Head Injury- Is running a PPC campaign beyond your general mental capacity?

It's ok and nothing to be ashamed of. There's a reason Adwords Experts exist, and it's that not everybody should manage an Adwords account... much like I shouldn't wear spandex, change my own oil or sing in public.

Apply these steps to see what condition your Adwords are in, and if you're stuck give us a call. We can rebuild it, we have the technology :)

*Just to point out the coincidence, in writing this article we realized that we both had essentially the same picture of ourselves in uniform even though they are 32 years apart. Bob and I are about the same age, same name on the uniform, the same rank, in the same pose with the same weapon... hell for all we know it might be the same serial number!

Is it time to revisit the Content Network?

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:49:00 +0000

The Content Network isn't always the best neighborhood to play in. It isn't uncommon for novice Adwords advertisers to not even realize that they're getting a huge percentage of their traffic from the Content Network until they look down and notice their watch is missing and their wallet is empty. Not to say that the Content Network can't convert, it just has to be handled as a separate entity from regular Search.

As most people, know we have not been fans of the content network and for good reason. We had several new clients that came to us because of the damage that was being done by the content network. While we appreciated the business that this brought to us, we can think of much better ways to gain a client. Several clients saved thousands of dollars each month simply by turning off the Content Network with little impact on their revenue. There were conversions in the Content Network but the decision was either turn it off or try to guess where the abuse was coming from. Our decision was to turn it off if it did not meet the conversion cost goals of the client. We knew we were leaving potential conversions on the table but we also knew it was better for our client to not make those conversions.

Then in June 2007 Google responded to market pressure by releasing the "Placement Report" and professionals in the field immediately went to work using this new tool. The Placement Report allowed for the first time the ability to see where the traffic was coming from by using the site exclusion tool we could finally manage this traffic. In the first several months of the release of this we used this report to isolate and document some horrible things that were going on but we were not recommending a return to the content network for clients that had problems.

Our friends at Google are masters at the art of partial information and they did not disappoint us with this report. It tracks many clicks back to the specific URL your ad showed on but it also contains entries like "Domain Name" and "Error Pages," and these are largely unmanageable. We find it interesting that these common entries are missing from the examples and documentation but this just comes with the territory. There is a substantial delay between the time the data is reported in Adwords and when it is available to this report so you have to wait for your data.

Because of this new information we have slowly begun to revisit the content network, especially for clients that lost a number of conversions when this was turned off in the account. Some clients lost lots of unprofitable conversions are showing some good early results but this has to be done slowly and carefully. The Content Network and the Search Network operate very differently and mixing the campaigns is a huge mistake. Bringing a content network campaign online is done differently than a search campaign.

If you would like to discuss how this might impact your Adwords strategy please contact us.

Facebook Flyers PPC Program

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:15:00 +0000

SMS is always looking for new opportunities to market ourselves and our clients on the Internet. Recently we've begun to experiment with Facebook Flyers. Facebook has millions of members and now offers a PPC program with a lot of potential!

For the uninitiated, Facebook is a social networking site where you can create a profile about yourself and link it to all of your friends. This type of site has exploded in popularity in the last few years and Facebook is one of the biggest in the market space. To give you an idea of the size of the Facebook user base, the network currently shows 20,665,600 people for the US. It's also become very popular overseas. For example, I got into Facebook after one of my Swedish friends asked me to join. The network for Sweden is now almost 1 million people in a country of only 9 million! Facebook continues to grow at a staggering pace and if your customer base includes 18-34 year olds (Facebook has 15,788,600 of them) you can't afford to ignore the opportunity this marketing channel presents.

The coolest thing about this new offering is the targeting. Some PPC engines attempt to give you the ability to target demographics but can't really guarantee their guess will be correct, Facebook knows for sure who you are advertising to. The Facebook Flyer platform allows you to target by a country or cities, gender, age, keywords, political views, relationship status, educational status, school, major, and workplace!

So for example you could target single Men ages 18-24 in San Luis Obispo, CA enrolled in Cal Poly majoring in Mechanical/Electrical/Computer/Civil engineering who have moderate to conservative political views. In that particular example I get about 340 very specifically selected guys that would be able to receive my flyer.

Facebook has made this a Pay Per Click system so you only pay for the people who click your ads and visit your site, which is good because in our tests we have gotten huge impression numbers in very short amounts of time. Currently The minimum bid you can make is $0.10 and the most they will let you spend in a day is $50.

For our new and existing clients, we are adding Facebook Flyers to our PPC repertoire. If you want to try out this new media give us a call or send us an e-mail at rob@smsrd.com and we can help you figure out if this new advertising platform will benefit your business.

So far Facebook's program isn't perfect, and I think we're in for some big improvements soon, but the one thing that won't change is the potential in this new way of getting your message out. We're excited to see how this platform and its traffic patterns evolve, and if you're a 25-65 year old interested in marketing, advertising or the internet keep an eye out for the Adwords monster!

Understanding the Potential Power of a Click... or a Man with no Hat

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:49:00 +0000

A lot of us that deal in clicks and impressions and conversions have a tendency to get lost in the numbers presented to us. Seeing as we don't function in a vacuum, you have to take into account a lot of what ifs when determining cost per conversion and return on investment numbers. What if someone clicked my ad and bookmarked it to make a purchase later? What if they saw my ad and called in an order? What if they saw my ad and then came to the store?

Recently I lived out one of those untrackable what if conversion tracks and thought it would be a good example of how there is more value to your advertising than what is tracked in your Adwords campaign.

I have what I would categorize as a slight internet addiction, and a taste for hard to find products... luckily these are complimentary problems. Being bald and Californian, also complimentary problems, necessitates the acquisition of a good hat... unless you look good with a red, peeling scalp. Since I have a general distaste for regular baseball hats, especially seeing as any team I like is pretty much horrible (Milwaukee Brewers anyone?), I've made a move to fedoras. So far I'm a fan, they're fun and different, keep my head and ears (bonus!) covered, and ...if I may say so myself... look pretty suave on me :) Here's the problem, when's the last time you came across a fedora store in the last 40 years? Yeah me neither.

So here comes the internet to the rescue! I did my initial Google search for Fedora and got all kinds of Linux related stuff, not helpful. So I expanded it to Fedora Hats and hit pay dirt. I clicked on one of the Adwords ads and found a site that I really liked. It was easy to navigate and had a good selection. Problem was I didn't feel comfortable dropping $200 on a hat I couldn't try on first. Feeling somewhat defeated, I proceeded to sulk through their site a little more. Eventually I came across their Location page and realized I was going to be in their state and driving past their store in about a month, problem solved! I bookmarked their page and printed directions on Google Maps of my little side trip before I flew out.

Fast forward about a month and there I was about 2000 miles from home in their doorway with cash in hand. Unfortunately for your friend and humble narrator, they were closed... and I burnt my head sitting on the 3rd base line of a Cubs game the next day.

So there are 3 lessons to learn here... One little click can do more than you think! Make sure the days you're open on the website actually correspond to how locked your doors are on the day a bald guy shows up from half way across the country to buy a hat. And finally, Lesson 3, if you're bald pack sunscreen irregardless of your destination.

I Left My Brain in My Other Phone

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 23:31:00 +0000

I was reading an article in Wired Magazine (Human Memory and the Outboard Brain by Clive Thompson) this weekend about how computers, PDA's, cell phones, and Google have replaced quaint and outdated things like actual human memory. In a recent study, respondents over 50 years old were substantially more likely to be able to recall information like phone numbers and birthdays than those 30 and under. A full third of the younger set didn't even know their own number off the top of their head. It's enough to make you wonder if your business has enough visibility on the web for those who use Google as an external hard drive for their brain.

As a member of that under 30 group, I can vouch for our collective inability to remember dates and numbers. Case in point - my old cell phone is roaming the streets of Milwaukee in a cab somewhere with how to get a hold of pretty much everybody I at least sort of know. Once I flew back into San Luis Obispo and bought a new cell phone I proceeded to put 3 numbers into my phone from memory: Mom, Girlfriend, Work... pretty much everybody that might yell at me, and then I hit the wall. Luckily the Internet knows everything I forgot. A bunch of e-mails, a Myspace bulletin, and some Google searches later I'm at least half way back to my original phonebook glory.

Notice not once did a physical phonebook come into play. That's because we all rely on websites, devices and search engines to find things.

So how does this apply to Internet Marketing?

If you're not in Google you don't exist. It sounds a little harsh, but for most people if they can't find you in just a few minutes they're done and on to the next thing. If you like customers and you like money, it's in your best interest to make sure that someone searching explicitly for you will always be able to find you.

Now some of you will say "but I'm first on Google for my business!" Well that is all well and good, but unless you're a major company like Microsoft or Wal-Mart an unfortunate tweak to the algorithm could send you off to the outer reaches of page 10 never to be seen again. What we recommend to any business is to have a Pay Per Click phonebook style listing for your business. Google is the new phonebook! Advertise on your business name, important people associated with your business (owner, founders, sales people, etc.) and the type of business you run plus the street/mall/plaza that you reside in. For example you could advertise on "car wash Grand Ave Arroyo Grande," that way if someone knows you but forgot who you are; they still have a shot at finding you. How many times have you tried to explain what business "that great place over on main street" is that really like but can't remember the name of?

Not advertising online is like not putting a sign on your store... a good way to save money and a bad idea. And you don't have to be a Rockefeller to get in the game. A small PPC campaign like this won't cost you much money, and won't get huge amounts of traffic. But it will tend to be of the highest quality traffic which is more likely to result in a purchase. They were specifically looking for you by a very specific search, which in my book is money well spent. Now if I could just do a Google search for my phone...

But I want to be first on Google!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:40:00 +0000

You and me both! For a new webmaster, trying to run your own SEO campaign can be a daunting task. What words do I pick? Where should I put them? I should use them an unnatural amount and have at least 50 Meta keywords right...? (no, by the way) There are a lot of questions and very few answers out there (plenty of speculation however). Sure someone from Google like Matt Cutts might let a little something slip and send the SEO community into a frenzy every once and a while, but that is like giving you one piece of a 500 piece puzzle and saying "Go!" So where do you start? With a solid footing in the common sense basics because they can do a lot of good for you and your web site.

Pick a Keyword

Don't come up with a list of 50 keywords and phrases and decide you're going to own all of them... with 1 page of content. If that's what you want to do save yourself a lot of trouble and sign up for Adwords and forget about SEO completely. In fact you should sign up for Adwords anyways (SEO & Adwords are part of a balanced breakfast), because you can use the data collected from it to see how popular your keywords are. Remember just because you're first on Google for something it doesn't mean anybody searches for it.

Title Your Page Appropriately

A good title makes both the search engine and the searcher happy. Don't stuff it full of keywords to create an unintelligible string of garbage. A short focused appropriate title will do the trick.

Support Your Title

When you are formulating headings and writing copy make sure it relates to the title you made earlier. Don't go crazy repeating your keyword over and over and over, that's not going to do you any favors. But if it is a natural appropriate spot drop it in. A well optimized page shouldn't look optimized. Remember you don't want to make them read unintelligent sounding keyword stuffed copy.

Write Good Content

This seems to be the part that everyone wants to get out of. Creating content is hard work, no doubt, but it is worth it to you for a few different reasons:

1. Search Engines love good content
2. People love good content
3. Good content gets links

Good Links to Your Site are More Important Than the Code on Your Site

If you meet someone that is going to magically send you to the top of Google by only manipulating the code on your site, the desired result is unlikely. To really boost your rankings you need to gain authority in the form of links. Not all links are worth the same, a link from a site with a high authority will have more positive impact on your site. In general the more good links you have to your site the better. However Google will not give you credit for purchased links and when they catch you it's going to hurt!

To see who is currently linking to you go to Yahoo and do a search that looks like this:
linkdomain:yourwebsite.com -domain:yourwebsite.com

Wow, Is It Really That Easy?

Nope. It's fair to say there is a lot more to it; these are just some common sense basics. But by employing a strong set of fundamentals you can practice by gaining rankings for lower traffic words, and eventually you can take what you've learned and chase the high traffic words and phrases. Also I would like to stress that taking a more holistic approach to Search Engine Marketing using PPC, SEO, Social Media, Print, etc will drive more traffic over time than picking just one tactic.

Brown Bag Business Dialog in SLO

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 23:18:00 +0000

Good afternoon everybody,

Rob and I just got back from our presentation at the San Luis Obispo Mission Community Services Corporation's Brown Bag Business Dialog event and I think it went really well. We ran out of chairs and had a lot of good questions from the audience!

The talk today was about Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in general, and Google Adwords in depth. We hope you all learned a lot, and we look forward to working some more with the MCSC in the future.

We've already had some requests for the PowerPoint presentation used in the class and we've made it available as a .pdf at www.smsrd.com/mcsc.pdf

Thanks again for coming out to see us and we hope you learned something that you can apply to your growing businesses!

Web-slaughter: The Unintentional Killing of a Visit with a Bad Landing Page

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 19:12:00 +0000

Personally I think a lot of what makes a landing page good is a balance of intentions. The web surfer intends to find the information they were searching for and the website visited intends to convince you to perform an action (lead, e-mail, call, purchase, etc.). Most people see the value in a good landing when it involves gymnasts, divers, and the red eye to Cleveland, but miss its importance to web traffic. A good Adwords Campaign mixed with bad landing pages is just a fancy way to set your wallet on fire. By designing a page that satisfies the intentions of both parties, you have a better shot of turning a surfer into a conversion.

So the first order of business is matching the landing page to the actual intention of the web surfer. Remember, if your ad matches the query you're more likely to get a click. And if your page matches the query, your visitor is more likely to stick around and do something... so give the people what they want. If they searched for boots don't send them to a department store homepage, send them to the boots page in the shoes section. They had a simple request and you provided a simple answer, congratulations you are now the proud proprietor of a good visitor experience.

Now that we've addressed the needs of the people, you have to get yours too. The biggest mistake I see in most landing pages is that they make it too difficult to perform the desired action. If the lead form or a buy it now button can't be found in a few seconds you might have just bounced your visitor in the name of aesthetics. Make sure your actionable items are obvious & easy to use! There's a good chance your web designer may fight you on this one because if messes with his flow. I agree looks are important, I generally won't do business with a really ugly web site, but I'll take slightly less attractive over completely ineffective any day.

Applying these simple steps can save you a lot of money by not killing an unreasonable number of visits that you have to pay for irregardless of how long they stay, and you'll improve the user experience offered by your site in the process.

Back to Basics: The Forgotten Art of Negative Keywords

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:47:00 +0000

Everybody is always so concerned with what keywords do I pick to advertise on. The words you specifically do not advertise on are just as important.

When developing a keyword list, try to think of ways that your words could be related to other topics irrelevant to your business. Take the word coach... think about it for a minute. You have football coaches, baseball coaches, motor coaches, life coaches, Coach Handbags, Coach the TV show, and the list undoubtedly goes on. Well if the word coach is central to your ad campaign you better get to work on brainstorming negative keywords.

Once you've done your own brainstorming go online and do some actual searches. See anything that doesn't match your query? You can use this method to generate more negative keywords. If your Adwords campaign already has some data accumulated run a Search Query Report and see how your keywords are being matched. Another good place to look if you have an analytics package attached to your site is at your organic traffic. Like the Search Query Report, Analytics will show you actual searches that resulted in a visit. Do any of them look a little bit off?

Now that you have all these possible negative words you need to make some decisions. Are they going to be implemented at the Campaign or Ad Group level? And are they the right words? Make certain that a good negative word for one keyword won't kill the relevant traffic of another.

Once you're satisfied that you will be decreasing bad traffic without hurting the good stuff, pull the trigger. Let your changes simmer for a couple of days and then check out the impact. Are your CTR's up? Conversion rate improve? Or has your traffic fallen flat? Even if you're happy, keep experimenting. Adwords doesn't stop changing so you can't either. Whether the results are good or bad, make sure you know why your traffic changed so that you can either fix or replicate the action.

Self Induced Content Inspiration

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 21:30:00 +0000

One of the hardest things about running a web site is keeping it fresh. If you have new interesting content on your site at a daily or near daily frequency, visitors have a reason to come back often. More visitors usually mean more money, so this is a good thing. Plus on a side note, this is great for SEO. The only problem is where do you find the inspiration to do all this writing?

Content development can be difficult and time consuming, especially if you have no idea what to write about. As it turns out, if you are running any kind of analytics program or PPC account you have a tons of possible ideas just waiting for you. The stats in these accounts will tell you what words and themes are most popular on your site and on the web. This is great inspiration because it allows you to see real searches, not just what you think would be popular.

The first place to look for content inspiration is your analytics account. If you don't have one in place, Google Analytics is a free and easily implemented option. What you want to do in Analytics is find your traffic sources, and then search engines. You should be able to access a list of keywords used to visit your website. There will be a lot of words that make sense to you in there, some relevant surprises, and some that are completely out of left field. One of my clients that does general contracting and clean up had a number of searches on how to clean egg off of windows, cars, and driveways. It's on the very edge of what they do, but it might be worth writing about seeing as a good number of people are interested. However if a phrase or keyword doesn't make any sense just disregard it.

Now start really looking at this list. Are there predominant words, phrases, and ideas? And are these themes relevant to your business? If there are, you've just found some great possible content development ideas. Make sure you scour this list for any potential topics, you have a lot of content to create and every relevant little bit helps.

Now your other content goldmine is your PPC account. This is a collection of words and phrases you want people to use to get to your site. The best part about this is you can see the total number of searches done even if they didn't result in a visit to your site. So say you sell fruit and you get 40 visits a day for 'apples.' 'Oranges' only gets 4. If you're only looking at analytics 'apples' is clearly more popular and content development should be focused there. But before you start your research into the wild world of applesauce, check out your PPC account. There's a chance that 'oranges' is searched far more often than 'apples,' you're just not getting a proportional piece of the traffic. Always keep an eye on which words get the most impressions.

Now that you have a better idea of what you should write about, make a plan. As I get ideas I write them all down in the same place. Then I try to figure out what topics have priority and how to best space them out. You don't necessarily want to ride one topic at a time. If you run 2 weeks of articles on the same topic and you have some regular readers that like your site but not the current topic you're riding at the moment, you might break their daily reader habit.

So in short, keep it fresh, keep it interesting, keep it relevant, and don't forget all the inspiration you need is right under your nose!

Targeting Regional & Local Customers with Adwords

noreply@blogger.com (Rob D) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 23:23:00 +0000

A lot of potential advertisers are intimidated by the possible reach of Adwords. They're trying to grow their business at a local or regional level and don't want to spend money for traffic coming from thousands of miles away. Luckily with a few extra steps in the campaign process you can use Adwords Geographical Targeting features to make sure you're paying for clicks in Portland, Oregon not Portland, Maine.

When Geo-Targeting you have 3 main choices: Countries & Territories, Regions & Cities, and Customized. Countries & Territories is the setting of choice for those running national and international campaigns, but for the rest who have a specific area to target the last two are the choices to explore.

Regions & Cities

Say your sales territory is the West Coast, how do you only serve ads to web surfers in your territory? With the Regions & Cities tool you can specify whole states, major cities, groups of cities, or counties. The level of detail in this area is limited by the options allowed to you by Google and it is determined mainly by population. For example my town, San Luis Obispo, is grouped with Santa Maria and Santa Barbara. Each City is demographically and geographically distinct, but we're a little low on people so we got smooshed together.

Customized Targeting

Customized Targeting allows for a much more specific targeting of prospects. You can set a radius around an address or a point on a map, you can also draw a polygon that includes the areas you want to target.

The radius settings are pretty straight forward, pick a place and decide how far away you or your customers are willing to do business from that point.

Below I've included screen caps of both versions, notice how impressively similar they are.

The Polygon setting is the most interesting setting to me personally. It allows you to capture cities that fall outside of a reasonable radius, or draw around ones that are on little to no value to you. Keep in mind that with the polygon tool you should use it with city level areas, going smaller probably won't get you the desired results. You may have a server on the side of town you didn't want and that's where all of your potential clients connect to the internet.

Other Benefits...

So besides saving time and money by only advertising to the areas you want to do business with, you also get a little addition to your Adwords ad that lets people know it's locally targeted. The string of ads I posted on the right includes a mix of national, local and statewide ads. Notice the difference? Web surfers do. In our experience we've noticed that ads that are noticeably local get better Click Through Rates and overall response.

So What's the Bad News?

For the most part Geo Targeting is pretty cool, but it's not perfect. Location is determined by the location of the server not necessarily the location of the person surfing the web. Most of the time the server and the surfer are fairly close to each other, but sometimes they are really far apart which means they could be in your targeted area but not receive your ads... and sometimes Google just plain screws up. In one campaign localized to San Francisco I had one rogue click from Greece... which happens to be slightly out of my 100 mile circle. That's the exception not the rule however.

It may be worth it, especially if you deal with tourists in your business, to consider running a national campaign that uses your keywords mixed with local city and region names to capture relevant out of town traffic and those with geographically distant servers.

Give it a Try!

So as you can see Google gives you a fair amount of control over where your ads show, and mixed with a well controlled budget you can safely test the waters and start advertising online!

Split Testing, an Exercise in Patience

noreply@blogger.com (Bob Dumouchel) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:57:00 +0000

Google Adwords require patience, persistence, and perspiration. Its hard work and it needs to be part of a long-term marketing strategy. Reacting too quickly results in judgment errors and a continual thrashing of your decisions.

A great example of this is an advertising split test. I have seen rookies that set up a test and declare a victor with 100 clicks and start making decisions based on the facts they just absolutely proved with a "one click" difference. With full belief in their results they tell a client that one ad was twice as effective as the other and, of course, they predicted that outcome just two days ago. They got one conversion with one ad and two with the other.

An immutable rule of marketing states that "You cannot predict the action of an individual but you can predict the action of a group". What does this rule actually say to us? It says that your data sample has to be big enough for it to represent a group not an individual decision. You need patience because you need a sample large enough to get to your number with some degree of confidence.

The next logical question is "How do we figure out how many need to be in the sample?" Good question although we are not ready to answer that quite yet. First we have to get some idea of the margin of error. The simplest way to do this is to set up a split test in several Adwords groups. You need to make everything absolutely the same.

Same keywords
Same traffic split (set campaign to serve evenly and turn off the content network)
Same ad copy
Same landing page
Same conversion objective
Same Start & End Date/Time

Logic would tell us that the results of this should be the exactly the same but they almost never are. The longer you run this the more the numbers move toward each other and at some point in this time line the differences settle in. Track this data weekly so you can see the patterns until your numbers slow down in their movement. I recommend doing this over several ad groups to get an understanding of how these factors interact. There are actually more accurate ways to measure this but that typically requires engaging professional market researchers.

With a sample size and margin of error you can now set up split tests where you change the ad copy, while keeping all the rest of the path the same. When you reach your sample size on all the ads examine your actual results with the margin of error. The graph below assumes our test had a 1% margin of error.

These results are "Too Close To Call". The two data sets overlap from 3.25 to 4.75 so within that range either of these could be the winner. While we are talking about this lets consider that the margin of error also has a margin of error. This math might be scary to some and I do not do this math all the time because I have a life and I like to live it. I have a simple rule of thumb and that is if the winner is winning by more than the margin of error then I tend to believe the result, otherwise I keep testing.

On sample size, my rule of thumb is that I do not believe a result until it has at least 1,000 events. If I am testing ad groups then I want to see an average of 1,000 clicks on each ad before I start making decisions. In some accounts this can take several weeks or even a few months but if you truly want to make a good decision you have to wait for the experiment to finish. On top of this consider that the market is a complex place and your results can be tainted by external events. Events like holidays, items in the news, and a thousand other things can change your results.

In closing continually question and test your marketing and strive to become one with the campaign.