See Part 1
6. Not split testing ads

One of the brilliant things about Adwords is our ability to get hard data on traffic from different keywords, including click-thru-rates and customer conversions. So why wouldn’t we try different ads on the same keywords to see which ones give the best results?

A lot of people don’t do this, so I guess they simply don’t understand the importance of the ad copy in achieving click-thrus and conversions. You could write a book on designing and writing good ads, but the very first and most important step is to have two ads in each ad group and to compare their relative performance. These differences could be minor differences of spelling, punctuation or capitalization. Or they could be major differences in the actual offer being made.

Two sets of ads - but with minor differences that could produce significantly different conversion rates.

So what’s split-testing?

To split-test two ads we simply let them run in competition with each other. Before we can do this we must set the campaign Ad serving setting to Rotate in Advanced Options. The default setting is Optimise. What this means is that Google will show the ads with the higher click thru rates more often. This might seem like common sense, but if you are trying to work out which ad is the best, it is quicker to run them both in rotation for a while until we get a winner. Then we drop the poorer performing ad, and create another one in competition with it. Possibly a clone, but with a minor modification. Just like natural selection.

How do we know which is the better ad?

We need to get enough clicks on each ad so that we can apply a test to see whether the differences in clicks are statistically significant. Sounds technical but it’s actually very easy.

All we need is the CTR (click-thru-rate) and number of clicks on two ads to compare them.

Take this data and use splittester.com to see if one ad is really better than the other.

7. Not having an appropriate landing page

It’s one thing getting traffic to our site, but another to get good conversions. These conversions could be actual sale, or sales leads though to our sales department, or sign-ups to a mailing list. Whatever they are, we will only get enough of them if our website is doing it’s job.

One common mistake is for people to dump all their traffic at their home page. This is equivalent to saying to the user “Here you are – go search.” But they thought they were doing at when they put their keywords into the search engine. Now they are into gratification, and you’d better provide it fast, or they’ll press the back button on the browser and you’ll lose them.

Ads should link to landing pages that closely match the ad content.

If the website has only one or two product or service offerings, then landing pages should be set up for each one. The landing pages should reflect as closely as possible the implicit offer in the ad.

It is also desirable to test different landing pages. This can be simple experimentation with placement of product images or it could be more complex multivariate testing. Google supports this with its Website Optimiser tool.

The big message here is that traffic is useless if your site won’t convert. When it comes to improving advertising ROI, start with the website. Get it right, and then start buying more traffic.

8. Not optimising bid prices.

Number one is the best position for my ad isn’t it?

Well maybe not.

To answer thus question we need to look at ROI – return on investment again. The real issue is that it can be disproportionately expensive to be number one. If we were to graph up the costs per click versus position

It would look something like this:

As an ad drops down the page, click costs drop disproportionately.

On top of this we find that although the rate of click – thrus will drop away as we drop down from the number one position, it does not do this in proportion to the bid price. Further, the conversion rate per click-thru actually is higher as we drop down the rankings.

This is probably because people who click on an ad further down the list have actually read the ad, rather than just click on the first thing they saw.

The upshot of all this is that it does not pay to be number one, unless you are in a market where you have lots of margin and the cost of Adwords is largely irrelevant to you.

Often a sweet spot exists around position 4 or 5. Here you are on the front page – this is highly desirable – but still reasonably close to the top. You’ll probably being paying about half as much for your clicks, and have traffic that will convert well.

9. Failure to set up separate campaigns for separate geographic areas.

If you are selling the same products and/or services into, say, Australia and the US, set up separate campaigns. There are many reasons for this including:

The US market is a lot bigger, and clicks will be differently priced.

Your competiton will be different, and you may use different ad copy.

Spelling may have minor differences.

You may even have different domain names. Americans are more likely to feel comfortable with a ‘.com’ domain than a ‘.au’.

They operate in different time zones, and you may choose to use day-parting i.e. bidding differently on keywords at different times of the day.

10. Using campaign budget to determine your total spend.

What Google suggests you do if you have a limited budget (and who doesn’t) is to control your total spend by setting a daily budget for each of your campaigns.

Sounds reasonable – but not the best strategy.

A better way to control your spend is to actually reduce your keyword bid prices .

This will mean your ad will drop down the page. You will get fewer clicks. But these things will also happen:

• Your ads will run all day, not just until the campaign budget is exceeded.
• Your traffic is more likely to convert, as people will have actually read your ad, rather than just ‘donkey clicking’ on the first link on the page.
• Conversion costs will drop.

It is important to understand that that there is a non-linear relationship between an ads rank on the search engine results page and the click-thru cost. (Explained in 8. above)

The only time when you need a number one ranking for your ad is when:

• There is little competition
• You have a high value product in a market you want to dominate, and the click-thru cost is of lower importance.

The following list is a bit of a brain dump, and is not in any particular order. but I reckon it will save most neophyte AdWords managers a heap of time and money. 10 points may be a bit long, so I am going to break it down into 2 posts with 5 points in each. So here goes.

I am going to use a hypothetical online shop – ACME Irrigation – selling home garden irrigation systems for my examples.

1.  Putting all your keywords in the one ad group.

A lot of new advertisers simply set up one campaign, then dump a great bunch of keywords into a single ad group with a single ad. This may have worked once, but it doesn’t now. Google rewards relevance, and there needs to be a strong continuity between the keyword, the ad text, and the landing page.

For example, there are thousands of keywords and word combinations that relate to garden irrigation. Here’s a few of the most commonly searched of ones from Google’s keyword tool:garden irrigation

garden water irrigation
landscape garden
garden irrigation supplies
garden irrigation pump
garden irrigation hose
garden irrigation systems
garden irrigation system
home garden irrigation

To most people these keywords would look pretty closely related, but I’d split them up. There are at least 4 different concepts here, each should have a separate ad group:

1. landscaping (a general concept)
2. irrigation systems (a more specific part of landscaping)
3. irrrigation hose ( a specific type of product)
4. irrigation pump (another specific type of product)

Each ad group would have different ads incorporating the actual keywords in the first line e.g

Splitting up a list of keywords into different ad groups. Each ad should be directed at a landing page specifically devoted to each topic – e.g. the pumps catalogue.

If you set up your campaign with this degree of focus, you will pay less for clicks and achieve higher conversion rates.

2.  Failing to run separate campaigns on the Search and Content networks.

The Google search and content networks are very different animals. Ads on the Google search network are the ones that come up on the right hand side of the search results. Content ads are ads that come up on other websites, blogs, directories and mail services that are part of the Google content network.

Ads on the search network are displayed in response to people searching on specific keywords. Ads on the content network are displayed in response to likely matches between the content of the website or whatever and the subject of your ad.

Click-thru rates tend to be much higher on the search network than the content network, and the cost–per-click is higher. Additionally, strategies for writing and managing ads for the content network are different, the quality of the traffic may be lower, with poorer conversion rates. The content network also allows for a range of multimedia ads – such as images and video.

Despite all these differences, the default setting for AdWords campaigns is to have both search engine and content network distribution turned on. This is not the way to go.

You should set up separate campaigns for the search and content networks. This way the click-thru data, bid prices and ads can be managed and optimized separately.

Having set things up like this, I would focus on getting the search only campaigns working first. They are likely to be most productive.

3.  Poor keyword research.

With keyword tools such as Wordtracker, or Google’s keyword tool you can get:

• A list of keywords and keyword synonyms that are related to your product or service.
• An idea of relative search frequency on these keywords (and hence the ones to concentrate on).
• An idea of advertiser competition.

It is worth taking the time to do this research up front. Look for keywords that have a high relevance to your product or service and a high search frequency. Keywords with a low level of advertiser competition represent an opportunity, particularly if you are trying to get first page ad listings in expensive markets and have only a limited budget.

It’s a good idea to keep all the original keyword research results in a spreadsheet. You can then refer back to your original research as you gradually expand your campaigns and ad groups.

Sure, in the intermediate term you will focus most of your time on the keywords which deliver the most conversions. But you won’t know what they are are unless you do your initial research properly, create appropriate ad groups and measure the traffic.

4.  Only using  Broad Matched keywords

When you create your keyword list make sure that you include phrase match as well as exact match versions of each keyword in your initial list for testing.

As follows:

• Broad match: This is the default option
• Phrase match: Put the keyword in quotes e.g. ‘irrigation supplies’
• Exact match: Put the keyword in square brackets: [irrigation supplies]
• Negative match: Put a minus sign in front e.g. -free

Three main points here:

• Broad matched keywords may bring in a lot of irrelevant searches and increase costs.
• Exact match will offer the lowest conversion costs in many instances – but less traffic.
• Negative match keywords are necessary to eliminate extraneous traffic e.g. getting rid of traffic from unwanted synonyms or sources

Start by running all keywords in broad, phrase and exact match forms and determine the most profitable by testing.

5.  Not tracking conversions

Many advertisers tend to focus on CTR (Click-thru-rate) rather than actual conversions when a visitor performs an action such as filling out a form or buying a product. Although CTR is a measure of ‘attractiveness’ of an ad, it may not be the best measure of its effectiveness.

I continue to be surprised by the number of Adwords accounts that don’t even have conversion tracking installed. Without this you won’t know the relative conversion costs of ads.

To < a href="http://www.youronlinebusiness.com.au/google-adwords/10-common-adwo…istakes-part-2/">Part 2

I was going to start this blog with the 10 Most Common AdWords Mistakes, but then figured it would be a good idea to look briefly at some AdWords basics first. I don’t mean the mechanics of setting up and managing an AdWords account – Google has an excellent online help to assist with this. What’s more useful is an understanding of Google’s philosophy in managing its users, and a quick overview of the structure of an advertising program.

If you understand a little of this, it will really help you in the process of setting up and tuning your AdWords account correctly. It will also provide a context for the 10 Most Common AdWords Mistakes.

Getting a high return on your investment in AdWords requires more than just creating an account with Google, and dumping a whole bunch of keywords in the one ad group with a single ad pointed at the your web-site’s homepage. If you do this, you will pay too much for your traffic, and your pay-per-click campaign will be ineffective.

Google’s Philosophy

Google has built its huge user base on the principle of delivering relevant information. When you perform a Google search you expect to get the most relevant websites at the top of the list. That’s why you use Google.

One of the ways Google has monetised this user base, is by providing pay-per-click ads on the right hand side of its’ search results pages. Now, Google knows that if a user is likely to click on an ad, that user has got to have trust that ad links to information that is relevant to what they are searching for. Not just some sort of spam or bait to get them to a site with a completely different agenda. They don’t want to click on an ad for financial services and end up in a casino.

If users trust Google ads, they’ll continue to click on them – and continue to deliver rivers of cash to Google.

So Google, in protecting it’s rivers of cash, rewards the owners of ads that it thinks are relevant. It figures that ads are relevant if:

• The click-through rate on an ad is high.
• There is a strong correlation between the content of the ad and the content of the landing page it is linked to.
• The landing page itself is ranked well, and is part of a site which (according to Google) has high quality information.

Google creates market pressure for greater relevance, by charging advertisers less for what it perceives to be more relevant ads for any given position on a particular search results page.

Main Structural Elements

An AdWords advertising account is often referred to as an ‘AdWords campaign’. But in Google-speak the word campaign is used to describe a part of an advertising program with a specific focus, such as a geographic region, product grouping, or language. A campaign is the highest level component of an AdWords account.

For example we could set up a Google account to advertise ‘Red Centre Boomerangs’. If we were to sell them into both the UK and US markets we would need separate campaigns for each market. These markets would be quite different, not just with currency but also with pay-per-click pricing, product offers and other factors. They should be managed as separate campaigns within our Google account.

An AdWords account is divided into one or more campaigns, and each campaign contains ad groups. Each ad group contains keywords, and related ads.

Separate campaigns should be set up for advertising:

• In different geographic regions
• On the search network as compared with Google’s content network (more on this later).
• At different times of the day or AdWords accounts are divided into separate campaigns, and each campaign days of the week.
• For different product lines, brands or information resources being promoted.

Separate ad groups should be set up within each campaign for each cluster of closely related keywords. (Although advertisers often fail to do this.) Ads are then developed to go with each keyword cluster. Usually the text of the ad includes the keywords.

By having a relatively large number of ad groups with a few keywords in each, we can effectively target market niches or channels.

Conversions

A conversion occurs when a visitor to a website does something that it is a primary business objective of the site. For example:

• Purchase a product or service.
• Fill out a form providing a sales lead for a product or service.
• Subscribe to a mailing list.
• Download a file, such as a pdf information file or product demo.

Conversions can be tracked using the tracking provided with a Google AdWords account. The key benefits of tracking conversions include the ability to:

• Identify which ads, keywords and landing pages generate the highest levels of conversions.
• Accurately determine the cost of each conversion, and hence return on investment (ROI).

Conclusion

An understanding of Google’s philosophy of information quality helps AdWords account managers design more effective ad campaigns.

A key online marketing concept is the idea of market niches or channels. If these channels are to be effectively exploited, then the AdWords account structure must be properly segmented.

Measuring traffic and conversions enables an accurate calculation of ROI.

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