Google adwords :: new tips and techniques

It has been a long time since I last wrote about CPC, specially Google adwords.

Here are a few tips/tools I have recently started using a lot, with very positive impact.

1) Quality score

Quality Score is a dynamic variable calculated for each of your keywords. It combines a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user's search query.

This is a very important parameter, which can be used to troubleshoot the performance of each keywords, specially related to the content of the ads and of the landing pages.

I am usually targetting at 7.

• run a report showing quality score for each keyword
• identify each keyword which can potentially bring traffic to the site (significant volume of impressions) and highlight all keywords with a Quality Score <>
• Verify that the ad copy contains these keywords. If not, create a new ad group for this type of keywords, and create a relevant ad containing the keywords in the copy
• Verify that your landing page is optimised for this keywords (meta tags, h1 title, image alt tag, copy contain these keywords). If not, create a new landing page targetting these specific keywords

Note: this process can be very time consuming if you try to apply this to ALL keywords (specially if you have got 1000s listed...). This is why it is important to focus only on keywords bringing potentially significant traffic to the site.

Benefits: A poor quality score usually means that the ad will not be clicked as much as it could be (poor CTR), that conversion rate will not be as good as it could be. By improving your quality score, you ensure that the ad copy and the landing pages are optimised to some extents. Also, a good Quality Score will ensure that you pay less than competitors for a same position.

2) Watch out position 1-2-3 format for your ads.
If your ad is in position 1-2-3, it may be formatted differently by Google (see picture below)

You need to ensure that your ad still makes sense (right punctuation) in both formats.

3) Use the editor
The adwords editor is nice piece of software allowing you to manage your ads more effectively that for the google.com/adwords interface

4) Use the media planner
This is a tool I have very recently started using, and turn your CPC content campaigns into a real media buying tool. Use this tool to build a map of all the sites you want to advertise on.

5) Use Google Insight Search
It is a combination of Google Trend, and Google keywords suggestion tool, providing you with a good way to create your different adgroups. This tool would deserve a post itself, which I will probably add to this blog later on this month.

overcoming the minus 6 penalty

A lot of things have been written about the minus 6 penalty/filter added by Google recently.

It is quite easy to demonstrate:
e.g.: we have very recently released a site (http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk), and I was checking the ranking of this site for some specific/unique titles.

"Segmenting Your Customers - Uncovering Hidden Value": This is a very unique title, which should get http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/articles/segmenting-customers.html into position #1 straight away.

Instead, the page is ranked at position 6. It is clear that this position is assigned on purpose by Google (you can check yourself with other very unique titles for recently released sites), which is probably because this is the position the less likely to be randomly clicked on.

Google probably tracks the number of clicks on results it returns, and take this into account in the ranking algorythm. But provided that some people just click on first links without thinking about it, positioning the "on probation" link in position #6 gives Google more chance to test effectively if the link is actually relevant.

I think that it is just a temporary position. Google hasn't computed all data yet, and hold the site in the position until more processing has been done. Nothing really to worry about, it is in my opinion just a sign that google has crawled the page, but not asssigned a proper ranking yet.

Using Facebook as a promotion tool

I am still trying to figure out the benefit of using Facebook really. The site can become quite addictive, but the actual "benefits" of using it are still a big mistery for me.

You can certainly hear from people you had lost contact with for instance. But there is usually some good reasons why you had not kept in touch with them in the first place. After catching up with them for a while, you soon realise that you will very probably loose contact again very soon..

I have started a group, GetBiz, to cover my activities with www.getbiz.co.uk.

I don't really want to invest too much time on this, since it is just an experiment. But maybe worth the try. Very much like keeping up with a blog really, with the ability to attract readers more easily through connections. The downside is that it is not as SEO friendly as blogs though.

Tip 1: Choosing content for adsense ads

I keep sharing tips everyday with colleagues, friends and clients, and thought that it would actually be a good material for this blog. Instead of just keeping this blog as a log file, and writing only about things I come across and find interesting to blog about, I thought I could also post some daily tips about web development, web design or online marketing in general.

Here we go - the first tip is how to optimise your content for Google Adsense. You may want to control what content Adsense should base their results on. In the old days, you just had to hope that your page was semantically making sense, and that it would pick up the right keywords.

you can now specify which content you want to be used for the ads:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=23168

You may think - oh right, well, let's put " secured loan" as content and make £1 out of each click. Why not, but if your site is about gardening, it is not very likely that people will click very often on the links displayed by google about "secured loan".

On the other hand, it is very useful to optimise the revenue you make out of your ads.
1) GO to adwords
2) Select the topic of your page: "my topic"
3) Use the suggestion tool to check out what are the most expensive keywords for this topic
4) Stick these keywords in the google ad section of your page.

Forrester CEO and Web2.0

When the CEO of Forrester talks about Web2.0, it is worth the read.

1) engage with your customers:
Georges Colony recommends using a corporate blog to connect with customers.

2) make sure that your site is run effectively
- Do you use scenario design? A slick design is one thing. But does it make sense? Do designers goals is to meet specific objectives, and drive the user to purchase your services/products or is it just looking good without any purpose.

3) Do you use personas? Defining what people will do on your site, and how to ensure that you make it as easy as possible for them can be addressed through scenario design. but who are your customers. By building personas, you can then draft different scenarios according their profile, and address the specificities of each user.

3) Would you recommend this product or service to a friend or colleague?
This is the one question to ask in order to improve customers satisfaction and retention. Once your customer has purchased something from your site, capitalise on him/her, and turn your visitor in a promoter.

The conclusion of the article is "Great marketing + Great technology = the only way forward. ". I would have added an addtional section about how to drive traffic to your site. This article takes as granted that you have got people visiting your site. But a great site is also a site bringing in new visitors (SEO friendly, supporting affiliation strategies, etc .. ). Without visitors in the first place, this is a bit like making a great car but keeping it in the garage.

optimising your form

An interesting article on NetImperative about how to optimise opt-in forms, which comes in very handy when running online marketing campaigns.

A few good advice in this article:
1) Have a privacy statement: it is common practice, and reaasure the potential prospect
2) The more questions you ask, the less subscribers you'll receive: MarketingSherpa demonstrated that conversion was increased by 50-75% when reducing the number of required fields from 20 to 6. a good rule of thumb is to keep your form to no more than 5 to 7 fields for the visitor to fill out.
3) Test, Test, Test: run split Testing (or "A/B testing") to inscrease the conversion of your form (an exemple of test result here). Don't assume anything, and spend too much time trying to figure out what is the best design for your form - just try a few of them, and keep the winner. If you are running adwords campaigns, you may want to register to Website Optimiser, which is an excellent interface to support your split testing activities.