You may have heard some murmurings about a coming Google Adwords update (some are calling it the “Google Slap 3.0″.

However, if you’re following Adwords best practice and keeping things nice and relevant, you should be OK. Check out the announcement on Googles official blog:

Inside AdWords: Quality Score improvements to go live in coming days

This is the key to the changes, in my opinion:

Reading between the lines, it sounds like if you’re bidding on a broad match keyword, Google will asses your quality score for that particular query at the time of the search.

For example, let’s say you were bidding on the broad match keyword “blue widgets”, and your ad and landing page for that keyword talked about blue widgets, then Google would give your ad preference if someone searched for “blue widgets” or a phrase like “cheap blue widgets”.

However, if someone searched for “red widgets” you ad would still be triggered, but it would be given a lower a quality score at this time, because it’s not as relevant to red widgets.

All in all, if you keep your keywords, ads and landing pages tightly relevant, and try to give searchers a good experience, you’ll survive this slap… and all the others!

Any questions, leave a comment below!

Cheers,

George

Tags: adwordsupdate, adwords slap,

If you’re an online4offline subscriber, you’ll have probably received a similar email to the one below by now.

(If you’re not an online4offline subscriber, why the hell not? Join the fun here.)

The email was only meant to be a quick reminder about a 12 week series of expert interviews we’re doing, but it turned into something a little more than that.

As you’ll see below, I truly believe that economic conditions that affect large corporations do not affect small and medium businesses in the same way.

And thinking that…

“my business will fail because of the economy and there’s nothing I can do”

…is a very dangerous way of thinking, and one to be avoided. (Your brains Reticular Activating System doesn’t do you any favours when you think like this.)

Here’s the email in full:

If you believe the news stories today, you’d be forgiven for thinking the sky was falling in.

It seems like everyday there are major companies going under or seeking rescue investment.

But what the media doesn’t tell you is that tons of businesses are doing great.

I should know… I work with loads of profitable businesses. (One guy I work with has a 3 month old business profiting £27k a week, with no sign of it stopping any time soon)

Another example is Ron Douglas who’s absolutely killing it in several markets online. He’s built an email
subscriber list of 215,000 people who like him and want to hear from him.

Doug’s interviewing Ron live tomorrow. It’s going to be a hell of a call.

Check it out here.

Having said all that, I’m not one of those “blind optimist” types who fails to recognise trouble when they see it. It’s tough out there, and it’s going to get tougher in the coming months (or even years) — but it doesn’t mean you or your business should be victims of these economic conditions.

Yes, the global economy is a factor affecting the success of your business, but it is nowhere near as significant as the media give it credit for.

Let me explain…

The majority of small businesses get going because they are very good at what they do — be it accounting,
plumbing, retailing particular goods, etc… and because of word of mouth, a little marketing knowledge, or sometimes just dumb luck, they manage to get customers and make a profit.

In good economic times, many get by on luck alone, with little marketing knowledge, systems or structure… just maybe the odd Yellow Pages ad, a few local newspaper ads and hoping for the best.

In the boom times you can get away with this, but when the proverbial sh*t starts hitting the fan, businesses like these are the first to blame the economy for their failure.

But the hard to swallow truth is that an economic gust of wind just knocked down their house of cards.

A great way to protect your business in these “blowy” times is to get very, very good at marketing.

Learn how to build multiple marketing methods that act like pillars holding your business up.

Adopt a “test and measure” philosophy to make every campaign more and more effective.

Use your current customer and prospect database to it’s maximum effect.

…And your deck of cards will be transformed into a fortress ready to weather even the most brutal economic storm.

As you may know, Doug and I are conducting a series of interviews with some real “heavy hitter” marketing experts to help you prepared for 2009 (which is less than 100 days away).

This weeks expert is Ron Douglas.

Doug will be talking to Ron about marketing to your existing list of prospects and clients, and how this
tactic alone can transform a business.

Ron is the real deal, and has sold over 1 million products using email and relationship marketing.

I strongly suggest you get on the call tomorrow and take notes. What you’ll learn could have a profound effect on your business.

You can get all the details here.

Speak soon,

George

On blogs, forums, and business events, I hear people complaining about the cost of pay per click marketing, which on the surface, is a valid complaint.

BUT, just because you’re paying a lot for a click doesn’t mean you can’t make money using pay per click marketing.

The truth is (that very few people ‘get’) is that the more competitive and expensive a market is on pay per click, the greater the chance there is of making a ton of money. Cheap keywords are cheap for a good reason.

One of my clients, Graham - owner of MyMoneyAdvisor.co.uk, had a massive problem.

• Cost per click was MEGA expensive in his market (as in £18 per click).
• Margins were tight.
• When people clicked, very few people took action (and not enough to break-even, let alone make money, from Adwords)

But within a few weeks of working together, we had it sussed.

• Cost per click was halved
• Cost per lead was reduced by around 75%.
• Profits were up in a big way.

Listen to Graham describing the Good, Bad and Ugly sides of marketing his business using pay per click:

If you do pay per click marketing and take inquiries or sales over the phone, this could be a breakthrough tool:

Mongoose Metrics - Offline Phone Call Tracking

I haven’t tried the system yet, but according to their website, you can actually track exactly what web pages, ads, keywords, generate phone calls to your business. Awesome.

Unfortunately, this service doesn’t seem to be available in the UK yet. What a shame.

Before this service, it was very difficult to track exactly where a telephone call came from in an online marketing campaign… And even though you can ask prospects what they searched for in Google to find you, research has shown that most give you the wrong answer.

There was simply no easy answer to this problem (except may be “click to talk” buttons), until Mongoose.

Mongoose Metrics - Offline Phone Call Tracking

Check them out, and if you’re in the US, let me know what you think of the service!

Cheers for now,

George

PS: You may also want to check out this article about how to split testing a web page using a phone call as your goal. Very interesting stuff.

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Tags: offlinetesting, offline analytics,