Archive for March, 2008

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You may have already seen it, but Google is changing its policy regarding display URL’s.

They’re really tightening things up on display URL’s that don’t match the destination URL. For example, if your ads display URL was:

“www.mywebsite.com”

And your destination URL (the page people are taken to when they click) is:

“www.anotherwebsite.com”

Google will more than likely disable that ad from the 1st of April onwards.

But fear not. There is a way around this and Bryan Todd explains it far better than me here.

Bryan is Perry Marshalls right hand man and co-author of the definitive guide to Google Adwords - so he knows what he’s talking about!

Check out the full article here.

Cheers,

George

There’s a lot of jumbled information on Google Adwords. I’ve recently been trying to clear this up in a series of free videos I’ll be telling you about soon.

For now though, I want to tell you about a really important discovery – one that will go against the beliefs most businesses (and some Adwords professionals) hold about Adwords.

“Back in the day”, the key to Adwords success was to get thousands of long tail keywords – with all kinds or weird variations or mis-spellings – and bid pennies on them.

This did work a few years ago, but Google has got a lot smarter since then and this strategy no longer works in the cast majority of markets.

Why?

There are two reasons:

1. The most talked about one is the ‘Google Slap’ (or Slaps). I won’t go into great detail about it here as it has been extensively covered on blogs and forums all over the internet. The brief executive summary is Google started penalizing its advertisers with very high minimum bid prices if their Ad or Landing page didn’t meet Googles quality score. To get a good quality score (and therefore decent minimum bid price), your Ad and Landing page had to be relevant to the keyword you were bidding on. This, literally overnight, stopped advertisers getting a huge bundle of keywords, slapping up one generic ad, then send the traffic to one low quality landing page.

2. The second, and more recent change Google has made is regarding how it shows ads for broad match keywords (For a definition of broad match, see the bottom of this post.). Before this change, Google didn’t show broad match ads for close mis-spellings of the word. This meant that you could quite happily bid on all kinds of mis-spellings of a keyword and get some nice cheap clicks. Google’s change has put a stop to this and now shows correctly spelling broad match ads on the mis-spelled keyword. Confused? So was I. Here’s an example to clarify.

Click here to view the entire image.

So as you can see, even though I searched for ”siatica”, Google displayed ads that matched the keyword “sciatica”.

Therefore, if you were to bid on mis-spellings of a keyword, you’ll be bidding against the advertisers who are bidding on the correct spelling. This drives the bid price up and kind of defeats the object of bidding in mis-spelled keywords in the first place.

Now I’m not saying not to bid on mis-spelled keywords altogether. There are some instances where it can be done and be profitable. There is just a bit of tweaking and trickery to make sure the above doesn’t happen to your keywords.

You may now be thinking “What does work on Adwords these days?”

Fair question and the answer is not what you’d expect. I’ll tell you all about it in the next post, but to give you a clue, it’s totally counter intuitive and involves “slapping yourself”.

Speak to you soon…

George.

Broad match definition:

Taken from: http://www.google.com/ads/glossary.html

Broad match. This is the default option. When you include keyword phrases – such as tennis shoes – in your keyword list, your ads will appear when users search for tennis and shoes, in any order – and possibly along with other terms.

Your ads may also automatically show for expanded matches, including synonyms and plurals. This means that Google will analyze your keyword list, ad text, and millions of daily Google search queries, and show your ads for relevant terms and variations (such as tennis sneakers), even if you didn’t include these terms in your keyword list.

Broad matches are often less targeted than exact or phrase matches. If you decide to run your ads on broad-matched keywords, we recommend creating keyword phrases containing at least two descriptive words.

Back in the day, everybody had an advertising budget.

Even if you were a sole trader, you had a rough idea of what you would spend on marketing/advertising/promoting your business in a year - even if it was just a made up figure to keep the local Yellow Pages rep happy!

For the majority of business (especially in the UK) this was - and still is - the norm.

But what I’m going to suggest to you today could change how you think about spending on advertising and marketing forever.

I’m going to suggest you disregard the concept of ‘budget’ in the old sense of the word.

Why am I saying this? Well, the way the internet is moving – and has been moving since around 2002 – the concept of an annual marketing budget is getting harder and harder to apply.

Never before has a business of any size been able to test and track their marketing efforts to the penny so accurately. And never before has competition been so fierce in all markets. Businesses and consumers are rapidly turning away from traditional media and focusing on the internet.

People are favoring news websites over newspapers – Youtube over TV – blogs over magazines…Of course; businesses are catching on and want to get in front of these ‘eye balls’ – but beware. The old advertising model won’t work here. Neither will the old ‘advertising budget’ concept.

Rather than paying for these ‘eye balls’ by the thousand and hoping for the best, we need to adopt a whole new approach. Not an entirely new approach – in fact the basis of this thinking is almost 100 years old, but rings so true today it’s scary.

This new advertising space is being sold in a totally different way and I believe this new way could filter down into more traditional media as time passes.

So what is this model?

If you’ve ever advertised on Google, you’ve already experienced it. Some call it pay per click, but the more generic term for the whole concept is Cost Per Action. That is, you only pay the advertiser when a prospective customer does something. That ‘something’ is generally clicking on your ad, but in some instances, it’s filling out a form or completing a sale.

Is this a bad thing?

Not at all! It’s bloody marvelous!

Think about it – you only pay for your advertising when someone actually DOES SOMETHING.

Cost per action advertising, along with proper testing and tracking of your ads, puts an end to shooting in the dark forever. As a business owner, you are now able to fairly easily work out how much it costs you to get a lead, and get a sale. With time and testing, you can reduce the cost of an action, and therefore increase your profits at the same time.

So if you know exactly how much it costs to get a customer, why on earth would you need an advertising budget?

Surely once you’ve established your cost of acquiring a customer is lower than your profit, the last thing you want is an advertising budget!

Think of it like this – if it costs you £20 in advertising to get a customer that makes you £50, why would you limit it with a budget? You’d simply scale up the advertising as fast as infrastructure and cash-flow allows – right?

Here’s the rough method behind the cost per action advertising process:

1. Test your ad & sales process on a small scale,
2. Measure the results,
3. Modify the ad,
4. Test it again,
5. Compare it to the previous one(s),
6. Repeat steps 3-5 until you’ve found the cheapest possible cost per action,
7. Scale up the successful ad as quick as you can,
8. Count your money.

Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that (this is when people like me come in handy!), but overall process is pretty simple.

Hopefully next time you hear someone talking about advertising budget, you’ll think about this post and begin to change your thinking around to cost per action instead!