The Art of Search

I came across this post over at at WebmasterWorld and It made me laugh.

Question:

Unfortunately the displayed URL is too long.
I skipped the www. , but it is still one letter too long. Asking for an exception was rejected without any further hint, how to make it work.
Any suggestion?

Answer:

Get a shorter domain.

If you don’t know already, AdWords allows 35 characters in the display URL field.

eg.

get-a-really-long-spammy-domain.com -> count = 35 Chars.

Honestly, there’s NEVER a good reason to have a domain name this long anyway. AdWords display URL limits are the least of your problems dude.

Additionally, if you are trying to stuff keywords into a hyphenated domain name so that you can try and rip off people with weight loss re-bill offers, Google won’t take long to bring down the ban hammer.

A word from the wise.

• Long domains suck.
• Keep your domain short regardless of where you’re advertising. You want people to remember it after all.
• Hyphens in domains suck.
• If you really need a hyphen – keep the domain short.

Happy AdWor’tising!

Facebook Ad approval process… fun and games.

Sometimes you wait for days hours,  and quite often ads are rejected for no apparent reason (for many ads there is also a very good reason why they are rejected.  Like any advertising platform – play by the rules).

But it got me thinking. Let us, for a moment, assume Facebook is on target to hit over 1 billion in revenue this year and for simplicities sake, let’s also assume that 50% of this revenue is from Facebook’s self service ads.

$500 million revenue over 12 months = $950 per minute.

That’s $950 lost every aggregate minute Facebook waste while advertisers wait for their ads to be approved.

Surely that in itself is enough incentive for facebook to develop an AdWords-esque automatic approval / dissaproval process for the masses.

Facebook – Not all advertisers are trying to game the system.  Stop hindering the efforts of the good guys. you may even find you make more money.

$950 dollars a minute would write a lot of quality checking code and algorithms.

Now I’m over simplifying here with gross generalizations and perhaps some flawed logic as well…

But my point is that for every minute an advertiser ‘ready to spend’ is left waiting for their ads to be approved Facebook are leaving revenue on the table. If they were able to build an intelligent system that auto approved ads that met the guidelines  we’d all be better off.  Quality can be assured via  community moderation, and FB ‘Human’ review after the fact.

Please make it so.

Next time you’re struggling to think of where to advertise your local business, don’t ignore the potential of Facebook.  The example here is not a bad one, think about it.

If you were Pizza Hut, would you want to target people who like Dominos? Hell yes!

And if you were Dominos, wouldn’t you want to target people who ‘like’ Pizza Hut? Damn straight! It just makes sense!

Think of the potential.. throw up ads with Dominos coupons targeting all the fans of your competitors.  sneaky, but that’s what Facebook targeting is all about – Being smart little marketers.

Another example… My father is a part owner of an organic olive oil business. Could Facebook advertising work for him? (Dad, if you’re reading this – hint, hint!).

Let’s see what Facebook says.

Targeting: Over 25, Australian, expressed a like or interest in ‘organic food’, ‘organic’, ‘olives’ = 5,000 people. For a small business, that’s a market.

I searched for ‘adwords credits for non profits’  on google.com.au

SERP

Awesome: ‘Google Grants is now available to AU non Profits…’

I click on the ad…

404!

Fail!

Editor’s Note:  I’ve spoken with Dennis on many occasions about his view on using Facebook and Twitter for Business. Following is his very blunt advice. Agree? Disagree? Let me know!

- Leigh

I get this question a lot.  So let me put it bluntly.  If you are not a celebrity or household brand, forget about twitter.  Unless people care about what you just ate or who you were seen in public with, as is done in the tabloids, you’re not going to get enough followers for it to even be worth your time. My twitter account has 3,502 followers, while my Facebook account has only 2,082 fans.  Facebook is the #7 referrer to my blog while Twitter is #20.  So even though I have more followers on twitter, I’m getting 6 times the traffic from Facebook.

And if you consider that the Facebook fan page for Dennis Yu has only 496 fans, the contrast is more stark.  Why?

Twitter is for existing brands and personalities that have massive recognition.  What you can say in 140 characters can’t possibly have much depth, though you can retweet pithy sayings, post interesting articles, or even communicate casually with friends.  But to generate more awareness, traffic, or sales for your business?  Unlikely.  The exception proves the rule– there’s that one donut shop that people cite as the example for small business success on twitter.

Facebook is where you can connect with real friends. You can interact with them and share in deep, meaningful ways (or at least as far as is possible online).  I’d challenge you to tell me what share of twitter users are bots, what percentage of tweets are done by bots, and what percentage of tweets go unread.  I’d wager that the ratio of spam pages on the internet approximates the spam ratio on twitter– although, I’d say that Facebook would be MUCH cleaner because of reinforcing mechanisms of the newsfeed filter and social graph.

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Last week I sent this tweet venting my frustrations at how long CGU Insurance have kept me waiting for finalization of my car insurance claim…

Background – In May, my car got trashed by a hail storm in Melbourne and After much back and forward it has been written off.

So the good, is I don’t have to go through the headache of getting it repaired, the bad – I love my car… and to add insult to injury, I’d spent $900 replacing the radiator 2 weeks before the attack of the killer hail storm occurred.

Anyway…  enough about me!

So my tweet was actually to see if CGU are monitoring their social media presence.

Verdict is no they are not.

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An oldie but a goodie!

Ok much has happened since last I updated, so I’ve decided to finish the remaining ‘adwords mistakes’ in one giant post!

Mistake #5 – Not monitoring bids at the keyword level.

Don’t fall into the trap of just setting bids at the ad group level and forgetting about individual keyword bids – success is in the detail guys, so pay attention to what’s happening in your accounts at the most micro level possible.

I spoke with someone the other week over the phone who couldn’t work out why their average CPC was 2 x what ‘they were bidding’. A few questions back and forth and we realized that while the ad group bid was set at $0.12, the individual CPC’s for keywords were all set at $0.25. Ouch.

Anyway – easy fix, but pays to remember this.

The thing is though that, depending on your ad group structure, setting the bid ‘just’ ad the group level may well mean you’re missing out on opportunity, or paying too much for some phrases, and not enough for others.

To illustrate, you could have an ad group for ‘compare home loans’ and in that group you have the following keyword with 2 match types.

History of this keyword – you already know this terms converts well…

What would happen if the bid was set only at the ad group level? Say at $2.50.

compare home loans
phrase match
conversion rate 18%
compare home loans
exact match
conversion rate 26%

Well chances are you will end up paying either too much for the Phrase match term, or not enough for the exact match term. Eg. The better converting ‘exact match’ phrase should be treated differently than the phrase match variant, simply because it converts better. But if you’re not controlling at this level, then you may be leaving opportunity behind.

Mistake #6 – Not using different keyword ‘Match Types’.

I started going into this above… and while I’ve covered negative keywords in an earlier post, and another great write up can be found over at PPCHero, today I want to go through broad, phrase and exact match in a little more detail.

Broad match, according to a Google rep at SMX Sydney who said  ‘Broad Match is your friend’….  I disagree!

Broad match may be Google’s best friend, but it’s not yours. Think of it more as that annoying friend on facebook that always takes things too far and is often inappropriate.. yeah that’s Broad Match!

Reason? Well BM is designed as a ‘catch all’ in the adwords system. You can set one key phrase on broad match and bam – your appearing for all sorts of crazy stuff (hence why negatives are important too!).

Let’s go back to the example above ‘compare home loans’.

If this is set on BM then you could match for things like

• compare home loans
• home loan compare
• loan compare
• compare home loans in melbourne
• do not compare home loans
• compare home loans for dummies
• compare mortgage insurance for home loans
• home loans
• home loans suck
• home loans for dummies

See what I’m getting at – it’s dangerous. Goes to far, and is inappropriate at times

That’s why we have ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match.

That same list again using phrase match:

• compare home loans
• compare home loans in melbourne
• do not compare home loans
• compare home loans for dummies
• compare mortgage insurance for home loans

Getting better – phrase match tells google ‘we only want to match in the specified word order.’

The same again with ‘exact match’:

• compare home loans

Simple as that – exact meant ‘exactly as I’ve written it!’

Match types allow more control and flexibility, but… and more importantly,  you’d be amazed at how much the intent of a search query changes with just a few words added.

Take the following where it matched on Phrase Match..

• compare home loans in melbourne
• compare mortgage insurance for home loans

If you were on broad or phrase match for ‘compare home loans’ and did not have these terms in another ad group – chances are that they would trigger you generic ‘compare home loans’ ad. However, if you were smart you’d see straight away that these terms should be directed to a specific landing page – one addressing ‘melbourne’ and the other incorporating ‘mortgage insurance information.

Powerful stuff when done well.

Mistake #7 – Not splitting out Campaigns to target Search and Content Network separately.

This was going to be a big rant about not separating out your campaigns between search and content… but you know what, I’ve written about the google content network quite a bit, and this really is the most basic of the basic step.
Simply put, you must always break up your campaigns into one targeting Search / Search Partners and another (potentially) targeting the content Network. Ever have the one campaign targeting both because it just makes things harder for you.

7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.

Mistake #4 – Not Targeting Your Geographic Region.

In the last post we talked about using Negative Keywords and how to best utilise these to cut out on unwanted and un-targeted AdWords traffic. Pretty neat huh?

But there’s another fatal mistake that I’ve see all too often and this one can be even more costly in the long run – Geo-Targeting.

The PPC engine such as AdWords allow the advertiser to be very selective in where they want to show their ads, eg. which countries, cities, regions or languages to target.

Most common targeting that an advertiser would use would be the country level, i.e. Australia, and for an online business that does indeed ship products country wide, this probably makes sense.

However I’ve also seen, time and time again, US merchants targeting Australian ‘eyeballs’ with their ads, and after investigating realise they only ship within the US and Canada! I’m sure there are a few Australian merchants that have done the same and accidentally targeted the US and other English language countries without realising. Can be costly!

I’d like to take this a step further however, think about the current targeting for your campaigns, then think about your target market, delivery constraints, serviceable regions, etc…

Does your product or service really cater to everyone in the region your are currently targeting who search using your keywords? If it does then great, keep your geo-targeting broad, but if it doesn’t think again.

If you’re a small business that only services a specific region, then this is especially important. Rather than target your PPC ads to the whole country or state, perhaps you would be better off targeting your city, or even a region within that city. Sure this will vastly cut down on the impressions and clicks that your ads will potentially receive, but we’re after quality, not quantity in cases such as this so there is not point in wasting hard earned dollars on visitors  who will never buy your product or service.

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