The economics and the business model are a challenge. Resellers have to pay sales teams who have to sign up as many advertisers as possible and account managers (if the business has any) have 100′s or 1000′s of accounts to look after.  The reseller than has to slap on a massively high mark-up on the Cost per click to drive any revenue at all.

I’ve seen 100% mark-ups ‘out in the wild’.

It’s a low quality, high volume business. and yes, the churn rate is massive because advertisers are not happy with results or service.

Honestly, It’s not a business model I’d touch with a 10 foot pole!

What I have begun to do is share my knowledge on this blog (via the ‘Mind your own PPC’ posts) in the hope that small business readers can start to wrestle control of their marketing back from dodgy resellers and actually get some value for money. Eg don’t pay a 100% mark-up on Click costs if you don’t have to.

However the reality of the situation is that many small business owners simply do not have the time (even a few minutes a day) to devote to managing their own local search campaign, nor the time to devote to learning what they need to learn to get things going properly.  Yet they also know that that they are potentially missing out on valuable traffic by not having a presence in the search results or map pages.  So they’re forced to find a supplier who can get them there, even if it means paying more than they should for mediocre campaigns…

Enter Google AdWords Express

BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER… Google are about making money, just like every other busines so they’re not a knight in shining armour here to rescue small businesses in distress, they see a massive opportunity to get 1000′s of small buinsesses online and buying their ads. They’re obviously not happy with the reseller model either so they seem to have reached a compromise,

It’s also worth noting that I’ve not yet had any first hand experience with Express, so these are just observations based on what information I’ve been able to find so far.

What is AdWords Express?

It’s designed to get small local advertisers up and running on Adwords as quickly as possible with a minimum of understanding required (sounds dangerous right?!). As Google explain:

AdWords Express is the easiest way to advertise on Google. Creating your ad takes just a few minutes, and that’s it. Everything else is managed automatically, ensuring your ad is only shown to people looking for what you have to offer. Now you’re advertising to an audience that’s already interested in you.

Search Engine Land also summed it up well saying:

The idea behind AdWords Express is that local businesses, who, at one time, only needed to place a yellow pages ad once a year, have been frightened away from AdWords by the perceived complexity of keywords, bidding, etc. With Express, they input a bit of information about their company, set a budget, write a couple of lines of ad copy, and Google handles the keywords and bidding.

How does AdWords Express work?

You tell google about your business and location, google give you some ads. Sounds easy right?

When people search online for local products or services that you provide, an ad for your business will appear above or beside their search results. Your business will also be marked with a distinctive blue pin on Google Maps, helping it stand out to potential customers.

Who should use AdWords Express?

AdWords Express is for local businesses looking for local customers. It’s for business owners who want the benefits of a targeted online ad campaign, without having to spend time managing it.

Won’t Google just charge Advertisers more for clicks – like the resellers do?

Google can’t mark-up the CPC because it’s an auction, but they can bid high and broad. I envisage an AdWords Express  “convenience tax”. eg. Google will bid very competitively on terms (eg high) and possibly use broad matches to get as many clicks are possible. The focus will be on Clicks and not conversions so Advertisers will pay more than they potentially needed to, but it will beat paying 100% mark-up to resellers who also focus on the clicks.

Who will could AdWords Express ‘hurt’?

a) The resellers
b) Service based directories with large adwords campaigns covering multiple service categories and locations. Sorry guys, if Express takes off in your market, expect CPC’s to rise!

If you’re after a sophisticated, conversion orientated PPC campaign, then Express is  not for you. But if you’re a small local business who would like a hassle free way to start advertising on Google, then this could be a safe bet.

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Do you have your web site ready for PAID traffic?

It’s very easy to get carried away at the thought of instant traffic to your site in the form of AdWords clicks. But if that site of yours is not ready for traffic, then you’re just wasting your time and money.

I’m not talking about conversion optimisation here – all these things follow later. I’m talking about giving your business the best possible chance of generating ROI from your ad spend, and forming some kind of relationship with the user that just clicked through. Conversions that matter are not always transactional in the form of money in the bank and a product sold. They can often be as simple as an email sign-up or a ‘White Paper’ download.  Building a relationship with the researchers and the information hunters is just as important as converting those ready to buy.

The idea here, in simple terms,  is that even if this user (who’s click you just paid for on AdWords) does not purchase from you on their first visit, if you get your ‘hooks’ into them somehow, then you may be able to get them back to your site for free the next time when they are ready to buy.

Here’s a list of things I’d consider:

• Email sign-up form (even if you don’t send out emails yet)
• Facebook Fan/Business Page and a ‘Like’ box on your site. (yes, simple as that. They’re free, 500 million ++ people might see it… so go get one).
• A Contact Us form that works… (You know who you are, the site with the broken contact form that emails no one, or the incorrect email address listed.)
• Follow Us on Twitter link. (If you are on Twitter make sure you let people follow you easily).
• Local business?  Phone number and even your address on every page!

OK that’s just a few ideas for now.

The other question to continue to ask yourself even while you are paying for traffic is:

Are you also doing everything you can to build a consistent and reliable source of ‘free’* traffic?

* nothing’s ever free… in the case of free web traffic I refer to that which you have not had to purchase it via amedia buy. Eg.  SEO  versus PPC (SEO you pay for on-site dev, and off-site factors, not the actual click from the search engine).

Search on Google.com today for ‘How to Claim Bankruptcy‘ and look who’s in second position….

Broad Match fail in AdWords. Oh the irony!

They have already lost millions, what’s a few more thousand a day on badly managed adwords?

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!

SERP

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

I click on the ad…

404!

Fail!

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.

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.

Another interesting way to use Geo-targeting to your advantage is if you wish to have different ad text appear for different states. Lets pretend we’re a tourist resort in Queensland, Australia. While we may consider the entire country our target audience (and potentially international markets too), yet image the powerful messages we could create if we knew that a particular ad was only going to show to people searching from Melbourne.  Eg.

Great Noosa Holidays
Escape the Melbourne Rain in Noosa.
$1459 for 10 Days. Offer Ends Soon!
YourDomain.com.au

So how do you set up geo-targeting in AdWords?

Geo-targeting or Location Targeting is activated at a campaign level in your account and is set up via the Campaign Setting tab in AdWords.

If you wish to edit the location targeting for your campaign – select the ‘Edit’ link and you will see a map based box appear.

Have a play around, and be sure to leave a comment and let me know how you are going!

Previously:

Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.

Mistake #2 – Not using negative keywords.

Mistake #3 – Sending All Clicks to Your Homepage.

Coming Soon:

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

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

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

__________________________________________________________

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Sign-up Here!

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

Mistake #3 – Sending all Clicks to Your Home Page.

Let’s start this post with a question. What is one of the single most powerful features of search engine marketing? The key to why PPC and SEO work so well?

Quite simply, the user is actively broadcasting their needs and desires to the world every time they search for something.

‘Useful’ is an understatement… The ability for us to promote products and services in the targeted manner that Pay-Per-click allows is incredibly powerful and profitable when done right.

The key (excuse the pun) to being successful is choosing the right keywords in the first place (to be covered in separate posts) which will not only target the users when they’re ready to buy, but also target users when they are at other stages of the buying cycle – research, comparison etc.).

Once you have developed your master keyword list, you then need to break this up in to campaigns & ad groups, write your ad copy and select your targeted landing pages…
This is where many advertisers let themselves down and ultimately pay the price in the long run.

Too many AdWords advertisers will develop a great list of keywords relevant to their business but then make the fatal mistake of then sending all their click traffic to the home page.

This is a bad move.

If you have invested the time into finding the terms that your potential customers will search on, then it is imperative that you invest more time in customising landing pages on your site that will best match the keyword themes you have defined. Eg. If someone searched for ‘blue widgets’, send them to a ‘blue widgets’ page. Don’t send them to a home page that says ‘Welcome, we sell 100’s of widgets and widget accessories in many styles and colors…’

They’ve already sent you a very strong signal that they are interested in ‘blue widgets’, so that’s what you should give them.

Let’s think about it another way. Let’s say you run a brick and mortar retail outlet selling shoes. Sending all traffic to the homepage of your site, regardless of what they searched for would be like answering every customer query about shoe type, size, brand, color in your store with ‘Yes we have shoes, check out our massive range!’ as you stand at the front door…. Helpful? Not really, and chances are many potential customers would walk straight out of your store and try your competition out.

Search marketing is exactly the same. If you don’t match the searchers intent with a relevant lading page, you run a much higher risk of loosing that user completely. They will ‘bounce’ back to the search engine results page and click on a competitor’s link.

Going ‘Back’ is easy for the site visitor to do. Getting ‘that visitor’ back again is expensive.

So the lesson in this is. Send your PPC traffic to relevant landing pages on your site that reinforce the message that you have what they are specifically looking for. If you don’t have a page that suits, but you do have the specific product or service category, build a page that does.

Technically speaking too, the relationship between the landing page you have chosen and the keywords you are bidding on will impact on the Quality Score of your ads. The higher the Quality Score, the less you pay for a given position.

Don’t chase your tail and loose visitors due to poor landing page choice. Give them what they’re after and you’ll be amazed at the results.

Previously:

Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.

Mistake #2 – Not using negative keywords.

Coming Soon:

Mistake #4 – Not targeting your geographic region.

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

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

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

__________________________________________________________

Don’t miss an update, sign-up to the ‘Mind Your Own Pay-Per-Click’ Newsletter and learn how to manage your own PPC!

Sign-up Here!

Mistake #2 – Not using negative keywords.

Google AdWords (Yahoo and Bing) allow advertisers to select words or phrases that you do not want your PPC ads to appear against. They call this adding ‘negative keywords’.

The idea is pretty simple, but often overlooked.

Let’s just assume you have added in your list of keywords to AdWords using the default ‘broad match’ match type. What this means is that Google will show your ad for not only the keyword you’ve chosen, but also for any other potential phrase combination that includes your original keyword.

Let me use a real world example.

My father is an owner of an organic olive oil business called Donkey Hill Organic Products. They’ve decided to run a small PPC campaign on Google to hopefully attract some wholesale enquiries and potentially a retail client or two. The main focus however remains B2B.

Obviously the important types of phrases / keywords to include are things like:

• Organic olive oil
• Australian organic olive oil
• Organic olive oil supplier
• Organic olive oil suppliers
• Olive oil wholesale
• Wholesale olive oil

You see where I’m heading.

However if I were to just add these keywords in on ‘broad match’ (default) or even phrase match (more on match types in another post) I’d be potentially wasting money on impressions and clicks that have nothing to do with the core aim of this campaigns.

Let me explain.

So as I said above ‘broad match’ essentially takes the keyword you’ve entered and will then match it on as  many potential search queries as possible that include that particular keyword or phrase (in any word order).

So back to the term ‘organic olive oil’ – No doubt this is a key term for this account but on broad or phrase match do you know what other terms this would match as well?

Check these out!

• organic olive oil soap
• organic olive oil recipes
• organic olive oil lotion
• organic olive oil hair spray
• organic olive oil massage
• organic olive oil decanter
• organic olive oil cosmetics
• organic olive oil cake

wow! Granted these are probably all great products made from organic olive oil, but guess what? Donkey Hill doesn’t sell them!

So what can we do to not appear for these terms?

Well the first step would be to add in ‘campaign negative keywords’

In AdWords these can be accessed via:

Opportunities Tab >> LHS in Tools “More tools” link >> “Edit Campaign Negative Keywords” link.

In here I’d then select the campaign in question, and then add in:

• Soap
• Recipes
• Lotion
• Hair
• Spray
• Massage
• Decanter
• Cosmetics
• Cake

..and any other term I feel is not relevant…

I could also add these in for just specific ad groups if I didn’t wish to block completely.

In this case I would just add a ‘-‘ before each term that I wanted to make a ‘negative match’ in the specific ad group. Eg.

- olive oil soap
- olive oil spray

So, why is this important, and how can it help save marketing budget and improve performance?

In simple terms, what this will mean is that:
a) You’re not wasting impressions on irrelevant keywords.
b) You’re not incurring costs on clicks by users who are very unlikely to convert..
c) Your click through rate will go up.
d) You quality score will improve.
e) You’ll get better return on your spend!

Good luck!

Previously:  Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.
Coming Soon:

Mistake #3 – Sending all clicks to your home page.

Mistake #4 – Not targeting your geographic region.

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

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

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

__________________________________________________________

Don’t miss an update, sign-up to the ‘Mind Your Own Pay-Per-Click’ Newsletter and learn how to manage your own PPC!

Sign-up Here!

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

Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.

I see this mistake all the time and, as a new AdWords advertiser, it’s not exactly 100% your fault. I’ll explain why.

Google (and Yahoo and MSN) pretty much lead you down a path of adding way to many keywords per ad group right from the account set-up stage when they ask you to add your keywords. How many of you had a list of 100 or so and just added them into one ad group to get going? See what I’m getting at?

Well I’m here to tell you that it most definitely is a big mistake, but it is understandable given the way the account set-up process works.

While there is no single correct answer when it comes to the number of keywords per group, the aim of the game is simple – each ad group should only contain highly targeted, related keywords that focus on a specific product or service.

Take a look back at all your ad groups and ask yourself, “Are these groups individually targeting a single product, service, or action?” If not then you have some work to do.

Here is a really basic example.

A business called “Leigh’s Widgets” sells, you guessed it, widgets!

Here is the initial Keyword list (all in one ad group):

Ad Group 1:

• widgets
• widget
• widgets online
• widgets sale
• widget reviews
• compare widgets
• buy widgets
• widget model 123abc
• small widgets
• small widgets online
• buy small widgets
• cheap small widgets
• house widgets
• house widgets online
• buy house widgets
• cheap house widgets
• large widgets
• large widgets online
• buy large widgets
• cheap large widgets

There are simply too many different products or services being targeted with this list. Firstly we’ve got generic ‘widget’ terms, then we’ve got comparison and review terms, followed by specific models and/or product types.

Not only is this ad group not focused, but it’s also targeting keywords that may well be relevant to vary different parts of the buying cycle (Important – we’ll cover keyword research and the buying cycle in detail in another post).

So stepping back at and looking at this, here is one possible way I’d structure these keywords into numerous ad groups:

Ad Group 1: (Generic / Head terms)

• widgets
• widget
• widgets online

Ad Group 2: (sale)

• widgets sale

Ad Group 3: (review)

• widget reviews

Ad Group 4: (compare)

• compare widgets

Ad Group 5: (buy)

• buy widgets
• cheap widgets
• widgets sale

Ad Group 6: (model 123abc)

• widget model 123abc

Ad Group 7: (small – generic/head)

• small widgets
• small widgets online

Ad Group 8: (buy small)

• buy small widgets
• cheap small widgets
• small widgets sale

Ad Group 9: (house – generic/head)

• house widgets
• house widgets online

Ad Group 10: (buy house widget)

• buy house widgets
• cheap house widgets

Ad Group 11: (large – generic/head)

• large widgets
• large widgets online

Ad Group 12: (buy large widget)

• buy large widgets
• cheap large widgets

You’ll notice I’ve got a number of ad groups now with only 1 keyword – this is intentional. If there are no other keywords in your list that are relevant/related, then build an ad group with just the one keyword. You may also find keywords you have missed as you do this too.

Take a look at Ad Group 3 – ‘widget reviews’  is the only keyword in this list, yet, we really should include related keywords like ‘widget review’, ‘review of widget’ ‘online reviews of widget’, ‘online widget reviews’ etc.

In some instances, you may expand an ad group with additional relevant terms only to discover that you could then break that ad group up even further. This is OK! I recommend it!

Why are we going to all this trouble? Well the simple fact is that if your Ad text/copy for a given ad group is highly related to all the keywords in that ad group, then you’re going to have a better quality ad, higher click through rate, and ideally, a highly relevant landing page.

Combine all these factors and you’re potentially doing PPC better than 95% of the other advertisers who are bidding on that same term!

One of the biggest issues with having too many different product or service related keywords in a group is that it’s almost impossible to create a good ad that works for every one of them. There is such a thing called Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) (again a topic for another post entirely) which can add the keyword that triggered the ad into the ‘ad copy’. However DKI is something that needs to be done very carefully (and in some instance avoided).

But ultimately, if you are selling different types of ‘widgets’ to people at different stages in the buying cycle, would it not make sense to write ads that would appeal to directly to that type of mindset, rather than trying to write one ad to suit all possible searches?

Yes it would! And breaking up your ad groups into smaller tight groups will help you get it right.

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