My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords

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My quick advice on getting the most from Google Adwords

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 | Best Of, E-commerce |

Doug is asking for Google Adwords advice, so I’ve typed up a bit of what I know.

Some basic considerations

How many Adwords accounts should you have? My company has multiple Web sites. I have each in its own Adwords account with its own login. That makes it easier to keep track of the marketing costs for each site. Right now I’m managing the marketing for all of the sites, but by having their Adwords account I’ve made it easier to delegate the work in the future.

Campaigns
How many campaigns? Each Adwords account can have multiple campaigns. Inside those campaigns you can have subgroups, each with their own set of keywords, their own ad text, daily limits, geography limits, etc. That makes it easy to see how much money is being spent on a group of ads and keywords.

Here’s one way to use campaigns. Say you offer products from 10 manufacturers. Create a campaign for each one. Then you can track how much you’re spending to advertise each manufacturer. The next step beyond that is to compare your ad costs for each manufacturer versus your profit. I’ve had to drop product lines because the advertising costs began eating up too much of the profit. That typically happened when there were too many competitors advertising the same product on Adwords - the cost of the ads got bid up on the advertising side while good old fashioned competition ate up the profits side.

Landing pages
When you create your ads Google will ask for a URL. That may or may not be the front page of your Web site. The more pages on your site the less likely the front page should be the landing page. Search engine visitors are often impatient. You want them to find what they want immediately without making them decipher your site’s navigation structure. Use the most relevant landing page for each campaign.

Conserving your marketing money

At first everyone wants as many clicks as possible. Sooner or later reality will intrude and you’ll start asking yourself how you can get more bang for your buck.

You have the option of showing your ads on Google, their search partners (such as Amazon), their content network (such as sites showing Adsense ads, including my blog). For our products and services I only show our ads on Google itself, for reasons I’ve mentioned before. If what you’re selling is more consumer-oriented you might experiment with the other options. By default your ads will display on both regular computers and iPhones and other mobile devices. Our site isn’t designed for display on mobile devices, so I disable that option on all of our ad campaigns.

Geographic locations
Part of the setup process for every campaign is selecting geographic locations, such as countries and states. Adwords will only display your ads to people in those locations. Limit your ads to the parts of the world where you think you can realistically makes sales. For instance, if you only sell products and services in Tennessee there’s no point paying to advertise in the other 49 states, much less the rest of the world. We limit our ads to the U.S. and Canada because most of our reseller contracts limit us to the North American market.

As a variation on that idea, you could create one ad to display in Tennessee and another ad to display in all other states. The Tennessee ad might include the state’s name right in the ad. You might also bid more on the Tennessee ad because you feel you’re more likely to makes sales in Tennessee.

Ad variations
When you create your campaign you can have multiple ads for the same keywords. Some ads do dramatically better than others so it’s worth experimenting with different ad text. Google will rotate the ads and keep track of the click-through rates. The better-performing ads will be shown more frequently. (Make sure that under Settings tab for the campaign that “Optimize: Show better performing ads more often” is selected.)

Words like “sale” and “free shipping” never hurt. Pay attention to your competitors’ ideas. Borrow the good ones.

Scheduling
By default Adwords displays your ads 24×7. If your sales approach depends on someone picking up the phone and calling you, and you only work 8×5, that’s wasteful. Also consider your time zone vs. that of customers on the other side of the country. Do you want people seeing your ad, visiting your Web site, and calling you before your office has opened or after it’s closed? You can schedule the hours and days of the week your campaign appears under the campaign settings.

Negative keywords
Use negative keywords to keep your ad spending in check. When someone’s search phrases matches your keywords, but the search phrase includes one of your negative keywords, your ad won’t show. That means the person won’t see it, can’t click on it, and you can’t be charged for the click.

Why use negative keywords? To avoid clicks from people who won’t buy anything. Example. For our products Web site some of the negative keywords I use include free, demo, download, driver, manual, open source, FAQ, review, shareware, cracked, warez, and some others. People searching for any of those words along with the products we sell isn’t interested in buying anything. You can create negative keywords at the bottom of the keywords page.

Use Sitemeter or similar Web analytics programs to monitor the keywords people are using to come to your site. That will help you refine your keywords and negative keywords. In Sitemeter, pay attention to the Search Words screen. For instance, we sell Juniper Networks firewalls, switches, and routers. I noticed people searching for “juniper bush” and specific juniper cultivars were clicking on our ads, so I used negative keywords to eliminate those wasted clicks.

Web traffic analysis - Sitemeter and Google Analytics

While you’re signing up for Sitemeter you should also sign up for Google Analytics. Both have different strengths.

Sitemeter is better for taking the immediate pulse of your site and seeing what individual visitors are doing. I also like the fact that Sitemeter will email a weekly traffic summary. I have that email sent to our sales team so they can get a feel for our Web traffic.

Analytics is better for broad analysis and long-term trends. Google is adding more and more integration between Adwords and Analytics.

Tracking inbound clicks and conversions

Always include a tracking code in the URL you provide for each ad. It can be as simple as adding “?Adwords” to the end of the URL. (The Web server ignores anything after the question mark.) The tracking code makes it easy to tell by looking at the entry page URL if someone came to your site as a result of your Google Adwords campaign, as opposed to a natural, unpaid Google search engine ranking.

I wound up writing some code on our Web site that looks for the tracking code, then stores the code, the visitor’s IP address, the referring URL (which contains the search keywords) and a datetimestamp to a cookie on the customer’s computer and to an SQL database on our server. Whenever someone makes a purchase or uses a Web contact form I query the cookie and the SQL database to see how they originally found us (the tracking code), when they first found us (the datetimestamp), and what they originally wanted (the referring URL). I include that information in the email we receive so it’s clear which of our advertising campaigns drove the sale.

Use email contact forms, not email addresses
Speaking of tracking, don’t provide an email address for contact. You can get more information if you provide an email contact form instead. Typical forms can capture the person’s IP address. You can then find that IP address in Sitemeter’s Details screen. Once you find it click on the Detail number to get more information about how the person came to your site. You’ll also see what pages they visited and how much time they spent on each page.

At a minimum every page on your site should have a prominent link to your contact form. Better still is a compact email contact form right on the page.

Conversion tracking
Along the same lines take advantage of Adwords own conversion tracking. A conversion is a customer interaction such as a purchase, quote request, newsletter signup, etc. Get the conversion code from Google Adwords and add it to a results page. For instance, if your goal is to get customer quote requests add the conversion code to the page where people are directed after they submit their request. Google will keep track of which ads and keywords produced conversions.

If your site has a shopping cart add the code to the final page people see after their credit card payment is accepted. You can then modify Google’s conversion code to report the dollar amount of the sale back to Google. Google will track your sales versus your ad spend so you can see how much money each conversion costs in terms of actual sales.

You call that “quick advice”?

That was longer than I had intended, but it really just covers the basics. There’s much more in terms of keyword selection and writing ad copy. Those are topics for another day.

Tags: google