Archives for April 2007

For those out there wondering what the difference is between a “Adwords Qualified Individual” and a “Google Qualified Professional”… well the short answer to that question is that there is none.

We were stumped when we chanced upon several search marketing firm websites that utilized a “Google Qualified Professional” logo to display their certified expertise with Google Adwords. The only two logos we were aware even existed were an “Adwords Qualified Individual” and an “Adwords Qualified Company” logo. We initially thought that “Google Qualified Professional” meant some new level of advanced certification, so we clicked on it to see where it took us. It did take us to a Google certification page, but not to any new certification type. It shows clearly the “Adwords Qualified Individual” logo!

The thing we don’t understand is why anyone, if given a choice, would choose to use the “Adwords Qualified Individual” logo when they can use a “Google Qualified Professional” logo on their page. The “Qualified Professional” logo seems much more alluring to potential clients than “Qualified Individual”…

Of course we wanted to get a direct answer from Google, but as they are well known to keep their workings secretive, we didn’t get a direct response. The best they could do was tell us that they don’t offer any level of certification above the “Adwords Qualified Company” status, which made us feel good about our current level of recognition. Still, it makes us a little annoyed that we didn’t have the same options as these other companies seem to have when it comes to choosing the wording of their Google certified logo. The only one we had as an option before our company-wide status was the “Adwords Qualified Individual.”

Since Google wouldn’t flat out address our question directly, we’re just left to wonder what the point is in having two logos for the same certification. And having one of them leaving a much greater impression on potential clients than the other.

You must be selective with the keywords you choose when setting up your PPC campaign, or it is doomed to fail right from the very beginning. The more specific you are in selecting phrases that describe your products and services, the higher the quality of traffic you will receive. That’s not to say you can’t bid on general terms, but if you make the rookie marketing mistake of bidding for too general of terms, your boss will pull the plug on your PPC experiment faster than you can say “zero conversions for the month.”

Our first recommendation is to start out very conservatively, bidding only on very specific phrases (that show a high search volume using something like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and running them as Exact Match terms in a campaign that only serves on the search engine’s primary search. You’ll know if you’re being too general: you’ll get tons of traffic quickly and spend a lot of money without getting any leads or sales from it. That’s why it’s very important to not only start out slowly, but also know how to spot out a “bleeder” term when you’ve got one.

It’s not rocket science. Just run your campaign for a day or two and see which terms are getting you the most traffic, or which ones are costing you the most. Are those terms resulting in conversions, or at least showing a high clickthrough rate? Those are both indications that your terms are working, or at least may work with some adjustments. If you’re spotting any key phrases that are not yielding a healthy percentage for clickthrough or conversion, then you need to pull the plug on them ASAP.

We will on occasion rerun the terms that originally seemed like bleeders, because the markets fluctuate greatly to the point where a wasteful term can become a useful one overnight, and vice versa. Just don’t be afraid to pull the plug for good one an overly general term though. Your productive terms, and your boss, will love you for it!

1. High Position Equals High Value

For high-end companies with ocean deep pockets looking to use the search engines as their own digital billboard, sure, it’s worth the price to pay and get into the top positions for your ppc keywords. But for most small businesses, the cost/benefit analysis will show that over the long term it’s not worth it to push yourself into that prime real estate when what you’re looking for is a significant quantity of quality traffic. That’s the key with setting up a lead generation campaign; finding how little you can pay to get into a good enough position on the first page to get you conversions. So definitely don’t shoot for the sky right off the bat. You’ll likely waste a lot of money before you find that the optimal ROI is further down the page.

2. More Keywords Equals Better Results

Yes, we’re all very proud that you know ten different ways to say “widgets,” but are they all common uses of the term? Is there the potential for any of them to get confused for a different product or service than what you’re offering? And most importantly, are they all the ways that someone who’s looking to pay money for your products and services would phrase things? When faced with questions like these, it’s clear that for your ppc lead generation campaign, you should think long and hard about your keywords. Less can always be more if you pick the right combinations of keywords and key phrases.

3. Don’t Need A Landing Page

Why design an entirely separate page to advertise an individual product or service to my ppc visitors when I’ve got a beautifully crafted home page to point them to? Well, that’s not always an easy question to answer. If you’re just running a branding campaign, then you’d obviously want your visitors all funneled towards the face of your website. And depending upon how you have your website set up, it can act as a landing page. The biggest issues that most home pages have is that they have a lot of navigation options that can make it easy for your visitor’s attention to drift from why you brought them there in the first place: to buy a specific product! Also, the buttons and links on home pages are often set up into directory-like categories instead of appealing calls to action. If you plan on using your home page as your destination URL, then ask yourself this question: Would this look good in print as an advertisement? If you’ve got too much Flash animation and a simple navigation scheme, without reinforcing the offer that you put in your text ads, then your home page definitely won’t optimize your lead generation campaign’s conversions.

4. I Only Need One Landing Page

Ideally, you should have a separate landing page for each of the specific service or products that you are offering. This gives you the opportunity to concentrate on the SEO of each page, and writing copy that makes you seem like an authority when it comes to that individual product or service. This in turn leads your visitor, who usually typed in a very specific key phrase to get to you, to find exactly what they are looking for on your page and nothing else to distract them/scare them off. If you’re going to have several products share a landing page, for heaven’s sake at least make sure the products are closely related. If you can come up with a catch-all phrase to sum up all of the products as a group then that’s the ideal way to set up a multi-product/service landing page for a lead generation ppc campaign.

5. Ad Scheduling Doesn’t Make A Difference

They’ll stumble out of bed in the middle of the night and type in something, anything. They’ll be up so late trying to figure out how to pay the bills next week that they can’t even remember what they were searching for. They’ll be killing five minutes while making dinner for the family, and their heart won’t be into making an online purchase at the moment. You should avoid having any of these people view your ads by utilizing the power of ad scheduling in your lead generation campaigns. Your ppc budget will thank you by having more money around to put towards people who are awake, on a break, and not temporarily financially crunched.

6. I Can Monitor Every Week And Be Okay

It’s only after blowing through tons of cash while your guard is down that you realize how fast the search markets can change. As much as you can use budgeting, scheduling, and just good old proper ppc campaign setup to your advantage, there’s no better way to make your budget work for you than to get involved with your lead generation campaign on a daily basis. Just a half an hour a day will not only let you make necessary ppc budget adjustments and try new text ad variations, it will also give you a bit of time to slowly chip away at the stuff you really need to be utilizing: analytics.

7. Text Ads Just Have To Get The Job Done

You’re the kid yelling out on the street corner selling papers. And you’re hungry. So is your family. You’d better think of something good to say, cause you’ve only got a couple seconds (if that), and you need to start putting some bread on the table. That’s the mind set you need to have when writing text ads, because if you just throw them together it will show. Well-constructed ppc ads have a polished look to them. Some of them grab attention visually. Others rely on great calls to action to motivate people to click on them. So experiment and find the style that works best for your business. And don’t blaze through writing them.. the results usually aren’t pretty.

8. I Only Need Keywords In My Ad Title

You shouldn’t just place Keywords in your ad title, and then say whatever you want in the rest of the ad. You should have keywords in the title, both description lines, the display URL and the destination URL. Just make sure that you word things so that it doesn’t sound like a random collection of keywords. And if you wanna be sneaky, you can always try some nifty tricks like creating shapes out of the keywords that are in bold when your ads serve. If there is a common keyword phrase that has three words to it you are bidding on, try putting one of the keywords at the beginning of the ad title, another at the end of the first line of the description, and another in the beginning of the second line of the description. What you’ve done, my friend, is create an arrow that leads the visitor to view your ad instinctively! And that’s the kind of creativity that will reward you with results in your ppc lead generation campaign.

9. One Campaign Is Easier

What’s easy rarely makes you rich. Now when it comes to a ppc campaign, you can’t settle for throwing all your keywords into one group with one campaign and expect to get the best bang for your buck. Not to mention you can’t even effectively track what types of traffic are getting you the best results. So if you’re a widget dealer throughout the southwestern U.S., set up campaigns for all your geographic targets. After you launch them all, you’ll notice which ones are flying out of the gate, which ones are keeping up, and which ones need you to pick them up off the ground (or bury them!). Also, you’re gonna get bonus points for setting up Groups for each specific product or service. That way you’ll know what your big sellers are. If you’re running a national campaign, you can use separate campaigns for your products instead of geographically targeting the campaigns. You get the same benefit: separating your product/service lines so you can evaluate what’s getting you the most out of your lead generation campaign.

10. Keywords Are Easy To Figure Out

You may think you know a lot about your target demographic, what they would search for, what’s gonna make you rich. Just stop with it already. You can’t possibly conceive of how rapidly the markets change. What might seem like a traffic gold-mine can be a term that no one in ten years would ever search for. So instead of thinking you know what’s your optimal keyword list and just going for it, do some homework with Google’s keyword tool, researching your competition, and reading a few more posts like this one before you start to structure your keyword lists to optimize the leads you generate through your ppc campaign.

We’ve found that the buzz is true; turning off Google’s Search Network and running your campaign on Google search alone is the best way to go. A lot of the Search Network traffic (we’re not talking about Content Network, but Google’s affiliate search partners) doesn’t carry much value because a large majority of it comes from parked domains with a generic search box, spam directories and portals, and other low-content sites. Some accounts we’ve nearly run into the ground sharply avoid hitting the runway after we turn off Search Network, and then perform exceptionally well. It’s just one more tool in your PPC management arsenal, so don’t forget about it!

Google’s products are great, and we’re sure that they will eventually figure out a way to phase this horrible waste of marketing dollars that’s currently called Search Network out of the picture. But there’s no sense in you helping them (in an expensive and ineffective way) through the tranisition. If you can’t find enough traffic on Google search alone, then by all means set up separate campaigns with slightly less relevant keywords or on the Content Network, with a different bidding and ad strategy, but don’t use Search Network until they clean it up first.

Another common mistake amateur internet marketers can make is to use a shotgun approach when it comes to the different “streams” the search engines offer to advertise using. Remember that success using paid search not about how many people you can put your ads in front of. It is all about selectively targeting your markets in a systematic manner, only adding streams as you either require more traffic, or if the initial marketing effort doesn’t work. Sure, there may very well be useful traffic out there in the Google content network, but you’d be crazy to let the same ad campaign with the same text ads, bids, and budgets run on search and content networks simultaneously.

First start out by setting up a campaign that ONLY runs on the search engine itself. This traffic will be the highest quality you can find because you won’t get inquiries from people who found you on the cheesy search forms found on a lot of ‘parked’ domains, commercial spamming portals, etc. The way you do this in Adwords, for example, is to only opt into Google’s search. Not their search network, and certainly not their content network, which just places your ads next to often (but not guaranteed to be even half the time) relevant pages of content.

What you’ll find by using this systematic approach is that either you get:

1. Really great quality traffic (and plenty of it).
2. Great traffic but not enough to support your business model.
3. You get poor traffic.

Here’s the next step for each scenario:

1. If you get plenty of great quality traffic using only Google search, then congrats! Keep it up.. instead of thinking about traffic, focus instead on continuing to improve your clickthrough and conversion rates. And also about your response to those leads.

2. If you get great traffic, but not enough of it, then consider expanding your keyword list first. The Google keyword tool works great for that. Only after doing this should you set up a separate campaign to target the search network. And only the search network. Then try that for awhile. If you’re still not getting results, the last option is the content network. Again, you want to set up a separate campaign for that.

3. If you get poor quality traffic, then that could mean a lot of things. Either your landing page isn’t up to snuff, your ads are not serving high enough on the page, or your keywords aren’t set up right. Regardless of the problem, it’s not going to make things better by opting into search and content network.

Are you still directing all of your keywords and ad texts to either your site’s homepage or one of your site’s inner pages?

If you answered in the affirmative, then you are most likely finding yourself paying close to, if not, the premium click prices for your keywords and key phrases. If you haven’t realized by now, these pages are not the best places for your destination url’s to point to. The reason lies within the relevance and focus of these pages. Your landing page should be the most relevant and specific page associated with a certain ad group or even keyword or phrase.

For example, if you are a real estate agent and are selling properties in Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Malibu, instead of having visitors directed to a page within your website that has information and/or properties about all three areas, you should rather have them led to a page that has information about just one of the communities. Even better would be to create a single marketing page (a.k.a landing page) that is just about one area. This will help to increase the quality score of your keywords and phrases, which will in turn lower your click prices, thus allowing you to spend more of your Paid Search Marketing budget or allocate it elsewhere.

Once you set up a unique and focused landing page for each Ad Group within your PPC campaign there are some simple things you can implement to optimize this page to help stretch your budget a little more. These are some very basic steps that anyone can install. For more advanced tips please check back for our follow-up post about Advanced Landing Page Optimization Tactics.

(1) Whatever the page is about (Malibu real estate, used books, iPods), make it very apparent that the visitor has come to the right place. Any and all reassurance of landing on the right page and not being led to an unrelated marketing ploy page will immediately increase your credibility. In addition, it will also help to increase the page’s quality score because when these pages are reviewed by actual people over at Google for instance (yeah, actual people review these pages) they will see that the page is completely relevant to the Ad Group and search terms utilized.

(2) Have as much relevant content on this landing page as possible, but keep it brief. This poses somewhat of a dilemma for most marketers because as they attempt to have as much unique, relevant content on their landing page as possible they are unintentionally scaring away visitors with a seemingly bottomless page of text. The search engines love to see this content, but you have to keep the visitor in mind at all times because they are ultimately the ones who these landing pages need to appeal to first and foremost. So, keep your content very concise, relevant, and unique and a happy medium will be met. Think of how you act when you come across a landing page. How much time do you spend on this page? 15-30 seconds? Does a page of text appeal to you? Are you really going to read all of the landing page text?

(3) Try to include the ad creative you used in your text ads on your landing page and make them very apparent. For example, if you advertised in your ad text:

Santa Monica Real Estate
Looking For Santa Monica Real Estate?
Register Once For Unlimited MLS Access

Make sure to include “Register Once For Unlimited MLS Access” on your landing page. This will again verify that the visitor has come to the right place and has not been led to a spamming site. In addition, it creates another call to action on the landing page, which is what is going to increase your page’s conversion rate.

(4) Keep the design of your landing page simple, and of course, aesthetically pleasing. Remember that you have to keep two people in mind; the visitors who see your landing page and the people who work for Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc that personally review your landing page. If the page is extremely busy with too many photos or cut up in numerous scattered tables, then most people are going to be immediately turned off. Once again, just ask yourself how you react to certain landing pages? Did the page catch your attention? Does the page keep your attention? Does it look professional and make you believe or want to provide your personal information?

There are many more things that can be done to optimize a landing page. In the sake of keeping our blog posts as concise as possible, we are going to follow up this post with successive additions so please check back with us in the coming weeks for more useful and free information.