Let’s first look at how buyers learn about and eventually go on to buy our products and services.

The AIDA principle

This acronym essentially walks us through the sales process. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. A potential customer typically goes through these stages before buying:

Targeting prospects in the early buying stages.

In our paid search campaigns, we can target specific keywords around the Attention and Interest stages – and they’re significantly cheaper than words at the Action stage. Let’s look at the examples below:

Just bidding on these cheaper keywords isn’t enough, we need to connect with this person and educate them on why your product or service is best. We do this with persuasive ad copy, engaging content on our landing page such as videos, calculators, and case studies, and a strong call to action.

But I still need to target the buying keywords!

Yes, and this is true. We still need to target those customers ‘ready to buy’ but ideally, we should be spending some of our marketing budget on a more long term cost effective search engine optimisation strategy, boosting your site’s organic rankings, building trust with your audience and ultimately positioning yourself as the authority in your marketplace.

While being at the very top of these results isn’t always the place to be, depending on your industry and business type, for some it is an enviable position that can mean more visits to your site, and more conversions. Google Adwords announced this month that a new metric had been added to the campaign dashboard of Adwords accounts – Top of page bid estimates. Similar to the first page bid estimates, this new metric will; show you the approximate CPC bid needed for your ad to appear in the top section above the organic search results.

How can I use this information?

This new metric will make optimising your adgroups for the ‘top’ or ‘side’ sections much easier. In July, a new segment called ‘Top vs. Side’ was introduced so that users could see a breakdown of how many clicks and conversions their keywords were getting when comparing the position of the ad.

You could then leverage this information in your keyword bidding, if a keyword was performing better in the ‘top’ section, you could bid more for it in an effort to get the keyword to appear there more often. The only problem with this system was that you never knew how much to bid, and you may end up paying many dollars more per click than the keyword was worth. The new top page bid estimate metric takes out the guesswork.

To see the new metric in action, all you have to do is:

• Select the ‘keywords’ tab

• Click the columns button, and then select ‘customise columns’

• Check the ‘Est top page bid’ box and save your changes.

Remember not to rely on this information as the only tool in optimising your AdWords account – as position can be calculated on quality score, your daily budget and user behaviour among other things, this is merely a guide for you to gain insights into your account and to plan your strategy accordingly. If you aren’t sure about how to interpret your findings, White Chalk Road are more than happy to make sense of it for you.

It is well known that Google collects user data to customize and improve their plethora of free products, (whether you are logged into a Google account or not) now advertisers can take advantage of this data, and use it to target their pay per click traffic. “Interest based advertising” is a new feature which delivers ads depending on the interests of the user, and the topics of web-pages they visit.

How does it work?

Interest categories are assigned to users based on the identifying cookies stored in their browsers, and how many times the user visits a website with that cookie. A cookie is a number or code used to remember your visit for next time. For example, if you have a stamp collecting hobby, and visit many sites related to that topic, Google will add you to the “stamp collector” interest group and show you more ads related to stamp collecting when you visit sites that are part of the Display Network.

To see what categories you have been added to, visit http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/.
If you do not have a Google account, then it will ask you to opt in to the ad preferences before starting to record them. Deleting your cookies and browser history regularly will also remove you from any recorded interests, unless you have added them yourself.

What is the Display Network?

This is a group of websites that partner with Google to show ads on their websites rather than in search engine results. These ads can be triggered by keywords, as well as the new interest targeting. These websites are subject to approval before they run ads so Google does work to make sure they are seen only on good quality sites.

What does this mean to Adwords Advertisers?

As with all new products and metrics, testing is the best way to see if it will work for you. If you are already showing ads in the Display Network, try a new campaign and select a few interest categories to target. In a week or so, review your figures and see if it is helping your CPC or conversion rate. Interest categories are priced in the same way as the keyword bidding system, you only pay per click and it is up to you what your bids are.

According to Google, there are over 1000 categories to target at the moment, which will almost certainly grow with time – which means this could be a valuable tool in making sure that your ads are reaching the right people.

If you fail to take the time to learn, then you will be an easy target for someone who is willing to take advantage of your ignorance. Here are a few things to keep your eye on to make sure that your Adwords campaigns are being run effectively.

No Landing Page
One of the biggest tipoffs that your Adwords campaigns are being handled in a less than optimal way is if all your Ads are leading to your website’s homepage, rather than to a specialised landing page. When an Internet user clicks on one of your ads, it is almost always best to have that click lead to a special offer page. In contrast to a random web surfer, the user who clicked on your ad has already expressed interest in your product or service. Now all you need to do is transform that prospect into a paying customer. This is generally much easier to do if you lead the user to a specific landing page for each ad campaign.

No Clearly Defined Ad Groups
If your Adwords manager isn’t using multiple ad groups, then they aren’t maximising your potential sales and conversions. In order to maximise conversions, you should have a different ad for each product or service that you offer. If you sell products related to pet birds, then you should have a different ad and a different landing page depending on whether the Internet user searched for “bird feed” or “bird houses”. In each case, the searcher has indicated a specified interest, and you probably have a special product to fulfill each need. This is far more effective than simply leading the prospect to a generalized sales page.

No New Ads Being Tested
Like most aspects of the entrepreneurial process, the art of choosing the right ads is largely a process of trial and error. If you aren’t consistently testing new ads, then you are undoubtedly operating far from optimally. It is extremely easy to try new ad headlines and new keyword campaigns. As long as the conversion rate is faithfully tracked, you will be able to easily discard the campaigns that don’t work and amp up the ones that do.

Content and Search Networks
Your Adwords ads typically appear in two vastly different circumstances. The first is on the search network, and the second is on the content network. The search network is when an Internet user actually performs a search on a search engine like Google. The content network is when your ad appears around related content on someone’s website or blog. Both ad types can lead to new customers and more revenues, but it is a grave mistake to lump the two together. In many instances, one network works well for a particular keyword, while the other network is a loser for the same keyword. By separating these out, you can greatly increase your profitability.

If you determine that your Adwords team isn’t taking these simple steps to make your ad campaigns continually more effective and profitable, then perhaps it is time to hire someone else. There is no reason to stick with someone who isn’t getting those results for you.

We’re keen to discuss with you how we can effectively manage your Pay-Per-Click campaign. Call, email us or simply use our contact form to get the conversation started.

As I mentioned in my previous post, setting up a successful AdWords ad campaign isn’t as simple as just stuffing a few “relevent” keywords into an adgroup, writing an ad and putting a bid amount on the keywords and turning it all on.

Chances are, if you’ve ever dabbled with AdWords before and done this (as most beginners do), you had a pretty poor result.

Either your ads didn’t show up often, or they didn’t get clicked much, OR (even worse) you got lots of clicks but very few of them turned into a sale or a lead.

So, one of the pieces of the puzzle is the landing page, and I thought I’d make a few comments about them, since we are (once again) designing landing pages for clients who have NO IDEA about how to make this work properly – which is NOT their fault. We’re the adwords specialists, not them, which is why they came to us for help!

1) A landing page MUST be very on-topic for the keywords and ad copy you are focussing on in your ad group.

If you’re targetting wines, then pick a single product (eg. Shiraz or Riesling), create an adgroup with keywords ONLY on that topic in them, and write ads that ONLY discuss that particular wine.

Finally, you want to send visitors to a landing page that ONLY discusses that particular wine. NOT to your home page or a general shopping cart page.

If it’s Shiraz, then send them to a landing page that promotes the virtues of your Shiraz wine ONLY! (example link below…)

Don’t confuse the issue by having 3-6 other wines featured on the same page. If you offer too many choices, you’ll not only confuse the visitor, but you’ll also increase the risk that they’ll get distracted and start wandering around your site until they get bored and leave, having done nothing.

If necessary, create a stripped down version of your “normal” site pages – one where you remove ALL unnecessary links, graphics and content – and JUST focus on the topic of that 1 product or service. You will be surprised at how much more effective your results will be, compared to sending them to a generic page.

2) One of the bigger reasons for creating a custom landing page is to improve your Adwords Quality Score. To borrow from Google’s own help center discussion on the topic, here’s the most important point about QS:

Quality Score influences your ads’ position on Google and the Google Network. It also partly determines your keywords’ minimum bids. In general, the higher your Quality Score, the better your ad position and the lower your minimum bids.

The most important takeaway for you is to know that Quality score influences both your ad’s position AND it’s keyword minimum bids. In other words, if you have a high quality score for certain keywords, your ad clicks will cost less than your competitors AND rank higher, all at the same time.

It should (?) be fairly obvious that high rankings and low costs for your keywords is a HIGHLY desireable situation and the landing page is all part of this “magical” formula.

So, why does a good landing page improve QS?

Simple really. A good landing page is HIGHLY relevent to the search that that person on Google made, and is most likely to answer the “question” they had in their mind when they initially made that search and clicked on your ad.

In simple terms, if Joe Blow was searching using this key phrase ‘buy west australian shiraz,’ and your ad popped up, and they clicked through and landed on your West Australian shiraz landing page, and subsequently made a purchase, that’s the IDEAL outcome from both Google AND the searcher’s point of view. Hence, Google will improve the Quality Score of the keyword that triggered that search, in conjunction with the landing page that helped facilitate it.

Google has some general guidelines about landing page (and site) quality here: landing page quality

3) A key factor in improving landing page quality is relevence. Google has this to say about relevence:

• Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a page with a description of several products.

If your keywords which lead to your ad which leads to your landing page does not have relevence with each other, you’re giving the searcher a “bad experience” and Google can and will penalise you for that.

I’ve often heard this described as “message to market match,” and if the entire path from start to finish doesn’t stay relevent and congruent, you’re in trouble! Hence the need for creating individual landing pages, rather than going down the lazy (or ignorant) path of just sending everything to the home page or the shopping cart “home” page.

4) The above mentioned Google page that discusses landing page quality also mentions originality. The main reason behind this is to ensure that your site is not just a copy of everybody else’s when it comes to discussing your offerings.

Google tends to frown on “duplicate content” (to some extent), and it’s not uncommon for some adwords advertisers (especially those targetting affiliate commissions rather than advertising and selling their own unique products/services) to re-use content from somewhere else to explain their product on the landing page/s.

There’s nothing wrong with promoting someone else’s products (whether you are an affiliate, reseller or retailer), but Google likes to see SOME unique content explaining the virtues of the product, over and above what the manufacturer supplies.

If you’re selling iPods (for example), then don’t just copy Apple’s iPod product info page into your shopping cart product description field. Yes, use what they have, BUT enhance it by adding additional commentary and suggestions to help the searcher make a more-informed choice. That way, you’re adding value, which enhances the end-user’s experience (which makes google look good, which is what they want!)

5) The last point on improving the effect of your landing pages for Adwords is the load time of the page. Google very recently introduced a penalty for landing pages which load slowly – once again, it’s all about whether the user’s experience on your site reflects positively or negatively on Google as a search engine.

You can read Google’s comments on landing page load times to get an idea of what they want and expect.

Keep the massive graphics, unnecessary flash files, pop-ups/unders/overs and so forth to a bare minimum, and ensure your webmaster does a little “performance enhancing” of your web server, to keep speed up and delays down.

In closing, perhaps you’re starting to get a feel for the key underlining message of this post. That is, in order to get great results from Google AdWords, you need to keep google’s wants foremost in your mind with everything you do.

Google relies on its accuracy and effectiveness as a search engine to keep people coming back and using it. Without its massive popularity, their AdWords program would not earn them billions of dollars a year. So, everything THEY do is driven by the desire to give the “client” (the searcher) the absolute BEST experience when using Google to search.

If you, as an AdWords advertiser, are giving their clients a POOR experience, they WILL penalise you, because it’s people like you who make them look bad (no offence intended with that statement), which would reduce their popularity, which would reduce their ability to attract advertisers from all over the world.

No one advertiser is important enough to Google (in terms of how much they spend per month with AdWords) that they will put their entire reputation as the best search engine on the planet at risk. Even if you spend $1 million per year, you have to understand that, while they value you as an important paying client, you’re just one of 100s if not 1000s who spend that sort of money, and if you bring them and their search engine into disrepute, they’d rather lose your business than suffer the poor impression it gives the general public.

It might sound pretty harsh, but it makes perfect sense when you look at it from a business point of view. AND, the best part of all this is that you just have to follow Google’s rules and you will be rewarded with better results than those who don’t. Your ads will rank higher and your clicks will be cheaper than your competitors, and really – that’s what you want as an AdWords advertiser, right?

If you need help designing and testing high quality landing pages for your AdWords campaigns, please just complete the Contact Us form on our WCR Internet Marketing site and we’ll get back in touch with you as soon as possible. Be sure to note in the comments or enquiries field that you’re interested in an AdWords landing page consult.

One of our main business offerings is Google AdWords consulting and management services. We manage close to $1,000,000.00 worth of adspend per year through Google for various clients, so I thought it would be worthwhile giving you a quick overview of what I consider best practises for a successful AdWords campaign. Hopefully, you can get a feel for all the steps we have to go through for a client in order to achieve a positive result when it comes to adwords.

1) You can’t fix/improve what you can’t measure There must have some sort of analytics system on the site (whether WCR stats or Google Analytics). The tracking code should be on every page as a general rule.

2) What is the client’s “Most Wanted Result” (MWR) from Adwords? Is the client looking to make sales directly on the site from adwords, or capture an email address (sign up for a newsletter, for example), or the completion of a form asking for more information, etc.

Each one of these results has their own unique requirements (in terms of implementation, etc.) so we (and the client) need to be VERY clear as to what we are hoping to achieve.

3) Once we know the MWR (and analytics has been added to the site), we have to set up conversion tracking. Conversion tracking allows us to measure ROI (Return on Investment). It also allows us to measure success of individual ad copy, keywords, landing page design, etc.

Without this, we have NO WAY of knowing if what we’re doing is working or not, and whether it’s profitable or not.

4) Test and Measure. (requires analytics + conversion tracking). ALL results can be improved with better words, graphics, layout, offers, etc. Never assume your first effort is the best.

ALWAYS create a minimum of 2 ads per adgroup, testing them against each other to find which one performs better. Once you have a winner, ditch the loser and create a new test ad to compete against the winner. This is called “beating the control”, where the winning ad is the “control” – or the yardstick against which we measure other ads performance.

Google Website Optimizer (multivariant) testing can be very helpful in measuring multiple components to find the best combination, when you have high enough traffic to justify using it.

5) Build tightly focussed adgroups targetting tightly focussed landing pages, and minimize distractions. If we use a winery client as an example, 1 adgroup should ONLY contain keywords about shiraz wine, and the ad copy should ONLY discuss shiraz wine, and the landing page should ONLY pitch shiraz wine.

Don’t bundle everything into 1 big adgroup and point the ads at the home page of the site. Your quality score will nosedive, your ad costs will skyrocket, and you won’t get high ranked ads unless you pay lots more than those ads ranking above you.

This is a BIG ONE. Most clients (and web designers) do this in reverse, so we have to gently educate them on the necessity of tightly focussing our efforts. Often, this will require new landing pages, etc.

6) Make your landing pages convert. Remove as many unnecessary links on the page as possible (less distraction). Make a strong call to action (buy now, add to shopping cart, etc) with a prominent link or button (see Amazon.com for some excellent examples). Use clear quality graphics where possible. This might seem obvious, but it’s often forgotten by the client in their web design. They create a pretty site but forget to “stock it” with persuasive copy and images.

Remember the golden rule: WIIFM

W = What’s
I = In
I = It
F = For
M = Me

That’s what every visitor to your client’s site is thinking when they are browsing. If they don’t see any compelling reasons to move ahead with a purchase (or submitting an enquiry, etc), then you’ve lost them.

Explain the offer clearly, clarify any confusing areas, make a compelling offer, give them reasons to buy from YOU (rather than all the alternatives out there) and make it safe for them (strong guarantee). Write clearly and persuasively. Give strong reasons to buy.

Explain the features and ALSO how each of those is a benefit to them. Learn more here

Where available, use client testimonials.

For more info on online sales conversion and persuasion, read the previous posts I added to this blog:

Selling Online vs Selling Offline
Does Your Website Sell?
The Forgotten Dynamics Of Buying and Selling Online
The Top 10 Sales Conversion Secrets Of The Best Websites In The World
The Psychology of Sales Conversion

If you have any more questions, or would like to discuss whether we can help you with your AdWords needs, please just complete the Contact Us form on our WCR Internet Marketing site and we’ll get back in touch with you as soon as possible. Be sure to note in the comments or enquiries field that you’re interested in an AdWords consult.