Do no evil

I had the privilege today of attending a day of Google AdWords and Analytics. The guys, Pete and Grant, from www.the-media-image.com came down from Durban by the sea to facilitate a day of insight into the finer details of managing and tracking campaigns.

Adwords, using the cost per click (CPC) payment model has been a huge success for the company. Currently, the average bid for the keyword ‘insurance’ is at around R45. In the UK the same keyword will go for around 20 Pounds (50 pence back in the early 2000′s). Your choice of keywords and phrases is very important!

So how does the bidding for keywords work?

Firstly, Click Through Rate (CTR) gives and indication of relevancy and this is used in the formula:

AdRank = max CPC x QS(quality score (relevancy))

Google nurtures and encourages a wide user base by using formulas to rank ad and not just highest bidder. A million people clicking through at R1 CPC vs a couple clicks at R1000 CPC. Google facilitates this by making all its products free, this way businesses and clients both get the relevancy they are after when searching or advertising.

There you have it, there’s obviously a little more going on in the background that Larry and co. are not telling us, but that’s the basic idea. So it’s possible to be the first ad on the page and also have the lowest CPC if you have a high QS.

Dont forget other languages when considering keywords – afrikaans. Language is under utilised in south africa. in france people will not click on english ads or results. Locally a lot of people have there language set to afrikaans – but will click on english ads as there are not many companies catering for other languages. A couple good keywords tools to consider are the Google keyword tool and Good Keywords

Currently the minimum bid is around 7 cents if there are no competitors bidding on your  keyword, but this is highly unlikely. The Google Adword Traffic Estimator gives you an idea on how much a particular word or phrases, the results are all historical so may not be that accurate. It pays to be an early adoptor for keywords and phrases that are under  utilised. Because when the competition wakes up your relevancy/QS for  that keyword will be good and it will cost a lot more for a competitor  per click on that phrase.

Google Trends is a useful tool to see how news events etc affect your  search traffic and how you are doing against your competitors on specific keywords.

Syncronising online advertising time slots with offline campaigns is a strategy that is being employed more abroad than here, but very effective. eg: run your online campaign after tv adverts for a better  CTR. Also, always a good idea to pick up on above the line advertising slogans in your CPC campaigns.

Some notes to keep in mind when creating the actual advert copy:

• Google will not run ads for gambling or firearms.. do no evil
• Exclamation marks in title are not allowed
• No excessive capitalization – ‘FREE’, will not fly.

You can also create more than one set of creative per advert in your campaign and google will  show all the versions for the first thousand odd impressions and will then display the most popular version thereafter – free A-B
testing!

Beware of the content network – turned on by default. turn it off unless you know where you want your ads placed. This is important as you’ve lost the relevancy if someone browses a site with your ad on it and they are out of context.  Its much more powerful to have your ad show in search results when you know that someone is actually looking for your product/service.

An effective brand bwareness strategy is to use the content network for banner advertising on targeted sites of your choice and use the pay per click model. This way your brand will be seen – even if no one clicks on the ad – and you will only pay for the actual clicks. Choose the sites carefully though to keep the CPC down to a minimum. Having said that it’s valuable to know that Google employs the concept of ‘Smart pricing‘ for CPC campaigns on the content networks, which equates to cheaper CPC on CN versus search results.

Coming soon is something called ‘Interest based advertising‘ which tracks you and your search trends so ads will be targeted to you. Google is already tracking all the data on your  search patterns, but not using it – yet.

Another service called Regional targeting should be launched soon locally to allow for adwords to target specific regions with specific keywords. They are also be more cost effective as aposed to a national campaign as you bid seperately and the relevant ad will trump the national ad (and it will display the location it is in).  Fantastic for local businesses who operate within a very localised area  (fast foods, recruitment etc could be good candidates). Using the local business center you can geo locate your business and it will pop up on a map search.

Locally, the best times for search traffic is during working hours, and then in the evenings and on weekends mobile search takes over. So Don’t forget to set up a mobile campaign as well.

The 3 steps to AdWord success:

1. REVIEW CAMPAIGNS

• Structure your campaigns: best sellers, generics, specific themes, mis-spellings,brand/company, long tail, products/services.
• Break ad groups to a more granular level to create a better targeted ad.
• When an ad group outperforms another then lift it into its own campaign then you can apply a seperate budget for it and will allow the other keywords to get some display time too.

2. KEYWORD MATCHING

• Use keyword matching options to your advantage: broad, phrase, exact, negative.

broad: words in any order (most competition)
phrase: words in exact order (less competition)
exact: exact match (even less competition)
negative: exclude searches for ‘free’ etc. Use it to filter your audience, ‘car insurance’ needs a negative for ‘travel insurance’ etc.

Best practice: use broad and exact and try and get more of the phrases into exact and less in broad over time. Makes for better CTR and lower CPC. Be careful of poorly performing keywords as it can negatively affect the quality of your account and you could end up spending more for CPC.

3. WRITING AD TEXT

• Be specific, refer to the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) , refer to location, specific ad title, brand presence and call to action.
• Dynamic keyword insertion- a bad idea most of the time.
• Include best performing keywords in ad title.
• Create multiple ads and test, tweak and test again.

The google ad planner helps  to select exact sites you want to place your ad on and it shows stats about the site as well as where on the site and what sizes.

There you have it, for a first post its a monster – if you read all the way to here, well done. Do you have anything to add, have I got something wrong? Please leave a comment.