3 Common Newb Adwords Mistakes

July 21st, 2008 admin

Without doubt the biggest mistake a newbie to Adwords makes is compiling a long list of less than targeted keywords and whacking (technical term) them into a single ad-group.
Using broad match only
The unholiest of the trinity – not tracking results.

#1 The Single Adgroup
Although at first it may seem tempting – collecting all your keywords and lumping them into a single ad-group for ‘ease of administration’ is not a good idea for a multitude of reasons.  First off, let’s say you have managed to find 1000 keywords for your campaign and you pop them all into a single ad-group. Yes, you get a single point of administration (or more accurately a single point of failure) but look at what you miss:

The ability to group tightly cohesive keywords (which are the mindset of your prospects) and construct targeted adverts which are more likely to gain a click through to your site.

The ability to have specific landing pages on your site for specific customer psychographics. This alone will greatly increase your chances of getting a prospect respond to your call to action – be it an email address capture or a sale.

The ability to keep tight control over the budget of your ‘best’ keywords (where best are high traffic/high conversion). Sure you can adjust individual CPC’s within an ad-group, but the granularity and control is not there and the problems inherent with grouping too many loosely assembled keywords will ensure your efforts are thwarted and money wasted.

Have you ever had your account slowed? It’s a pain for sure but the more keywords you have administered in a less than disciplined way, the more of your keywords will be put on hold/in-trial and/or disabled.
Remember Google rewards good advertising performance and looks at all advertiser histories & your advertising history when determining how well you are doing.

Adwords is not a fire and forget medium (unless you have a very niche market with very little competition – but the days of such markets are numbered).

Active campaign management is required to ensure you have not just a return of your investment but a positive return on your investment.

#2 Using Broad Match
Consider the keyword ‘widget’.
How many ways can you search for this keyword? In theory there are infinite number of searches that can be conducted but in practice there are considerably fewer thankfully.  However, how should you specify your matching options within Adwords?

Option 1: Broad Match
This specifies the keyword in an unadorned fashion within your list like so:
Blue widget
What this means is that should somebody search for the keywords:

Blue widget
Red blue widget
Widget blue
Widget who searches for these things blue?
Don’t need blue widget

Then, your advert would show for all of these. This is all very well when broad match (I’ll not talk about expanded match searching for fear of confusion!) shows your advert for terms relevant to you. But…
For every term relevant to your market there could be 10, 100 or 1000 others which are not (which is why when you utilise broad matching you should use negative keywords exhaustively).

The upshot of this is two-fold:

• Your advert will have more untargeted impressions which will result in a lower Click Through Rate
• You will receive more ‘tyre kicking’ clicks from visitors who are not in the least bit interested in your product/service thus increasing your costs.

Option 2: Phrase match
This specifies the keyword by surrounding it in quotes like so:
“blue widget”
What this means is that should somebody search for the keywords:

Need blue widget
Blue widget
Blue widget where are you
Don’t need blue widget

Then your advert will show because the phrase is found within the keywords. This is the next most highly targeted form of search matching and is an ‘improvement’ on broad match – in terms of specialisation.

Option 3: Exact match
This specifies the keyword by surrounding it in square brackets like so:
[blue widget]
Now, your advert will only show if and only if the keyword
Blue widget
is searched for.
In an ideal world, you will know exactly what every keyword is that your prospects are searching for and you could therefore have an exact match for a keyword search. This would serve to both minimize your advertising expenditure and increase your return on investment simultaneously.  But, to get to a point whereby you know the keywords (or at least know as many as possible) which are profitable to you, you need to conduct some research within your adwords campaigns.

So which is the best matching options to use?  Starting off, it is best to utilise all 3 matching options within your ad-group because:

You get to know if there are keywords out there you have missed in your research and can dig further to find out if they should be specified with more targeted matching or added to your negative keyword list.

The assignment of your keyword status (on hold, in trial, disabled) is delayed because the impressions are spread between the variants of the keywords.

More targeted terms (using exact match) generally have higher conversion rates so you can assign different more cost effect cost per clicks accordingly.

Eventually, as your campaigns mature in time, you will have more and more exact match and less phrase & broad match. As a result your advertising costs will decrease whilst your return on investment will naturally increase.

#3 The Unholiest Error
Ok, this isn’t an adwords tip perse as it should be adopted and applied to each and every part of your online and offline advertising.

It’s time to be honest – for each and every piece of advertising/PR you have on the go, how well are you tracking results?

I mean can you categorically put your hand on your heart and say, “Yes, by handing out business cards, I generated £x of business last month” (doh! – I’ve just got a new batch printed up and even I’ve missed out on this, slap my wrist, practice what you preach Tom!).  In the world of Adwords, you need to know what keywords are giving you results and focus your budget and efforts accordingly.  If you have an advert that shunts prospects to a generic landing page, which is not tracked and you have no idea as a result whether they signed up or bought a product/service.  Then, you are wasting tens, hundreds, thousands (bigger companies are some of the worst offenders wasting millions) of pounds every year.

Now you can no longer claim ignorance on the biggest mistakes made with Google Adwords. And I shall make sure my next batch of business cards are trackable!

Posted in Making Money Online | 1 Comment »

A Good Community Member = Postive SEO

July 21st, 2008 admin

People are always asking for the best methods of promoting their site. The usual answers are: Link Exchanges, Buy Advertising, Submit to Search Engines, Viral Marketing…and so on.

While these suggestions are all good in their own way, some require a lot of effort, some require money and some rely on your site being ‘worthwhile’ for the other sites to link to…as in, a reciprocal link will be worth them putting your link on their page…and some simply put people off because of the ‘spammy’ feel to them.

My suggestion *does* require effort, but it is a lot more subtle than the methods mentioned above.
All you need is:

• Membership at a forum
• A link back to your Home Page (without index.html or index.php) in your signature (eg: www.nzboards.com).
• The ability to make helpful/interesting/funny comments.

How many of you have seen somebody make helpful comment after helpful comment, or release great hacks/code, and then head over to their site because you were impressed with what you had seen of them on other sites?

Probably most.

Being a productive member at all the Communities you frequent will more than likely cause other members of that community to investigate your site.

The converse applies.  If you flame other community members or generally make trouble, people are unlikely to want to visit your site and become a member of your community…I know of a few people whose sites I would have to literally stumble across before I would actually go there, simply from what I have seen of their posts on various fora.

So, instead of focusing solely on spamming or getting your site known through direct advertising, think about the simple act of being a good contributor, and the people will come to you.

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Picking a Domain Name

July 16th, 2008 admin

You have been thinking of starting your own website.  You have done some preliminary research and you are ready to go, all you need to do now is pick your domain name.  Pretty simple, right?  Well, it is not as simple as most people think, including myself.  I thought it would be the easiest part of starting my website but you really need to put some thought into it.

You need a website name that is memorable.  You can do all the work on the website you want but if people don’t remember your name it will be hard to get them to come back.  You also need a name that is somewhat relevant to the content of your site.  Here is where you begin to run into some roadblocks however.  With the amount of websites being created (it is estimated there will be 500 million sites created by the end of the decade) the availability of the real popular names is limited.  Now you need to consider multiple word names and this is where it becomes even more tricky.

To make things a bit easier to understand I will use my own domain name as an example, because I learned the hard way.  With any website you need to concern yourself with SEO (search engine optimization).  This is basically a formula of what the search engines use to look up websites when someone punches in a keyword.  The sites that play this game right will find themselves on the first couple of pages for their given keyword.  When I first chose my domain name I went with www.bestinternetbargains.com.  Not a bad name, so I thought.  Pretty straightforward on what I would be focusing my site on, right?  When I picked the name I knew nothing of SEO.  I thought you created a site and BAM, it appeared on Google in the number one spot.

A major part of SEO is links to other sites.  The actual wording you use in the link that appears on other sites is called the “anchor text”.  This is one of the major things searches engines use in ranking the pages.  In most cases you get to determine what your anchor text will be.  But, if you write articles like this one, and you put your website in the signature and people post your articles that counts as a link with anchor text.  So, in my case I have had many people publish my articles, which is great, but the anchor text appeared as bestinternetbargains.  Not many people are doing searches in Google or any of the search engines for that word.  This was hurting my SEO.  I was the only site found for that search word so that was great, but I was the only one doing that search.  Recently I changed my name to www.best-internet-bargains.com.  Same name but the dashes make all the difference.  It separates all the words.  Now if someone publishes one of my articles my anchor text would be those three different words.  With the combination of articles being published and any links I exchange with other sites I can now make my anchor text internet bargains and increase my chances of appearing high in the rankings for those search words.

As you can see, something as simple as some dashes in the name can make a huge difference.  If you are lucky enough to find a one word domain to be available that is related to your site content then you do not need to worry about the dashes obviously.  As I mentioned before, this is unlikely to happen.  If you have read my other articles about starting your own website you will see that I have mentioned SEOelite (http://hop.clickbank.net/sbianchi/bryxen1).  This is the tool I used to help me with the anchor text breakdown.  It does many important things in addition to breaking down your anchor text such as, allowing you to examine your competition’s website so you know what you need to beat to take the top ranking for your keyword search.  For example, let’s say I am the number one site for the keywords internet bargains.  If my anchor text uses these words 90% of the time then you will know you need to be at 91# to take the top spot for those keywords.  It will allow you to breakdown the sites your competition is linked to, which is important in the SEO formula as well.  This tool was the best $167 I have spent on my website.  I highly recommend it if you want your site to be ranked highly.

Building a website is probably the easiest part of having a site.  You need to pick the right domain name, created the right content (which SEOelite will also teach you how to do), write effective meta tags, and find quality linking partners.  Now that you have read this, and hopefully found it useful, get to picking that domain name.  I hope to see your site on the internet soon.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »