AdWords

This article by Howie Jacobson was originally posted on Search Engine Watch.

Showers frighten me. No, I don’t think anyone is going to ventilate me with a kitchen knife.

Instead, I worry about the water temperature. Sometimes I get under one of those faucets and turn on a torrent of freezing water.

Other times I scald myself. (South Africa is notorious for tap water temperatures that ordinarily occur only in pressure cookers.)

So when I start my shower, I turn on the tap and then wait a moment. I look for clues – steam, say. Then I stick a couple of fingers under the showerhead. Only if they feel good do I commit. If they don’t, I fiddle with the dial and try again.

When the water temperature is perfect, I jump in. No guesswork. No fingers crossed. No risk. (Unless someone then flushes a toilet and uses up all the cold water – yowww!)

Bad Marketing Also Frightens Me

You should create websites to accomplish specific purposes, whether it’s to build a free email subscriber list or generate leads. The goal of the front end site is to get prospects to know, like, and trust you enough to say “yes” to future correspondence.

It’s through the follow up (emails, webinars, videos, Facebook, and Twitter engagement) that you can develop the relationship to a point where your prospects are willing to pay for exclusive access or pay-walled content.

Which begs the question: What does your market want to hear from you? What do they consider valuable, and what they yawn at (or get annoyed by)? What sort of follow up builds the relationship, and what sort erodes it?

Which leads to the next question: How do you find that out so you don’t throw your website and follow-up sequence under the cold (or scalding) shower of my traffic?

By researching your market. By looking up the answer before the test. (In school, that’s called cheating. In business, it’s called smart.)

Don’t Throw Your Website Under a Cold Shower

If you don’t know your online market, how can you give them what they want? And if you do know them – deeply – then how can you fail?

By combining quick and dirty (and free) online market research with AdWords testing of keywords, ads and landing pages, you can fail in small batches, with minimal consequences.

Like sticking a couple of fingers under the showerhead.

AdWords is not the world’s cheapest source of traffic. It’s called pay-per-click for a reason.

AdWords isn’t the world’s fastest source of traffic. A viral video can bring you millions of visitors in a weekend.

AdWords isn’t the world’s highest value source of traffic. An endorsed article on someone else’s site (like this one) can bring you traffic that’s already predisposed to like and trust you (or at least pity you for being a cold water wimp).

But AdWords is The World’s Best Testing Platform.

Use the web to discover everything you can about your market – how big, how passionate, how scared, how cynical. What products they are buying, what complaints they have, what they love and hate about your competitors, what they wish someone would offer.

Take that information and craft your marketing to appeal to your market. Heck, you’ll probably rewire your business to take advantage of the insights you gather.

Then, turn on the AdWords tap and give it a try. Send some traffic to your landing page and see if you’re right about what people want. See if your opt-in offer is strong enough to start building relationships via follow up.

If you’ve missed the mark, pause AdWords and adjust your message. Then turn the traffic tap on again and see what happens.

Once you have a steady flow of leads, you can begin testing follow up and conversion strategies the same way.

And Now for a Completely Different Metaphor

Reading about marketing is like reading a book on tennis.

Studying your market is like taking a tennis lesson. Engaging your market by sending traffic to your site is like playing a match. That’s where actually improve your game.

If you get the traffic via SEO or social media, you’ve probably put in hundreds of hours of work to send traffic to a lead and sales funnel of unknown quality. That’s like playing your first tennis match at the French Open.

Using AdWords is like joining a local tennis league. You get all the benefit of being in the game without playing way over your head.

And since being in the game can make you sweaty, don’t forget how to shower safely.

This article by Howie was originally posted on Search Engine Watch.

Split testing is fueled by curiosity, by wonder, by knowing that you don’t know something. Some gap in your understanding of your prospects’ psychology and outlook is potentially responsible for lower than desired marketing performance. The more profound your curiosity, the more useful and powerful your tests become.

Here are two examples of profound questions (what I call “deep curiosity”) that can be operationalized in PPC split tests. There are hundreds more; I share these to jump-start your own deep curiosity about your market and their relationship to the problem you solve and the particular solution you offer.

1. What’s Their Primary Motivation?

All animals, humans included, are biologically hardwired to seek pleasure and avoid pain while expending as little energy as possible. These three motivations (pleasure, pain, efficiency) mix together to form the heart of every search, every desire, every fear, and every problem we want to solve.

For most of us most of the time, one of the three motivations predominates and defines the search for us. Let’s take three different searches related to vacation planning. Someone searching for “comfortable airplane seat” is looking to avoid pain. “Fun family Disney vacation” seekers are looking for pleasure. And “pack like a flight attendant” signals someone whose prime directive is efficiency.

But what about search terms that are less obviously motivated by one of the Big Three? How about “airplane seat guide”? Is that someone:

• Looking for a great seat with lots of leg room so they can recline and watch DVDs while sipping red wine and eating pretzels (pleasure)?
• With irritable bowel syndrome who needs to sit in the aisle close to a large bank of bathrooms (pain)?
• Who wants to sit near an exit for speed of disembarkation, or who desires priority access to the overhead bin so they don’t have to check a bag planeside (efficiency)?

If I were in charge of search advertising for SeatGuru.com or SeatExpert.com, I’d be very curious about which pitch would resonate most strongly with the most searchers. My split test might include the following three headlines:

• Better Seats Mean Better Flights
• Avoid These Seats At All Cost
• Best Seats For Business Travel

The winning ad then informs the landing page, the value proposition, and everything else about the message. If you let Google AdWords run split tests by choosing ads with the most conversions, you may end up running all three ads in a single ad group and let Google funnel the traffic to the most appropriate ad.

If your main search terms represent multiple motivational possibilities, keep the Big Three Motivation Test in your split testing arsenal.

2. What’s Their Metaphor?

Did you notice the metaphor that I used in the last paragraph? I referred to an “arsenal.”

If you already think of marketing as a form of war, then you probably didn’t even notice the word; you skated right on by it. But if you see marketing as a dance or a courtship, then the word “arsenal” probably rubbed you the wrong way. It may even have caused some readers to tune out the rest of this article.

The previous paragraph is rife with metaphor. Reading involves physical motion like “skating.” Words can physically irritate or “rub” you. Reading is auditory, not physical.

The words we use provide clues to the way we see the world and various aspects of it. We are generally unconscious of the metaphors inherent in those words, so we don’t notice when those words represent a view that clashes with the metaphors of our market.

In “Marketing Metaphoria“, Gerald Zaltman has identified seven of what he calls “deep metaphors”; universal ways of looking at the world that serve as filters and guides to people navigating various challenges. I can’t get into all seven metaphors in this article, so I’ll choose two and apply them to the “airplane seat guide” example we’ve already explored.

One of the deep metaphors is Journey. Obviously, an airplane ride can be a journey: a trip from Point A to Point B with the potential for adventure along the way. Some people like the thought of adventure on a journey. They might be the ones who pack light, laugh at contingencies, and hope for the serendipitous and unexpected.

Others who see their upcoming trip as a journey might want anything but adventure. They want a smooth flight, no delays, no inconveniences.

But Journey is only one of the seven deep metaphors. Another one is Container, meaning something with boundaries that serves to exclude and isolate and protect.

Someone viewing an airplane ride through the Container metaphor might see their seat as a protective bubble, keeping them safely apart from screaming babies, kicking toddlers, and demanding passengers. They might view their carry-on luggage through the same lens; a protective bundle of all their important possessions that must remain close at hand.

There’s a more negative slant on the Container metaphor in this case: something too restrictive and confining. A seat that’s too small, or a window seat that requires gymnastics to reach the aisle, or the entire plane as a flying coffin from which there’s no escape in case of disaster.

A couple of Journey headlines:

• A Seat To Speed Your Way
• The Right Seat Is Like a Shorter Flight

And a couple of Container headlines:

• Your Seat is Your Sanctuary
• Don’t Be a Flying Sardine
• The Most Dangerous Seat

Again, try writing ads that use words to evoke different metaphors. You can combine metaphors with motivations to capture the positive and negative takes on those metaphors.

While focus groups and in-depth studies of your target market might be beyond your budget and time frame, simple PPC split testing can provide market insights that allow you to connect deeply and powerfully with your prospects. All that’s required is a willingness to think, wonder, and ask.

This article by Howie originally appeared on Search Engine Watch.

Local small businesses rarely use Google’s AdWords program to its full potential. Want to learn three cool ways to use AdWords, even if the local business doesn’t have the world’s most robust online presence? If you help local businesses with their online marketing, these strategies will be very useful arrows in your quiver.

1. Straight-up AdWords for Traffic and Leads

First, there’s the obvious reason for setting up an AdWords account for a local client: nearly instant traffic. AdWords is now more important than SEO for local searches, since between ads, maps, and local listings (the “7-pack”), the top organic listing is often below the fold, as this screenshot below demonstrates:

A compelling ad can start generating traffic right away. Notice the uninspiring headlines in the above screenshot? “Dentist.” “General Dentistry.” Dental Care Provider.” “Find a Local Dentist.” Wow, talk about “Mad Men”. If you’re advertising a dental practice, use the headline to differentiate your ad:

• Big Benefit: Gentle Dentist for Cowards
• Social Proof/Story: “I Woke With a Toothache”
• Great Offer: Get $300 Whitening Coupon

In conjunction with a prominent Google Places listing and lots of favorable reviews, AdWords can produce a prominent presence on the search results page.

Unlike national campaigns where keyword selection is a complex job, local markets don’t require hundreds or thousands of medium- to long-tail keywords. Instead, if you geographically limit the campaign to a city or metro area, you can successfully bid on broad match short-tail words like “dentist” or “oral surgeon.”

As a bonus, Google rewards this sloppy bidding strategy by letting you know the exact search phrases that triggered your ads. You can add those keywords to you AdWords account, optimize just those phrases for organic SEO, and make sure the pages that receive this most targeted traffic contain specific, relevant, and compelling content.

2. Test Messaging For Other Media

Even if the local search volume is so low that the number of new leads is negligible, AdWords has another trick up its sleeve. By split testing different ad copy, businesses can find the best copy for their print ads, radio and TV scripts, and yellow pages listings.

It’s not unusual for one ad to perform 2-5 times better than another. Imagine leveraging that improvement across all advertising platforms – especially the ones where testing is unwieldy, expensive, or just plain impossible.

Since most offline media is of the “interruption” variety (print ads, radio and TV commercials, billboards, etc.), you can take advantage of the interruption arm of AdWords, the Display Network. Not only does the Display Network generate about 10 times the traffic of search, the clicks are also cheaper (typically half the price of clicks from search). So the Display Network is the perfect place to find the messages, offers, and calls to action in offline media.

3. Remarketing for Lead Gen and Branding

Remarketing is one of the most powerful AdWords features – and one of Google’s best kept secrets. You’ve experienced remarketing if you’ve ever seen an ad “follow” you around the web. Here’s what happened: you visited a website and Google planted a remarketing cookie on your computer. Now whenever you visit a page in the AdSense network, Google checks for cookies and often shows you ads based on sites where you’ve already demonstrated interest.

Remarketing done well can make you seem ubiquitous, like a giant billion-dollar brand, even if your ad budget is a couple of hundred bucks a month. Because you’re only ubiquitous for the very targeted and highly qualified people who have already visited your site, and didn’t convert on their initial visit.

Imagine sending your local business client a screenshot of their ad on the New York Times or Washington Post – while keeping their advertising budget under $300 per month.

Here’s a powerful local twist to remarketing: when you get an inbound call, try to take the prospect to a page on your website where you have a demo, a price list, a feature list; whatever can help educate your prospect and further the sale.

Stick the Google remarketing code on that page, so that your ads now follow the prospect around the web. Instead of being one more forgettable contender for the prospect’s business, you soon become the dominant player; the obvious choice.

This article by Howie originally appeared on Search Engine Watch.

As described in Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball”, Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane fielded the winningest team in baseball while spending half as much on player salaries as their nearest rival, the New York Yankees. Beane achieved this feat by slicing and dicing huge quantities of baseball statistics so he could find wisdom where others just heard noise.

He won games by fiercely playing the percentages: where to position the outfielders; when to bunt; when to replace the starting pitcher with a relief pitcher; and a thousand other situations. By having data at his fingertips and understanding how to interpret and act on it, he found an advantage in every encounter.

If you advertise on AdWords, you may find yourself in a similar situation to Billy Beane, facing unfair competition with much deeper pockets than yours. Luckily, AdWords and baseball are similar in that, in Lewis’s words, it “matters less how much money you have than how well you spend it.”

Campaign cloning is the AdWords equivalent of “Moneyball.” By approaching the data as granularly as possible, you’ll discover lots of opportunities to optimize your account that you simply couldn’t have seen by staring at aggregate statistics. You’ll bid more intelligently, achieve greater margins, and turn each small advantage into better ad positions and more traffic. The result: you’ll see and act on otherwise invisible opportunities.

How to Clone in 60 Seconds or Less

Before we get into a few cloning applications, let’s visit the free desktop AdWords Editor program so you can see how simple it is to clone a campaign. For this example, we’ll look at a basic slice and dice best practice: funneling search and display network traffic into separate campaigns.

Let’s take a search network campaign and clone it for the display network.

In AdWords Editor, click the campaigns tab to show all the campaigns in your account. Select the campaign you want to clone from the list, and right-click (or control- or command-click) and choose “Copy” from the contextual menu.

You’ll see two copies of the campaign.

Now it’s time to rename one of them and change the network settings. Click the name of one of the duplicated campaigns and change the name:

Click the new campaign row to bring up the properties window below the campaign list. Now it’s time to change the settings for the clone. In this case, set search network to “None” and display network to “Relevant pages across the entire network.”

Finally, post the selected changes to your account. When you next log into AdWords, you’ll see the new campaign, a complete mirror of the existing one, except that the new campaign targets the display network only, while the original campaign targets search.

The entire process should take about 30 seconds from start to finish.

Strategic Uses of Cloning

So now that you see how simply you can clone an account, let’s talk about when you want to use this powerful strategy. The first requirement is enough traffic to justify splitting your traffic into multiple campaigns. Each campaign generates its own metrics, so if your single campaign receives so little traffic you can’t declare split test winners and set accurate keyword bids, it makes no sense to divide that traffic in half.

But assuming your campaign generates sufficient traffic, or you want to expand into a new traffic stream not covered by your current campaign (moving into mobile devices, or a different country, for example), here are some cases where campaign cloning makes sense:

1. Separating Traffic by Network

Search traffic resembles the Yellow Pages: people have a current need and are looking to fill it. Display traffic, on the other hand, consists of people who were interrupted by your ad while they were doing something else. If you use the same ads and offers in both networks, at least one of them is severely under-optimized.

2. Separating Search Traffic by Match Type

Exact, phrase, and broad match keywords typically perform very differently from each other. Exact match keywords generally achieve the highest value per conversion, since you can specify exactly which searches trigger your ads. Broad match keyword, on the other hand, represent a wide variety of searches, most of which will not closely match the ad. By creating different campaigns by match type, you can easily spot trends and differences.

Here’s some typical data highlighting the difference between exact, phrase, and broad match keywords. Assuming a threshold cost/conversion of $10, if these three match types were combined in a single campaign, the entire campaign would appear to be ROI-negative (with an average cost/conversion of roughly $19). Broken out, however, you can clearly see that exact match is highly profitable, while phrase match loses a couple of dollars for each conversion, while broad match is just bleeding money.

3. Separating Display Traffic by Ad Type

Text and image ads in the display network typically perform very differently from each other, so it’s useful to watch them in separate campaigns. In this case, you don’t need to change settings in Editor. Simply clone the campaign and upload text ads to one campaign and image ads to the other.

4. Separating Traffic by Device

In Editor, you can create campaigns that target computers, tablets, and smart phones, respectively:

Research that I shared last month in Search Engine Watch shows that tablet, smartphone, and computer users behave differently when searching. Also, many websites are not optimized for smaller screens, and should not be buying smartphone traffic from Google for those sites.

5. Separating Traffic by Country or Region

U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia traffic often respond quite differently to ad text and offers. Separating this traffic (which you can do easily in Editor) allows you to optimize messaging and bidding for each country.

Within a single country, it’s often worthwhile to show different messages to different regions. For example, a national tutoring company with branches in most states might target each relevant state with an ad headline like, “[State Abbreviation] tutoring center.” Click-through rates will be much higher because of increased relevancy to the local searcher.

6. Separating Traffic by Gender

In the display network, you can tell Google to show your ads predominantly to men or women. Clone the campaign using Editor, then go into the campaign settings in the online AdWords dashboard and scroll to Demographic Bidding. Click the “Edit” button and you’ll see the following screen:

Exclude males from one campaign and females from the other. You may be surprised at the differences in search behavior that can affect the value of a click. With each gender assigned to its own campaign, you can easily set bids and write ads that are appropriate in each case, but would have been sub-optimized had both genders been lumped together.

7. Day Parting

In a previous Search Engine Watch article, I described an advanced form of day parting that combines ad scheduling with geotargeting, so that each campaign addresses a different time zone. Use Editor for geotargeting and online AdWords for ad scheduling.

Go Forth and Clone

This list of campaign cloning applications isn’t meant to be exhaustive. The complete list may be limited only by your traffic and your imagination. While it took Major League Baseball a couple of decades to see the value of nerds with laptops, your marketing department should be clamoring for AdWords management that takes advantage of the wealth of data that Google provides for free.

And campaign cloning is one of the best ways to see the obvious truths that hide in aggregated statistics yet shyly reveal themselves when you apply “Moneyball” scrutiny to your account.

This article by Howie was originally posted on Search Engine Watch.

Last week, I looked at some research from Google into where and when people are using tablet devices such as iPads. The research showed that tablets are a multi-tasking device that rarely leave the home, but are used in different ways at different times – which may change the ways and means you deliver campaigns to those devices.

Yet, this is actually true of all market behavior and all businesses have specific time periods in which they are more profitable than others. So, as promised, here is a guide to setting up dayparting on your Google AdWords campaigns.

To Everything (Even AdWords) There is a Season

My neighbors in Champagne Valley, South Africa run one of the area’s most successful tourist attractions: the Falcon Ridge Birds of Prey Center. Every day (except Monday and Friday) at 10:30am (weather permitting), Greg and Alison McBey entertain and educate dozens of visitors with their descriptions and demonstrations of the habits and flying skills of their birds of prey. I asked Alison about their decision to hold only five shows a week.

The McBeys discovered that Monday and Friday mornings couldn’t deliver profitable crowds to their shows. On Friday mornings, weekday tourists are already returning home, while weekenders haven’t yet arrived. Reverse that for Monday mornings. Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday through Thursday, on the other hand, their shows are packed.

And why 10:30am? In the summer, the sun generally burns off the morning clouds by 9am, and the thunderstorms don’t start until noon or 1pm. Out of 168 hours in a week, Falcon Ridge discovered its 5 most profitable hours – and built a successful and mostly stress-free business out of that discovery.

How About Your AdWords Account?

Chances are, your AdWords account is working too many hours for its (and your) own good. You might object that your AdWords account is a totally passive entity once you’ve set it up, and that it’s no skin off your nose if it runs 24/7. Thanks to automated processes, you get to sleep while AdWords works on your behalf.

True. I’m not arguing that your campaigns need to rest. Instead, I invite you to explore the AdWords Dimensions tab to discover if your account is hiding any negative-ROI hours of operation.

Just as Falcon Ridge realized that Monday and Friday mornings weren’t worth the effort, you may find some of your campaigns losing money on a predictable and reliable basis at certain hours of the day.

Here’s how to check:

From within your AdWords account, select a campaign and navigate to the Dimensions tab. Click the View:Time button and select Time:Hour of Day from the Drop Down Menu.

You’ll see a data table something like this one:

Hour 0 means midnight to 1am, Hour 6 means 6-7am, etc. You’ll notice that from 2-5am, this campaign has spent over $400 on clicks (almost 300 of them) and generated absolutely no conversions. That’s a pretty good indication that it should be shut off during those hours. Here’s how to do that. Go to the campaign settings page and scroll down to “Advanced Settings” and click the Schedule: Start date, end date, ad scheduling link to expand that section.

Click the ‘Edit’ link next to Ad Scheduling: Show ads all days and hours to show the scheduling chart (below).

In basic mode, as shown above, you can turn the campaign on or off during any given 15-minute time period. Clicking the “Bid Adjustment” link gives you the option to lower or raise bids, in addition to just switching the campaign off. Let’s keep it simple for now and just turn the campaign off between 2 and 5 am each day.

Click Running all day in the Monday row to bring up the following dialog box:

To turn the campaign off between 2 and 5am, change the box to look like this:

Get the second row to appear by clicking “+ Add another time period”. Then copy the Monday settings to all days, click the “OK” button, and you’re done. Your new schedule looks like this:

If you’re happy with the way it looks, click the “Save” button at the bottom left to apply your scheduling changes.

If you want your AdWords account to fly like an eagle, make sure you aren’t acting like an ostrich when it comes to the Dimension of Time of Day. Otherwise, you might fall victim to the sly fox who does pay attention to these metrics.

Advanced Time of Day Optimization

My colleague Joel McDonald takes time of day several steps further. If you’re a high-volume AdWords user, and your productivity depends on what your visitors are doing during certain hours of the day (their day, not yours), you might want to take things a step further than simply day parting (the technical term for what we just taught you to do).

Falcon Ridge has to take into account just one time zone. But if your business is national or global, it’s always 10:30am somewhere. Fortunately, AdWords gives you the tools to manage multiple time zones – if you know where to look and how to deploy them.

For example, let’s say that you know that people only search for your product during work-hours – their work hours – not yours. A savvy advertiser in the Eastern US time zone might run ads only between 8am and 9pm to accommodate all 3 time zones in the continental US.

Much better than nothing, but it’s still a bit messy: their ads are showing too early in Sacramento and too late in Providence. To solve that problem, you can use a “campaign cloning” procedure to run three identical campaigns, each one targeting a different time zone. That way, you wouldn’t be wasting a single hour of productive advertising time, no matter what your prospect’s time zone.

One of our core messages: AdWords is the best testing ground and launch pad for any business, regardless of whether it turns out to be a source of profitable traffic in the long run.

Here’s a webinar where Joel and Howie drive that concept home, using metaphors like The Second City comedy theater, the Wright brothers’ product development strategy, and dangerous vertical leap training.

Enjoy! (For easiest viewing, click the Full Screen button at the bottom right of the player.)

[flashvideo file=http://vitruvian.s3.amazonaws.com/alp-preso.flv /]

Right click to download mp4 video

Right click to download mp3 audio

Timothy Seward of ROIRevolution.com is one of the clearest thinkers in the online marketing world. His recent article in Website Magazine, Improving AdWords ROI, is a wakeup call to anyone who dismisses AdWords as a marketing channel because “it’s overpriced.”

I’ll summarize the article (which you should read) this way: “AdWords isn’t overpriced, you’re undergood.”

Timothy and I (Howie) got on the phone today and kicked around the different ways businesses can discover and address their weaknesses using AdWords. Click to listen or right-click to download the 20-minute conversation:

Timothy Seward and Howie Jacobson on Overpriced AdWords

Agree or disagree? Got a story to tell? Join the conversation by adding a comment.