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.

Google now sprinkles Google+ results into general search results, in an initiative they’ve dubbed “Google Plus Your World.” Webmasters and SEO experts have been arguing heatedly about why Google is doing this (most point to potential revenue enhancement and the possibility of world domination through the marginalization of Facebook) and what this will mean for the SEO game (treat Google+ postings and pluses as links) and how this will influence PPC (fewer bits of prime organic real estate leading to increased AdWords bidding wars for the top positions – see “potential revenue enhancement” above).

This article examines Google Search Plus Your World from a different point of view. What is driving the integration of social and search? How does it work? And what’s the impact on our perception of Google’s relevance and usefulness?

The Supremacy of Peer to Peer Search

The history of search has been the continual de-centralization of the search algorithm. The founders of Yahoo, Jerry Yang and Dave Filo, started it by creating “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” a directory of cool and useful sites. The sites that made it onto Yahoo! were chosen by Jerry and Dave, and initially users had no say in the selection or order. In other words, totally centralized control of search.

Google shifted search results prioritization through a peer-based system of voting by links. Sergei and Larry didn’t go through the web and choose the best sites for every search, nor did they hire an army of web reviewers to do it for them. Instead, they instituted the PageRank metric that essentially turns each search result into a popularity contest, with the most popular web pages having the most votes via their outbound links.

But the algorithm was still supreme, and operated independently of any insight into the searcher’s unique needs, situation, or personality. The next phase of search wasn’t via a search engine at all. Instead, it came about via Facebook and Twitter, two places where you could ask a question of your entire social network and get almost instant relevant answers from people you know and who know you.

True, the answers didn’t come back as quickly as Google’s (1,300,000 results in 0.39 seconds). But they were often much higher quality. One reason for the increased quality was trust – we expect our friends to look out for our best interests. But the other was quite simple: instead of entering “search queries” of just a few words, you could embed context and conditions into your search.

Search Queries vs. Real Questions

For example: a search for “raw food cookbook” on Google yields several amazon and Barnes & Noble listings, some product photos of book covers, and a couple of websites dedicated to raw food diets. But what we really wanted to find was, “a raw food cookbook that doesn’t require tons of new equipment like spiral vegetable slicers and dehydrators and juicers, and that uses whole foods and doesn’t rely on tons of oil and salt for flavor. And which works if I don’t eat gluten or soy.”

When I type that search into Google, I find it’s too long to be fully considered. And it gives me pages that include my search terms, even if the context of my query negates those terms (like “vegetable slicers” and the other gadgets I don’t want to buy).

But that same question posted on my Facebook wall or my Twitter feed can generate helpful responses from dozens of people who all get the full context of my question in a way that a computer (even Google’s) can’t.

And since my friends can see each other’s responses, they can iterate their answers and get even closer to my search intent. All in all, social search can be a much more efficient process than Google.

The problem with Facebook search is that it’s not archived for on-demand review. If I want to find a link or a quote that I posted last month, I have to manually scroll through my timeline. I can’t search for “Sacred Economics” or “crying bullfighter” or “Rowan Atkinson standup” to find my own posts, let alone those of my friends.

Google, on the other hand, has an answer ready for me the instant I think of a question. By incorporating my friends’ and acquaintances’ opinions and expertise into the full search experience, GPYW takes advantage of peer to peer content generation while incorporating it into the more expansive algorithmic results.

That mashup not only improves the search experience by adding personal results. It also increases searchers’ perception of the relevance and trustworthiness of the organic listings and ads by association.

Google as Playlist

In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg tells the story of a hit song that almost wasn’t. The song, “Hey Ya!,” by the hip-hop group OutKast, showed every sign of being a megahit when it was released in the summer of 2003. Record executives and DJs loved it. Fed into “hit predictor” software that compared a new song’s tempo, pitch, melody, chord progression and other factors with known hits, “Hey Ya!” scored off the charts.

Yet when radio stations started playing “Hey Ya!,” listeners hated it. According to Arbitron, 30 percent of listeners switched stations within half a minute of “Hey Ya!” Fans told the DJs that “Hey Ya!” was one of the worst songs they’d ever heard.

What had gone wrong?

It turned out that “Hey Ya!” was too different from the typical Top 40 hits of 2003. Even though it sounded “great” to music insiders, its combination of hip-hop, funk, rock, and Big Band was simply too strange to be “likeable” on first listen. According to research shared by Duhigg, our brains prefer familiarity to quality.

Even if a new Celine Dion song sounds like every other Celine Dion song I’ve ever heard (and I haven’t liked any of them), I keep listening to it on the radio because it’s what I expect to hear.

Our brains have evolved to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar sounds, and focus preferentially on the former. The habit of attention saves us from having to make decisions, and thus frees up our brain for other tasks.

Arista record executives and DJs eventually turned “Hey Ya!” into a giant hit by sandwiching it between two top hits. Not just any hits, but the stickiest kind of songs that sounded familiar the first time you heard them. Radio playlists are an exercise in risk mitigation. If you play only familiar songs, listeners get bored. If you play only new songs, listeners get annoyed. The function of the playlist is to insert new songs that already seem familiar.

One way to achieve this familiarity is to only serve up tunes that sound like other tunes. The other way, used with “Hey Ya!,” is to trick the brain into familiarity by connecting the unfamiliar with the familiar.

GPYW: Playlist Risk Mitigation

The Google search results page is nothing more or less than a playlist: the “Top Hits” for each search query. One of the ways you can tell Google is working is that it shows you new stuff. Stuff you won’t find otherwise. But total novelty, as we’ve seen with “Hey Ya!,” can be off-putting.

If I search for “how to train for a marathon,” for example, I expect to see references to running experts I already know and trust: Phil Maffetone, Danny Dreyer, etc. When I don’t find them, I get worried about the entire results page. Can the resources listed by Google be trusted? Will I overtrain? Get injured? Experience nipple chafing, or worse?

The addition of personal results to the search results page reassures me about the quality of the entire page. Seeing blog posts and shares by people I already know and trust puts the new, unfamiliar listings (especially the things Google really wants me to click, the paid listings) into a comfortable context. Responding to the Facebook challenge, GPYW has stepped up the integration and customization of the Web to blur the boundaries between the known and the new.

PPC advertisers face two common problems when they try to tackle split testing: no ideas, or too many ideas.

If you have no ideas about what to split test, that’s a sure sign that you’ve been spending too much time in your AdWords account. Log out, browse a magazine rack, check out your competitor’s websites, watch a movie, or get some exercise. Shake off the mental cobwebs and look for serendipity and inspiration.

If you have too many ideas, however, you can be too overwhelmed to run any tests. Or you may discover yourself testing an ad that you already tried eight months ago, and forgot about. Or you may run 16 ads simultaneously and grow old waiting for insight.

What you need when you have too many choices is a system for filtering and prioritizing those choices. I respectfully submit my “Who, What, Why, How” testing plan for your enjoyment and edification.

Testing Is About Wondering

If you hated high school science class, you may not like the whole idea of testing. So let’s try a quick reframe: testing is just wondering about stuff and figuring out ways to get answers.

My friend and mentor Perry Marshall remarked once that almost all marketing problems are symptoms of not knowing something. If your AdWords ads are not attracting enough visitors to your website, that’s because you don’t understand something important about who your prospects are, what they want, why they want it, how they want it, or more generally, how many or how few of them are there in the first place.

If your ads attract lots of visitors but few leads and sales, that indicates you’re either targeting the wrong searchers with your keyword/ad combinations, or you’re somehow turning them off on your website.

The healthy response to either of those problems (and hundreds like them) is, “I wonder what I don’t know here.” Split testing is simply a way to subject your best guesses to a rigorous market reality check.

Start Broad, Get Narrow

Once you let yourself off the hook and simply see yourself as a bumbling, curious Columbo-like marketer, you’ll probably be able to generate lots of split test ideas.

Now all you need is a testing framework to answer the biggest questions first, and then drill down into the minutiae.

Without a framework, you’re likely to spend a lot of time testing things like “comma vs semicolon” or “half price vs 50 percent off.” Sure, those are important distinctions, but not relevant until you’ve established the big picture. That big picture starts with the question, “Who is my prospect?”

Who?

Who includes two dimensions, global and situational. Global who possibilities encompass demographics (age, sex, location, job, income bracket, education level, etc.) and psychographics (values, lifestyles, attitudes, and interests).

For example, if you sell motorcycle riding gear, you could be catering to many different groups: 43-year-old suburban male accountants who ride Harleys on weekends, 20-year-old rural high school graduate who can’t afford to gas up the pickup truck, or a 36-year-old urban female bike messenger, among others.

The situational who dimension relates to the search at hand. Someone searching for [motorcycle pants] might be getting their first motorcycle and have no idea what type of fit or material is right for them. They might be a seasoned street rider looking to take up moto-cross. They might be the bike owner or the passenger.

Your first testing step is to write ads to appeal to each different potential market segment you want to attract and service. “Look good on your HOG” and “Extreme Motocross Leg Protection” will attract one group and repel all the rest. When you run these ads simultaneously you can compare the size and buying passion of different potential customer groups and focus on your most profitable market.

What?

Once you’ve identified a who, you start wondering what they want. Let’s take Harley owners. Are they looking for denim or leather? Harley-branded MotorClothes® merchandise or some other brand, or no brand in particular? Full-on pants, or just chaps over their jeans?

If you started with what by just assuming the who, you wouldn’t know if your what categories were relevant. Once you determine a who, the what choices may become obvious.

You can test the what by making different offers: chaps vs. pants, denim vs. leather vs. heavy-duty polyester vs. all of the above.

Why?

Let’s say your Harley riders don’t need to pay a premium for Harley-branded clothing, but still want to look like Harley riders. What’s their motivation? Do they want to prevent bruises, cuts, and injuries? Or to feel more comfortable in the seat, either through more padding, softer material, more breathability, or more warmth? Do they want to look tough, or sexy, or accomplished, or rebellious and a tad dangerous?

You can elicit the why through your choice of words and personality, or “voice,” of your ad. Harley owners react emotionally to the sound, smell, and look of their machines. You can write text to evoke the roar of the engine, the looks they get from “civilians,” or the swagger they feel when they fit in perfectly with their HOG pals.

How?

Finally, we get to the how level, the arena of details. Do they want multiple colors, or just black? Overnight shipping or free shipping? Do they want to buy from a shop with 2,000 items in stock, or a boutique motorcycle apparel website that stocks just 15 top-of-the-line items? Do they want a big discount, or a full-price experience with great customer service and personalized help?

Testing your how possibilities is easy in AdWords – in fact, that’s where most split tests begin and end. But in order to have the most impact, save your how tests for the end of the testing cycle.

Summary

If you’re old enough to have owned an analog radio, you might remember the two dials of the FM tuner: the main tuner, with a heavy weighted knob attached to a flywheel; and the lighter bandspread tuner, used for fine tuning. Your AdWords split tests consist of four tuners, the who, what, why, and how knobs. Start with the weightiest question of who, and then successively fine tune your market knowledge with ever more precise degrees of tuning.

The Central Drakensberg region of South Africa is a popular tourist destination. Falcon Ridge Birds of Prey Centre is one of the most successful attractions in the area. They don’t have a website and don’t buy online advertising of any kind. Yet every Saturday and Sunday, their bird shows are packed with tourists. How do they do it?

Every Friday afternoon a Falcon Ridge staff member stands in the middle of the R103 and R600 junction, handing out flyers to cars as they slowed to make the turn.

Context: Every hotel, B&B, campsite, and self-catering cottage in the area is on the R600, south of the 103 junction. Meaning, every carload of tourists drives through that intersection on their way in. Yet of all the area attractions, only Falcon Ridge spends the money to put a flyer-man on the road for six hours.

The other attractions print flyers, of course. They display them on the wall of the Central Drakensberg Welcome Centre, located 30 meters in from the junction. Dozens and dozens of them, all screaming for attention amid a clutter of competition. Can you see how a flyer handed through the car window works much better than another brochure on the wall?

Falcon Ridge’s flyer strategy contains four foundational secrets to effective advertising.

1. Advertise Where Your Prospects are

Falcon Ridge strategically places the ad at the point where all their prospects must pass.

This seems too obvious to mention; yet many businesses advertise where the ad reps tell them to, or where it’s easy to place an ad, or where they can get a lot of vanity exposure. Make sure you build your ad campaigns in response to prospect behavior, not media convenience.

In search marketing, this is pretty easy. Choose the right keywords and by definition you’ve found your prospects.

Many keywords that seem to represent buyers may not; think about the difference between informational and transactional keywords: “I’m looking for info so I can solve this myself” vs. “I’m looking for just enough info to buy wisely.” Select keywords to target your ideal customer, the one who already agrees with your main value proposition.

2. Advertise When Your Prospects are Receptive to Your Offer

Falcon Ridge doesn’t spend money on flyer distribution on Sundays, when all the tourists are heading home. Figure out when your prospects are hungriest, and catch them then.

This also may seem obvious, but do you still get coupons on the back of your grocery store receipt offering a different brand of the thing you just bought? Can’t think of worse timing to make an offer like that.

In search marketing, timing relates to prospect readiness. Pay attention to the “readiness continuum” that goes from “I just starting thinking about this” to “When can you deliver?” Ben Hunt, in his wonderful book “Convert!“, shares his ladder of awareness, which I’m pretty sure he’d let me reproduce here:

Place each of your top keywords on a rung on the ladder of awareness. Then make sure that your ad and landing page matches that level.

If your prospect is only just aware of a problem (“migraine pain”), and not familiar with potential solutions, don’t go on about how your solution is superior to the rest. If they searched for your brand name, take them straight to a “buy now” page. And so on…

3. Match Your Offer to Your Prospect’s Immediate Desire

The crossroads is a perfect place for Falcon Ridge’s message: “Come with your family and spend 90 exciting minutes with us.” The bird show is a low-commitment event, in terms of time, preparation, and cost. You don’t need to make a reservation. You don’t need to spend all day. And a family of four can get in for under $20.

That makes it a great attraction for parents who have been dealing with fiddly kids in the back seat for the past 5 hours. “Here, look, we’ll do this tomorrow; now stop fighting.”

In the AdWords display network, prospects aren’t actively searching for what you’ve got. Your ad must connect your product or service with a latent need or desire and raise the priority of that need or desire to “I gotta do something about this right away.”

4. Focus on ROI, Not Cost

Falcon Ridge could save money by limiting their flyers to the racks at the Welcome Centre. But by choosing to stand out in a premium location, they get the benefit of a much higher return on investment (ROI).

We see this with our Google AdWords clients who pay a premium for the top-rank ad locations (the ones above the organic search results, as opposed to the right column on the search results page). The difference in response is often astounding, as in the screen shot below.

Within the very same campaign, the ads that appeared in the premium real estate were eight and a half times more attractive than the very same ads on the right side (2.49 percent click through rate vs 0.29 percent). Yes, they cost more per click ($7.67 vs $5.69), but they generated 22 conversions, compared to none for the side column ads.

This doesn’t mean you should always pay a premium for the most visible ad space; that’s your sales rep’s job. Rather, you should experiment. Make investments that your competition is unwilling to make, then measure the results.

Falcon Ridge could easily measure the impact of the crossroads advertising by marking each of those flyers, and including a coupon for free packet of chips on every flyer. Four Friday’s worth of data would clearly show the number of customers that each medium delivered.

Creativity Sometimes Trumps Cost

One way to get a premium listing is to pay for it. You may be the only local sewing machine store in your town to advertise on the Super Bowl, but that may not be a good use of funds. You can rent the biggest billboard, buy air time on the most popular morning talk show, and sponsor the biggest booth at the trade show; but that doesn’t mean you’re going to stand out and get noticed.

Falcon Ridge didn’t just advertise bigger and wider than their competition. They asked the question, “How can we do something nobody else is doing?” and hit upon a winning strategy.

As you plan your next AdWords campaign, be willing to spend for results, but start by spending your creative energy first. How can you get the right message to the right people at the right time in a way that sets you apart from your competition?

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.

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.

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.

A recent YouTube/Ipsos study explored the interaction between traditional TV advertising and YouTube pre-roll ads. 2400 study participants were placed in 3 groups: TV only, YouTube only, and TV plus YouTube. The TV plus YouTube group showed twice the brand recall of the TV-only group for 15 second ads, and one and a half times the brand recall for 30 second ads.

In the YouTube-only vs TV-only competition, YouTube trounced TV for 15 second ads, while they ran neck and neck for 30 second spots.

Why does cross-channel advertising work better for brand recall than single-channel? Research suggests several mechanisms. I want to talk about four of them:

1. Eraser events
2. Implicit and explicit memory
3. Pattern recognition
4. Ubiquity as a form of social proof

Eraser Events and Implicit Memory

“Walking through doorways causes forgetting” is a central finding in the research of Notre Dame professor Gabriel Radvansky. He found that the act of walking from one room to another can cause us to forget about decisions we made in the first room, such as getting a sweater. So we can wander into a new room and then have no clue what we were going go to do once we got there. Passage through a doorway acts, according to Radvansky, as an “eraser event” that the mind uses to compartmentalize information.

I’ve experienced a version of this when I don’t recognize a member of my Ultimate Frisbee team when I encounter them at Trader Joe’s. At the field I know his name, where he works, which knee he favors, and a bunch of other important facts. In the dried fruit aisle, he’s simply vaguely familiar. Maybe, I think, I just saw him in the frozen foods aisle. Or maybe he works here.

While this is not news to those of us who routinely forget what we were going to do in the living room once we left the kitchen, it has implications for the recall of advertising as well. An ad that we see on the TV in our den gets compartmentalized. Our brain, always trying to converse resources and clear things out of consciousness (RAM), has no need to remember that the car ad we just saw was for Volvo, and that it was for the 4-door sedan.

Multi-screen advertising addresses the doorway problem by reminding us of what we’ve forgotten. When we see an ad on TV and file it away, the same ad on YouTube before our video snack of epic skiing disasters resurrects our memory.

Memory researchers have found that studying for a test is most effective when we study in several different settings. Advertising appears to increase its effectiveness when it reaches us via multiple screens and in multiple settings.

Implicit and Explicit Memory

When we “forget” something, what does that really mean? We don’t delete the information permanently; rather, we do something more like “archiving.” The information is still “in there somewhere,” even though we can’t access it at will.

Chan Yun Yoo, assistant professor at U of Kentucky, makes sense of this phenomenon by distinguishing between explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is stuff we can recall at will: our favorite sports team, the Big Mac jingle, our anniversary (hopefully). Implicit memory is the stuff that lies dormant in the recesses of our minds, requiring a trigger for recall.

If that trigger occurs at point of sale, advertisers are ecstatic: “Hey, look, it’s Hurts Like Hell aftershave. I remember seeing an ad for it where a marine and a professional wrestler are rolling around on the ground in agony after applying a dab to their cheeks. I think I’ll try a bottle.”

Some products don’t appear at point of sale. You’re not likely to impulse buy a Volvo, for example. A brand like that wants to put its value proposition (Safety, or as Dudley Moore put it in Crazy People, “Boxy but good”) into your explicit, recall-at-will memory.

Multi-channel advertising, combined with repetition, does this by enlisting one of the most persistent habits of the human mind: pattern recognition.

Pattern Recognition

According to Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, the human brain operates by pattern recognition. The ability to see patterns has been crucial to human survival, enhancing our ability to hunt and forage, avoid dangerous predators, and choose healthy mates. When we see a pattern, our brain rewards us with a hit of dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasurable feelings.

We get this rush of pleasure when we connect something in the present with a similar something in the past. When I finally recognize the vaguely familiar Trader Joe’s shopper as my Frisbee teammate, I get a powerful hit of “the penny drops.” I may even blurt out something stupid, like, “Oh, you’re Ethan!”

The same thing may be happening when we see a familiar ad on a new medium. “Hey, it’s Hurts So Good. I remember this from my living room.” The pattern recognition circuitry rewards us more profoundly when we have to make a bit of a leap. I don’t get a mental high every time I wake up and go, “Oh wow, that lady sleeping next to me is awfully familiar. Now I remember; that’s my wife!” The leap from TV to computer may be enough to reward us with a hit of the pattern recognition good stuff.

Ubiquity as Social Proof

The fourth mechanism by which multi-channel advertising seems to work is by making the brand seem like it’s “everywhere.” Our AdWords clients who use remarketing (ads that follows their website visitors around the web) benefit from the perception of ubiquity: “Wow, these guys are everywhere. They must be huge.”

“As Seen On TV” has been used for years as a credibility booster. Now, with so much of our attention directed toward second and third and fourth screens (computers, smartphones, and tablets), the new mantra is starting to become “As Seen Everywhere.”

A Strategic Approach to YouTube/TV Synergy

If you’ve got enough bucks for a television campaign, how should you think about incorporating YouTube into the mix? Initially, use it as an extremely inexpensive and flexible testing medium. Find what works best on YouTube and then leverage the results to costly offline media.

To do this, you need to have something to measure, and neither “brand awareness” and “implicit memory” qualify. Include a soft and inviting call to action in the YouTube ad: click for a coupon, like a Facebook page in exchange for exclusive offers, or simply click to learn more. When the offer is brand-related, as opposed to a contest or sweepstakes that appeals to non-prospects as well as prospects, the level of viewer engagement can serve as a proxy for the effectiveness of the messaging.

Once you have an engaging message, you can unleash that message on TV minus the direct-response elements. Instead of making YouTube an afterthought, use it as the foundation as you develop and refine your messaging.

And you should probably get started before you leave this room‚ lest you forget.

My Fling with Macrobiotics

In 1991 I was flirting with a macrobiotic lifestyle. I was attracted to the strictness of the diet, the sense of fixed rules, and the “magic” of the rituals that promised cures from all known diseases and joyful longevity. I read a bunch of books and cookbooks, but so many of the ingredients were unknown to me (umeboshi paste, burdock root, daikon radish) that I found myself tied in knots. There was just too much to take in, and I found myself repeatedly looking up little things like, “When rinsing brown rice, should I stir the water clockwise or counter-clockwise?” So I invited a friend, Nancy, who happened to be a macrobiotic chef, to come over and give me a lesson in simple macrobiotic fundamentals.

Nancy’s Macrobiotic Lesson

The first dish we prepared together was steamed brown rice. Nancy started by pouring rice into a pot, then filling it halfway with water and using her hand to rinse and wash the rice. She was silent as she did this, focusing on the water, the rice, and the pot.

I interrupted her: “I can never remember which way to stir the rice. Clockwise or counter-clockwise?”

She stopped stirring, looked up at me, and smiled. “The thing to remember is that you stir with the intent to clean the rice.”

Have the Intent to Clean the Rice

I thought about that story this morning, when I received an article about using copywriting “power words.” It was a fine article, featuring 20 words that can help boost website conversion. Words like “you” and “can” and “get” and “love” and “results,” definitely helpful stuff for anyone who wants to improve the performance of their website.

But technique, no matter how powerful, isn’t enough, and isn’t fundamental to making sales. I would argue that the more important element of your sales copy is your intent — not your intent to make the sale, but your intent to serve your prospect. If you truly believe that you have a product or service that can help them, and that you would be failing them not to bring it to their consciousness in a vivid and powerful way, then your copy will be effective. At that point, implementing copywriting techniques designed to facilitate trust and connection and desire all make sense. But without the intent, the words fall flat. They become lifeless technique, and your website looks and sounds like thousands of others whose owners have read the same copywriting memos and listened to the same online marketing gurus.

Cars and Bridges

I once took a storytelling workshop with Amina Shah, then-chair of the London College of Storytellers, and author of several books of folk tales. Most of the participants were struggling to memorize their stories, until Shah explained that memorization isn’t necessary:

Do you have to memorize stories that happened to you? Of course not; you just tell them. If you want to be a good storyteller, then every story you tell must have happened, and you must have been there to see it. If you can see it in your mind, you can tell it in an engaging way to others. Don’t worry about the words. The words are just a bridge between your head and your audience. The meaning of the story, that’s the cars traveling across the bridge. The bridge must be sturdy, but without the cars, the essence of the story, nothing gets transferred, and no one is moved.

Copywriting

So by all means learn to be a skilled bridge builder. Practice writing words, sentences, paragraphs, and articles that cohere, that move, that convert. Spend time on the words, for they are a necessary bridge. But never forget that the words are there just to convey your intent. A heart intent on sustainable and joyful service will always find the right words.

The title of this article comes from Mahan Khalsa’s most excellent book on consultative selling, Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play.