Winning Results with Google AdWords_7

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192 Winning Results with Google AdWords because it seems Tony lends his name to skateboards for sale. That means Google’s Quality Score algorithm is more likely to see that name as relevant to a skateboard products page, especially one that includes Tony Hawk products. Some other famous skateboarder’s name might not be as relevant and thus might incur a lower Quality Score. It’s worth testing. What about inductive logic? If an ad for sporting equipment on phrases relating to a sports figure’s name performs well for you, and you don’t fully understand why, back up and try to figure out why. That will give you a new theory that you can use to generate new potential correlations. For example, if you successfully sold a book on skateboard techniques to people typing Tony Hawk into Google, you suddenly have about 100 more names you might try adding to your campaign—assuming you’re more resourceful than I am when it comes to generating the names of a hundred famous skateboarders. A potentially clever technique is to target affinity-indicating phrases that don’t attract many sellers of products. For example, pick a historical event that might be a common search phrase for people who also just happen to share the demographic characteristics that fit your offer, and bid on this phrase. How many are bidding on Louisiana purchase, Gettysburg Address, or Battle of Versailles? Changing Environment for Keyword Experimentation Well, hang on a second. Whereas back in previous versions of AdWords, it was feasible to cross over from the commercial realm to the informational realm—in other words, attempt to spark interest in your product or service among people who are searching for things like Gettysburg Address—in the present incarnation, AdWords is geared to allow fewer ads to show up in such situations. While the overarching challenge remains CTR, the fact that “other relevancy factors” are part of the Quality Score algorithm means that we’re seeing a lot of white space in the designated ad area on noncommercial queries these days. In essence, Google is trying to tailor search results pages to user needs and expectations. This deepens the expectation that users will respond favorably to ads on commercial queries, so in some sense that helps advertisers. But it means that the notion of endless keyword inventory, there for the taking, is dying slowly as Google applies lower Quality Scores to keywords that don’t seem to match up with the product being sold in a context of commercial intent. That’s another way of saying they’ve raised prices on experiments we used to run in the hopes of paying 5–10 cents per click. (Cue sad-face emoticon!) Still, advertiser laziness isn’t completely a thing of the past, and many niche terms in the commercial realm are undervalued. Focused terms like Louisiana travel attract fewer advertisers than you might think, given the pool of thousands of advertisers who could stand to benefit from placing ads on this term. The Long Tail Is about Users Being Unruly Search frequency distribution graphs show that a lot of terms get searched only once or twice in a given year. What’s most interesting is the percentage of searches that have only been performed once, ever. Search engines regularly report that their entire historical search database shows 20–25% of search phrases having been searched only a single time. CHAPTER 7: FIGURE 7-4 Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features The “torso” of the Long Tail graph is the part in the middle. These are niche, semipopular terms that will often be your campaign’s bread and butter. What does this tell you about users? They’re unpredictable. They want a lot of different information. Micro-niches are likely to thrive in terms of user response. Knowing that there is a Long Tail of infrequently searched terms (I discuss the concept of the Long Tail a bit later in this chapter) is not the same as having a good strategy for tapping into the few relevant ones that will impact your business. The reality is, you can no longer jam hundreds of thousands of phrases into your account (using some kind of mass keyword mining tool, for example, to generate endless lists) hoping that some will get a response. Either Google will simply forbid it above a certain threshold or you’ll run into Quality Score issues unless most of the keywords are highly relevant. So while you’ll want to research infrequently searched keywords to a point, don’t expect to go all the way down the Long Tail, discovering every potential phrase. The middle of the search frequency graph is where a lot of the potential customers lie. This is sometimes called the “torso.” (See Figure 7-4.) Advertisers should be as exhaustive as possible in discovering relatively obvious, semifrequently searched terms, rather than spending countless hours searching out the most infrequently searched terms at the skinniest part of the tail. Benefits of Being the Only Advertiser on a Phrase In Figures 7-5 and 7-6 you can see two examples of search engine results pages that have only a single advertiser. The most obvious benefit to this is cost: if you’re the only advertiser on the screen for a given term, you’ll have less competition. Of course, due to the magic of Quality 193 194 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 7-5 An Israeli manufacturer takes advantage of the lack of advertisers on a misspelled term. FIGURE 7-6 Clever advertiser Gurneys advertised on the botanical term verbena tenuisecta. It would be much harder to gain high placement in organic results. CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features Scores, you won’t necessarily pay the minimum of 1 cent, but in general, you should find some bargains. The more of these phrases you have in your account, provided they’re relevant, the better your economics will look. The best way to have more phrases that no one else can successfully advertise on is to engineer your business so it does something unique. Companies that try to drive traffic to an existing stale product lineup by interrupting people are going to have a tougher challenge on their hands than companies whose marketing is “in sync” with an evolving, responsive lineup of products and services. The second benefit of being the sole advertiser may be branding and positioning. Be the Purple Cow! For many businesses it’s not particularly desirable to have to prove that you’re the best at something. The key to strong margins and customer loyalty is to have customers think that you’re the only viable solution to their problem at a given time. When Ray Allen and I first discussed the idea of advertising on the Latin names for wildflowers, no one else was doing it. Ray has no doubt gained hundreds of new customers by showing up—in both the free search index and in Google AdWords listings—on botanical search terms that none of his competitors thought to highlight. The fact that many advertisers keep their campaigns turned off when their products are out of season might play into the hands of the advertiser Gurneys, who is showing up for a botanical term in Figure 7-6. Being the only advertiser there, a click would likely only cost a few pennies. Hardly a calamity even if some products are out of season. Of course, it’s getting harder to find that niche. If there is anyone at all out there doing what you do, chances are they’re going to stumble on AdWords eventually, especially for the core terms relating to that business. Type “pet urn” into Google and you’ll see not one, not two, but several ads for pet cremation urns.1 One of the big challenges for online advertisers, especially with the advent of comparison shopping services such as Shopping.com and Froogle, is to guard against declining profit margins that result from exploding consumer access to goods and comparative information about those goods. Some consumers will compare on price alone. Others may run you ragged with questions about your products and services before they buy. One way to fend off this pressure on profit margins is to build a trusted brand by making sure you’re showing up in many different places online (paying for traffic in a variety of areas), building a word-of-mouth reputation, and doing things that no other company does. But another great way to get around the comparison shopping problem is to be smart enough to be the only advertiser to bother to show up on a given search term. Keyword Brainstorming: It’s about Them Keyword selection is pretty much synonymous with targeting. Let’s start a conversation with potential customers who are interested in what we have to say. And let’s not waste money and precious user attention bothering everyone else. AdWords offers a certain amount of flexibility to push that envelope, but you can’t completely violate the rules of relevance and common sense. 195 196 Winning Results with Google AdWords With broad keywords and broad matches, you’re often targeting, well, broadly. But as you build a longer list of unusual phrases, you’ll find that you’re micro-targeting your ads to some very specific types of customers. You have the opportunity to get “in the face” of only a small subset of people. Therefore, one of the best investments of your time may be in brainstorming to come up with very targeted keywords and phrases. Solve Your Target Market’s Problems Certainly, the best prospective customers are generally typing a search query that actually describes your product or service, but other searchers (and this doesn’t mean they aren’t potential customers) may be typing something related to the problem your product could solve for them. Let’s think about problems for a second. There are many kinds of problems: broken windows, broken promises, broken relationships, broken laws, broken homes, broken legs, broken software, broken hardware, broken banks. And there are thousands upon thousands of businesses dedicated to patching up, fixing, solving, healing, or masking such problems—or just consoling or distracting people who suffer from them. People using search engines won’t always type in words related to your solution, patch, consolation, or distraction, but they may have all kinds of ways of describing different aspects of their dilemma. Most will be searching for information and will not be in a buying mood. But if 2% click on your ad, you only pay for those clicks. From there, 2%, 5%, or 10% may buy. It’s a numbers game. Someone selling allergy medication might want to include irritated nasal passage and a host of other symptoms of someone suffering from airborne allergies, for example. (In spite of the fact that I used this example in the first edition of this book, at this time there are only seven advertisers in the United States showing up for this term, whereas there are 74,600 pages in the Google index that contain all of those words, and 136 that show that exact phrase.) If your prospective markets exhibit many symptoms that would predispose them to your solution, which is designed to get to the root of the problem, then you may be able to distract them (ever so slightly) from the information they thought they wanted. After all, people don’t always know what they’re looking for. People who believe that online search needs to be reinvented as some kind of product catalog, where people go in and drill down to the exact thing they need, must not have much imagination, either about what shopping is really like or about what it means to do online research. If this dynamic applies to your business, spend a half-hour generating a long list of symptoms— be these caused by computer operating system problems, financial problems, health problems, or whatever—and think about how you might use them as keywords in your AdWords account. A computer crash could be caused by a virus. It wouldn’t hurt, in this case, to try showing your ad for a personal firewall technology to people typing in very specific phrases related to computer errors and crashes they might be facing. It’s nitty-gritty work, though. After you get past the obvious—computer crash, computer infected, windows problems—you’ll have to dig deeper to come up with a more extensive vocabulary. The benefit of stopping your discovery process early is that it saves work and you’ll probably be focusing on the most obvious words, words that are nicely targeted and have the best chance of creating a sale. Those of you who continue to add new groups CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features of experimental words, though, will discover less expensive words. Some of these will always be less expensive because they’re so offbeat and won’t attract crowds. Have you noticed that this type of keyword research is actually a bit of user-profiling research that requires empathy and reason at your end? Keyword research tools will only take you so far; they’ll help point you to similar phrases that are popular with searchers. But you can discover more useful ones on your own. It’s not the specific example that matters here; it’s the process. Once you’ve identified your target audience, the game becomes a strategic brainstorming exercise of imagining their online search behavior. You’ll be asking yourself a slightly different question than a traditional media buyer might ask—“what magazines do potential buyers of our skateboards read?”—but then again, it’s not so far off. What you’re essentially doing with a keyword discovery process is buying exposure to a very specific target audience. Because there’s never been anything quite like this in the history of advertising, you have to throw a lot of your traditional assumptions out the window. Unless you’ve been dealing with search engine marketing as a full-time job, you’re bound to be lulled into making the classic rookie mistake—the same mistake most of us made when we thought we were optimizing our sites for “free” search engine traffic: focusing on a limited range of keywords, obsessing about them, and trying to put all of our efforts into attracting users who search for them. While it’s true that the most popular search queries are indeed valuable commodities to the advertiser, it would be foolish not to continue searching for the incremental revenue that might be generated with further testing of unusual or highly specific keyword ideas. Do this as long as it makes sense, but then, it’s OK to stop. The incremental value of endless keyword research may be slim. In some industries, especially highly technical or B2B markets, mental blocks get in the way of keyword research. After observing how dozens of client accounts went from being trapped in impossible bidding wars to being consistently profitable, I asked myself what the problem was with the first approach they had typically taken to keyword selection. The problem was often this: they were getting caught up in insider phrases and insider thinking. Insider thinking is endemic to corporate life, it seems, even if you’re a small startup. Hold a meeting, even if only two people are present, and suddenly it’s about “we this” and “we that.” But what about them—the potential customers? Let’s face it. Every person that might be predisposed to buy the services of a disaster recovery firm might not type the phrase disaster recovery firm. There is some art and some science to determining what such a person might indeed type in. If it’s not disaster recovery firm, then what? Should we just load in words like disaster, hurricane, and flood and hope for the best? Of course not—too general. Millions of people use Google to search for information about disasters and hurricanes. A tiny few would want the services of a certain type of consulting firm, and Google won’t show your ad if only a miniscule percentage of users click it. Typing just about any query is good enough to show corporate arrogance in action. When I type disaster recovery, for example, in the advertising area on Google there is a range of IT firms screaming at me about “data disaster recovery.” Indeed, for their own convenience, many appear to have talked themselves into believing that there is only one kind of disaster that can occur in the world—data loss disasters. Beam me up, Scotty. . . please. 197 198 Winning Results with Google AdWords We don’t know, and probably won’t soon know, all that much about user intention and how it breaks down among people typing ambiguous queries into search engines. But in determining what keywords to target and the likely response, it’s probably worth taking a deep breath and trying to understand at a commonsense level what a user might be looking for when typing a term like disaster recovery. Let’s say the searcher is a manager who is going to be charged with developing a disaster recovery plan for her company using a mix of in-house and outsourced expertise. She’s in the preliminary research stage before having a meeting to determine the terms of reference. She wants some reading material on the main issues about disaster recovery and will also be looking around for some experts she can talk to who might be able to point her towards companies that might be helpful in an advising capacity. The first thing this user comes across, listed first in Google’s main index results, is something called Disaster Recovery Journal. She subscribes immediately, becoming the 60,001st subscriber. She then goes to lunch. Luckily, you, as an advertiser, have also been reading this publication. Already, this gives you an extensive lexicon of terms that may be of interest to your target market! Hundreds, when all is said and done. Sometimes, your target reader will want to learn more about one of these subtopics and will head to, you guessed it, Google, and type in that term. If you’re lucky (and yes, a certain amount of luck is surely involved), your ad, targeted to one of those nittygritty little industry phrases, actually appeals to her more than any of the other listings she sees on the page. If you’re good at converting website visitors to leads, and leads to sales—and yes, that process can take anything from a few seconds to a year, and is a numbers game like anything else—then it will be mission accomplished. As obvious keywords become prohibitively expensive, more and more guerrilla advertisers will need to understand how to find customers through the back door by targeting secondary terms intelligently. One of the things you immediately notice from studying the disaster recovery industry and its jargon is that there is quite a bit of talk about “business continuity” in the same breath as “disaster recovery” planning. So advertising on the phrase business continuity becomes a no-brainer, or at least you’d think it would. It gets better, though. If your tracking is set up right, over time you’ll be able to determine the return on investment of that part of your Google AdWords campaign that focuses on disaster recovery and related keywords, and the part that focuses on business continuity and variations of that term. You don’t need to know this in advance. You simply go ahead and set it up as an experiment and let the market tell you what works best. Then you’ll be able to tell people (those you trust) strange stories at cocktail parties: “We generate more disaster recovery white paper downloads on the disaster recovery words, so at first we thought it was the higher-performing keyword area, but as it turned out, the ROI on business continuity words turned out to be much higher, because web exposure in this area helped us initiate several relationships with Fortune 500 clients! We know because we track things using this cool software...” Just be prepared for the victim of your minute analysis to make an excuse and head for the veggie dip. The life of an AdWords junkie can be lonely. That’s not a bad example, actually. Two years after using this example in this book (2005 edition), my firm finally bagged a client in the disaster recovery industry (we didn’t have one at the time). Because I made competitor bid prices (in 2004–2005, I checked those out on the CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features Overture bid tool) public then, it won’t violate client confidentiality to tell you that you’ll pay upwards of $14.00 for a click on the phrase business continuity. But, of course, many other words are less expensive; it’s a matter of patiently testing to see if any of the alternatives converts to leads. You never know who’s typing what, and you never want to base your keyword selection or your bidding strategy on gut feel or limited data, especially in B2B. When you’re in a business that might generate only one or two really large contracts a year while generating a steady stream of smaller service contracts and software sales, a “rational” look at the payback on certain keywords, especially if it were over a short time frame, might lead you to wildly underestimate their value—at least until that big client inks a deal, at which point you might reevaluate your suppositions about what a certain phrase is worth to your business. In any case, there often seems to be a subtle difference between advertising on terms that represent the kind of jargon and problems that might be fodder for your target market’s search queries, and the preoccupations of the people who happen to work at your company or sit on its board of directors. Think about your market. Customers don’t hold the same sacred views of your industry as you do—they’re searching in an area that is new to them, after all. They are in a process of discovery. If you intercept some of them early in that process, you have a much better chance of being seen as uniquely able to fulfill their needs. As branding consultant Rob Frankel wrote in an article entitled “Why Ads Are So Stupid” (www.robfrankel.com/dumbads.html): The fact is that the dynamics of advertising are different for everyone, at every level, in every business. Even looking across the street at your local competitor can be dangerous. I can’t tell you the number of clients who tell me they run radio spots here or banner ads there because that’s what their competition does. Oh yeah? Well what made the competition such media mavens? How do you know that they didn’t follow someone else’s misguided notions? Do they have more or less to spend than you do? Keyword Variations: Plurals, Verb Forms, and Misspellings When it comes to selling ads on keyword variations that might be considered trivial, such as plural forms, the industry is at a crossroads. The instinct of many large media buyers is that bidding separately on ski boot and ski boots, for example, is too complicated. But experienced advertisers know that no two situations are the same. While plural and singular forms might connote a similar meaning on one keyword, in another keyword area the differences in meaning from an advertiser’s standpoint might be substantial. Moreover, many experienced advertisers have data that show one form of a word makes them money, whereas another form does not. What exactly is the reason that pearl earrings seems to be a more commercially viable term than pearl earring? I don’t know for sure, but can speculate that the first person is more likely to be a shopper, and the second person might, at least some of the time, be looking for a photo, the name of a band, or who knows what. In most garden-variety retail search situations, plurals convert better and are, consequently, worth bidding higher on. 199 200 Winning Results with Google AdWords None of this would matter so much if the advertising weren’t based on an auction system, or if Google didn’t create such strict rules around things like CTR. But the fact is, once you get used to the idea that you can bid less on a form of a word that converts poorly to sales, it can be tough to give up that control. Also, if Google wants advertisers to be relevant and enforces rules to that effect, it might be hypocritical if they began selling keywords in “bundles,” taking away some of the granularity that advertisers have come to appreciate. Overture was the first industry player to begin automatically using matching technology (it was called Match Driver) to save advertisers the trouble of listing both singular and plural forms in their accounts. This soon expanded into verb stems and common misspellings. If a user types seattle hotell by accident, wouldn’t an advertiser for seattle hotel want to show up anyway? No doubt. But because this kind of technology is automated, there are all sorts of unforeseen outcomes. And at various junctures, Overture was pushing the envelope too far, showing ads on too many variations without regard for the advertisers’ wishes. At one point, they began factoring in the ad title you’d written, along with the keywords in your account, to decide whether to show your ad on a related keyword. A ridiculous example was an old ad of mine that I’d all but forgotten about, running only on Toronto-related and Canada-related keywords such as Toronto marketing consultant, canadian search marketing, and search engine marketing Toronto. The ad had a frivolous title: “World-Famous Consultant. . . from Toronto.” Apparently, based partly on my ad titles, Overture’s Match Driver was showing my ad on queries that had nothing to do with the keywords in my account, such as famous Canadians. A lot of people type that query, it seems. Hey, my title was a joke to get local companies to read my ad, but I’m obviously not Celine Dion or Peter Jennings. The kinds of people who clicked on the ad weren’t prospective clients, needless to say. In fall 2003, Google released a similar technology called “expanded broad matching,” and it immediately began causing problems with campaign performance for some unlucky advertisers. Complaints on industry discussion forums, such as WebmasterWorld.com, were rampant. Some of my clients ran into major problems with increased spending for little return. Google has been tweaking the technology ever since. It does work better now. At first, I feared that the new technology would render many of my favorite keyword tricks obsolete. But it did not. Google has backed off the expanded broad matching initiative to the point where many small variations are still performing quite differently in the marketplace, and are worth bidding on separately. You can often save money on some odd variations by using them explicitly and bidding less on them, which frequently generates higher ad positions for less money. You can opt out of expanded broad matching by making phrases into phrase matches or exact matches. This means that advertisers will continue to have the ability to maintain control over small keyword variations if they choose. Let me run through a few of the major keyword variations you should consider adding to your account. The list is not exhaustive. ■ Plural and singular forms. ■ Verb forms, related nouns, related idioms (fix, fixing, fix up, fixing up, how to fix up, fix-it, fixer upper, fixer). CHAPTER 7: ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features Spelling mistakes or spelling variations (address, adress; email and e-mail). Numbers and codes (years, product numbers, other weird uses). Hyphenated and unhyphenated versions (soup ladle, soup-ladle). One word versus two words (teacup, tea cup). Abbreviations and acronyms. Phrases with who, what, when to capture readers who type a question into the search engine. (For example, how do I repair a kite or how to launch a new business might be common queries and might convert quite well.) I’ve tinkered with many other tricks, such as using punctuation marks (U.K.) instead of just letters (UK). I’m not sure if they all work, since AdWords likely disregards certain punctuation marks such as periods. At certain points in time, these methods have worked, even if by accident. All I can say is, if conventional keywords aren’t giving you great performance, try these tricks and any others you can think of. Although Google’s policies may change, and some are undocumented, for now, some important principles to consider may be: ■ The ampersand symbol (&) is treated like the word “and.” You needn’t include it. ■ Periods are largely ignored. So “heroiclemur.com” will be interpreted as “heroiclemur com”. ■ Apostrophes in “men’s” may be treated as a different search term than mens. You could try both variations. ■ Again, this is mostly conjecture and subject to change. Adding variations doesn’t hurt. But punctuation in keywords is ignored unless it changes meaning, by and large. Going Narrow After achieving some success following a principle like “more specific keywords are often more profitable,” many of us become complacent and stop exploring. Real estate, for example, is an increasingly competitive field. Many realtors have discovered the value of targeting home buyers and sellers in particular regional markets using phrases like atlanta home values. While working with one realtor, I went a step further and made a suggestion that seemed obvious to me as a resident of a well-known area (High Park) that is sought by a percentage of home buyers: people are probably typing the names of neighborhoods into Google! Heck, for all I know, they’re typing streets and the names of specific condo developments. So, if you’ve got a small campaign that’s targeting buyers of Atlanta real estate, but find the keywords are getting too pricey, simply build out your keyword list. (Of course, that’s not all you have to do. Your website is going to have to display your unique positioning and personality in that niche market, or you can forget about turning those clicks into leads.) A realtor who wants more business should have no problem generating it for still-reasonable costs per click just by thinking intuitively about probable search 201 202 Winning Results with Google AdWords engine user behavior in the home buying field. In a hot condo market in many urban centers around the world, I find it amazing that so few realtors are buying AdWords targeted to the names of new buildings. Whatever your field, make it your goal to double your click volume, targeting extremely targeted searchers, on keywords that should be priced at rock-bottom levels (due to other advertisers being too lazy to do what I’m suggesting here). In most cases, the return on your investment will improve substantially. As you move forward, you’ll engage in a process of extended keyword discovery. Once you master the art of keyword brainstorming and start using uncommon phrases along with keyword variations, you’ll want to look at your account every month or two and attempt to revisit your keyword expansion efforts. But listen to that other voice of reason, too. Know when to stop. Keyword Progression, Initial Quality Scores, and Troubleshooting Google is always happy to advise you what to do in order to keep the keywords in your AdWords account in a healthy state of “Great” Quality Scores: you should write more relevant ads and use sound campaign organization, as I’ve discussed thus far, to ensure you’re getting as high a CTR as possible on all keywords. But what if the keywords come out of the gate with poor Quality Scores before you’ve had a chance to experiment with various ads? Under Quality-Based Bidding, it’s crucial to understand that keyword expansion should almost be done with a “reverse logic”: generate high CTRs and high Quality Scores by establishing your ad groups with lowvolume, highly specific keywords, before entering broader words and broader matching options. Few of your competitors will understand this new logic; as a result, they may establish poor initial Quality Scores and be relegated to paying through the nose for clicks. A competitor in distress? In increasingly competitive markets, that’s synonymous with hope! Proceeding with Caution to Avoid Low Initial Scores CTRs are a vitally important factor in Quality Score, and as they are established, they tend to predominate as a factor. The worst thing you can do is to lump a bunch of questionable, irrelevant, or very broad keywords into an ad group. To be sure, you’ll want to try this later, but in the initial stages, pick very specific words that are clearly only directed at users with strong intent relevant to your offering. For example: buy ski boots. Advertisers cannot live on superrelevant phrases alone, I know. But get some high CTRs and high Quality Scores established for a few days or even a few weeks before building the more general words into your ad groups. It’s a pain to have to stage it like this, but that’s Google. You are better off building confidence in your quality first, rather than having to dig yourself out of a hole later. CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features Disapproved Keywords Google doesn’t allow advertising on certain keywords. I’ve run into prohibitions on liquor advertising and certain kinds of weapons, for example. From time to time, areas like casinos and online pharmacies are off limits, and using related keywords in your account might trigger an editorial review. If you run afoul of Google’s keyword policies, they likely won’t refer you to an exhaustive written policy to justify it; they’ll simply send you a disapproval message, and there is likely little you can do. Policies on keyword prohibitions are set by senior people in the company, including the cofounders; editorial staff simply apply the rules. Increasingly, you won’t receive any type of editorial disapproval message because Google has folded many keyword policy decisions into the black box of Quality Score. Many kinds of keywords, and some specific keywords, have lower Quality Scores by default; or they may have lower Quality Scores in relation to your ad or landing page, from a relevancy standpoint. What that means is Google isn’t willing to step up and explain a particular policy to you, but rather, conceals that policy behind a formula. You can now show your ads on certain classes of words— it’ll just be enormously expensive, so you probably won’t. That gets Google out of having to justify every decision they make about “troublesome” or “controversial” keywords. Apparently, Google can measure the price of “trouble,” and charge you approximately the amount that’ll be needed to offset it from their standpoint. As with any decision, you can appeal to Google’s editorial staff to reconsider, and sometimes your request will make it to a policy specialist for review. You have nothing to lose by trying, but some of these rules may be firm, so don’t get your hopes too high. Approaches to Bidding and Ad Position Bidding is at the heart of AdWords strategy. If it makes logical sense to bid according to the quality of targeting you get from any advertising, then each keyword, potentially, has its own “best bid point” for your particular business. What makes that more complex is that this “best bid point” fluctuates with seasons, changing economic conditions, and as competitors come and go in the auction. As I’ve already discussed, AdWords determines ad position by assigning a Quality Score to each keyword and then by multiplying your maximum bid by your Quality Score. When many advertisers are competing, you must either bid high or have a high Quality Score, or some combination of the two, to appear near the top of the listings. Don’t bid emotionally. You need to understand what a rational bidding strategy is for your marketing objectives, and stick to that plan. What Do We Know about Ad Position and Visibility? An unfortunate misconception in the industry today is that ad position is utterly decisive in determining whether you’ll be visible. While both heat mapping (user eye tracking) studies and studies of campaign data certainly show that a higher percentage of users click on the most prominently placed listings, they do click in decent numbers on all listings that make it onto the first page of search results. Many users are curious enough to scan down the page to look for something that interests them. 203 204 Winning Results with Google AdWords One past problem with the Google bidding system is that you couldn’t lock your ad into a certain position, even if you decided you preferred it. Let’s say you find that positions 8, 9, and 10 are bargains, but you prefer 10 above all. Short of using third-party bid management software, you’d have trouble staying in that slot. Google has now released an option called “position preference.” While it doesn’t work perfectly, this feature attempts to keep your ad in the position range you specify, as far as your max bid and Quality Score make this possible. I find that, like many picky features in the interface, I never use this. This one can lead to underdelivery, so I’d rather actively manage a campaign and let my positions float. Be aware that on some partner sites (such as AOL Search, Ask.com, etc.), you might not be visible unless you’re in the top three or four ad positions. This is one reason your volume of impressions and clicks can go up significantly when you up your bid to go from ad position 5 to 3, say. We all have our likes and dislikes. I am partial to ad positions 2 and 3, but I also like 4 and 5. Often, but not always, ad positions 2 and 3 will get you prominent placement above the results on Google Search, with a colored background. Ad positions 4 and 5 typically put you at or very near the top of the ads in the right-hand margin—a personal favorite of mine. You pay significantly less than you would for positions 2 and 1, but you’re still at the “top” of the righthand listings, which looks good. Others think about whether they’re “above the fold” on the right-hand side of the page. Does your ad show on the user’s screen, or would he need to scroll down to see it? That’s not a huge worry. On a desktop monitor that’s on the small side, assuming three ads make it into premium top-of-page position, I can see eight ads above the fold. On a tiny laptop you might only see six or seven ads. It’s starting to sound like lower ad positions can be a bargain, isn’t it? For the small business on a limited ad budget, you can take a low-bid approach, sit in sixth or seventh position much of the time, and stay out of costly bidding wars. This reduces your risk. Users’ browsing habits vary so much that the benefits of one position over another are more a question of tendencies and averages than absolutes. On the whole, higher ad positions do generate more volume, and many “big spend” advertisers feel that they just don’t get enough action in lower ad positions. Some swear that the brand cachet of a higher-position ad is better and thus converts to sales at a significantly higher rate. CTRs are much higher in premium positions (typically 1–3) on urgent, specific queries with commercial intent. It’s in these positions that my clients regularly see CTRs in the 10–20% range—not that you should expect that or consider it the norm. For the time being, depending on the query and the user, we remain in the golden age of the not entirely mythological “golden triangle” of user attention being laser focused on search results (and paid search results) at the top of the screen.2 Showing up in lower ad positions doesn’t harm your Quality Score, due to the lower CTRs associated with those positions. Google “normalizes” CTRs to account for ad position and industry vertical, so your relative performance is what goes into calculating CTR for the purposes of Quality Score. CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features Thus far, I’ve sort of implied that your bids and preferred ad positions come down to a matter of taste. In reality, of course, they usually come down to affordability; specifically, affordability in relation to the ROI or other user response metrics generated by that keyword. Do Your Bids Have a Sensible Purpose? Your bidding strategy is important not only because it impacts the cost of your campaign, but also because it determines your ad positioning. When you look at the campaign summary or ad group view in your campaign management interface, you’ll see the average ad position (Avg. Pos) reported over the selected time period. Since ad position fluctuates due to the nature of the auction system, the reporting tells you the average of where you showed up—say, in position 4.2 on the page—over that time period. AdWords defaults to using one bid for an entire ad group. While this may be a real timesaver, most advertisers generally want more control over their bidding and, therefore, ad positioning. To accomplish this, they use a granular strategy of bidding on individual keywords. Fortunately, this is not an either/or scenario. Bidding individually on thousands of keywords can be counterproductive, but having the flexibility to bid and track some of your most important keywords separately is very useful. Set and Forget? Using Goal-Based Bid Management Tools Many advertisers are concerned about the need to monitor their accounts. The key is to consider how much it’s going to cost you to monitor bids closely. For smaller accounts, it may not be cost-feasible to pay a person to watch closely, or to invest in some of the third-party bid monitoring services. But larger accounts need loving care. With growing third-party use of the AdWords Application Programming Interface (API), we’ll see more rules-based bid management technology being developed. As an individual small advertiser, you may be able to build your own custom software applications to make a certain number of changes to your accounts each day, at no cost. Typically, though, a software developer or agency using the API will pay for “non-user-based” accesses of the Google AdWords interface. Various operations performed via software (change a single bid, change an ad, etc.) are subject to small charges, based on a “token” system. If a large number of operations (say, tens of thousands of bid changes a week) are performed, this cost is not trivial. There are dozens of bid management technology vendors on the market today. Some leaders, such as Atlas Search, are now part of large companies (in Atlas’s case, Microsoft). I’ve run across accounts optimized using these tools, and can tell you that they are an aid, not a panacea. Many advertisers swear by them, but your decisions will have to come down to a variety of criteria— price, management credibility, ease of use, compatibility with other tools or tracking protocols you use, and so on. I’d really like to see prices on such tools continue to fall. I think a big flaw in many of them is that they encourage too many bid adjustments too frequently. This drives up token costs, and in turn seems to drive up the overall cost structure typically applied to bid management tools. An alternative approach, followed by second-generation bid management tools such as Clickable and Adapt, is to focus on superior usability and decision support for account managers 205 206 Winning Results with Google AdWords trying to manage complex sets of data. Newer-generation tools aim to provide smarter, “alertbased” approaches that suggest changes that you should consider making, in priority order based on severity. (See Figure 7-7.) This is likely to limit the degree of automated, needless tinkering, and as the resulting cost of API tokens will be lowered, we can only hope that some of the savings are passed on to the end user. Another important feature should be that you can also manage the accounts directly, hopping into AdWords and later into (say) Clickable, without disrupting anything.3 Remember that Google has a bid gap discounter that automatically charges you the minimum amount needed to maintain your current ad position. You can set your maximum bids fairly high and yet find that from day to day, the average actual cost may not differ very much. Some days, FIGURE 7-7 Clickable offers an intuitive console that assists in decisions about your AdWords account, including bid changes. As opposed to pure automation, it is automation that aids an intelligent campaign strategist’s work. CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features one of your competitors may take a holiday and you’ll suddenly be getting cheaper clicks without having done anything with your bids. Because of this, it sometimes pays to look more closely at your actual costs than at your bids. There are additional shortcomings of bid management tools you need to be aware of. The lack of direct access to the AdWords interface can mean you lose some of the subtleties. If you’re using these tools to change ad copy, you might not see an editorial warning message, for example. Sometimes, when lowering bids, you might inadvertently lower them so low that you’re below the assigned minimum bid on these keywords. By attempting to simplify user interactions, the third-party apps run the risk of oversimplifying. How to Use Powerposting to Bid at the Keyword Level Powerposting is a handy bidding technique that allows you to go into your existing ad groups and specify a bid for a specific phrase while leaving the “global maximum bid” for the group the same as it was. Let’s say your max bid for the “lizards” group is $1.50. You want to bid higher on the phrase buy lizards but lower on the phrase discount lizards. Google no longer highlights the term “powerposting” to describe this, but some oldtimers still use the term as a nickname for bidding on individual keywords. There are several ways to powerpost. The easiest is to access your list of keywords in AdWords, select the keyword(s) to modify, and click the Edit Keyword Settings button that appears just above the keyword list. This displays an easy-to-use Change CPCs and URLs form. Simply enter the maximum CPC, enter a different target URL for this keyword if so desired, and click the Save Changes button. While you’re doing this, you’ll see that it also gives you the ability to change your global bids for the ad group as well—at the top of the screen. If you prefer to do your own manual editing, you can access the keyword list, click the Edit Keywords link, and enter your own notations to signify different bids. The process is fairly simple. Just enter a pair of asterisks after the keyword, followed by a bid amount (for example, “buy lizards” ** 3.05). When you’re finished, click Save. Let’s say your global maximum CPC is set to $1.50. After you add powerposting notations to tell Google to bid something other than $1.50 on some of your phrases, the list of keywords in your ad group might look something like this: Lizards “buy lizards” ** 3.05 kapuskasing “discount lizards” ** .40 iguana In this example, the maximum CPC for “buy lizards” is raised to $3.05, lowered to 40 cents for “discount lizards”, and kept at the default ($1.50) for lizards, kapuskasing, and iguana. Powerposting has become a must for some advertisers, so they wind up doing a fair bit of this after-the-fact editing. For many of your keywords, you may want to bid only enough to keep 207 208 Winning Results with Google AdWords your ad in position 2, 3, or 4 as opposed to 1, but if you’re bidding high enough to keep your more expensive keywords visible to searchers, you’ll potentially be bidding more than you need to on your “cheaper” ones, putting them in the #1 ad position when you’d be content with #2 or #3. If you’re in #1 spot too often, that can be a red flag that you’re overspending and may need to either lower your bid for the whole group or edit individual bids, or do both. In fact, there will be times when you get clicks for 5 cents in second or third position, but you’ll pay something like 31 cents or 50 cents to get listed first. You may not want to be first all the time, and in cases like this, it can really mess up your average cost! At the risk of belaboring a point, this brings up a third reason to be tidy and organized in setting up campaigns and groups: it is easier for you to be thrifty. For many advertisers, the use of powerposting is like housekeeping to improve the effectiveness of their bidding strategies. You can go overboard with powerposting, though. Use it judiciously so you don’t create mounds of difficult-to-interpret data and a lot of additional work in managing all those different bids. Just a reminder: if you go with more sophisticated rules-based automation, you’ll be shooting for an ROI-based range for your bids, and being prompted to change bids to reflect the value of that keyword to your business. Google’s Conversion Optimizer If you have Google Conversion Tracker enabled, and a minimum threshold of sales or other conversions in the past month in a given campaign, you may be eligible to use Google’s new Conversion Optimizer tool. The principle here is the same as any rules-based conversion optimization or bid management tool. You set your target cost-per-acquisition number (say, $12), and Google will adjust your bids in that campaign in an attempt to keep your ROI within the range you’ve specified. Needless to say, this could increase your spend and click volume, or decrease it. The automated system, not you, is now “driving” your account. My sense is that this tool may be OK for some users, but there is still enough offered by third parties that goes beyond Google’s functionality that it’s worth looking into outside bid management. Making Bulk Changes Quickly with the AdWords Editor I don’t mind making minor edits online within AdWords, but there is absolutely no joy in making bulk edits online. Adding new ads can be a long, painstaking process, and inevitably, the phone rings or my Internet connection gets flaky right when I am on a tight deadline for a client and getting ready to head out to catch a flight. Google’s AdWords Editor is a customized take on work-offline workarounds such as Excel; you may prefer the interface because it’s tailored to the task of making bulk AdWords edits. This handy desktop application downloads your AdWords campaigns, including performance statistics, to your local desktop, where you can edit them offline and then upload the changes back to AdWords when you are ready. The AdWords Editor has a nicely designed tree-view interface that lets you drill down and edit keywords and ads, set bids, daily budgets, and geographic and placement targets, and do just about everything else you can do with the AdWords interface online. Further updates are CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features forthcoming with the latest version of Quality Score (discussed at the end of Chapter 5); of course, as AdWords changes, so must the Editor tool. With features like global search and replace, duplicate keyword finder, and the ability to cut and paste entire sections of your account, you can overhaul an entire campaign in a fraction of the time it takes online (unless, like me, you have a fast online connection and are addicted to the online interface). Another nice feature is that you can archive a backup copy of your whole account, so that in case the major overhaul you just made doesn’t work out quite the way you had expected, you can quickly roll back to the previous version. For now, be aware that there are still some AdWords settings that can only be controlled online, such as ad serving settings (accelerated or even delivery) and ad scheduling. Google also seems to have grappled with how much advanced functionality to offer. An “advanced bid options” link leads you to a useful tool that will help you bulk-change bids in a variety of ways, including by percentage. Overall, the key advantage of the AdWords Editor is that it is faster and offline. Yet this tool is still not without its quirks and shortcomings. Third parties will still outshine Google in the area of rules-based decision support, it seems. The Editor tool particularly shines in hard-core practical areas, like bulk-editing ads, which can be super-pesky. Software Saves Time with Keyword-Level Tracking Third-party software does have one major advantage: keyword tracking. Even if you don’t use bid management software to actively manage your bids, it can be an indispensable aid if you’re going to be tracking by keyword. A major problem with bidding by keyword is making sure you have the correct tracking URLs in your AdWords account so that you’re also correctly tracking by keyword. You’ll find it prohibitively time consuming to enter unique tracking URLs (another feature of powerposting, and a second set of asterisks followed by a URL) by hand for hundreds or thousands of individual keywords. If all you use for ROI tracking is Google Conversion Tracker or Google Analytics with autotagging enabled in your AdWords account, no special tracking URLs are required. Many third-party systems require them, however, and will append them to keyword-by-keyword destination URLs throughout your account, using the AdWords API. Dayparting Some software vendors emphasized early on the benefits of rapid bid changes and the need for dayparting—the turning on and off of ads, or adjusting bids based on prior knowledge of time periods when customers are more or less likely to buy. As you gain more experience with AdWords, you’ll probably feel the need to explore such advanced bidding strategies at some point. Large retailers may have no choice but to daypart, as their razor-thin margins make it crucial to generate revenues on as many clicks as possible, and not to waste money showing ads to nonbuyers (for example, in the middle of the night). Many advertisers can safely ignore this for the time being. You can out-think yourself. For example, it could actually hurt your company to reduce exposure with some advanced dayparting method when this exposure might actually be a cheap long-term brand-building method that compares favorably with exposure in other media. 209 210 Winning Results with Google AdWords One problem with dayparting is that ads do not always turn on and off instantly, especially on the sites of content and search network partners. So you can’t be too exact with it. Also, in an auction scenario, if everyone starts dayparting, the advertisers who remain should save money as advertisers drop out, thus canceling out the benefit of dayparting. It never hurts to consider ways of optimizing your account, such as turning the campaign off on Saturdays if you’re sure that having it on is hurting your bottom line. But be careful not to be lulled into underspending based on faulty premises. Dayparting also underestimates latency in purchases, especially between “at home” and “at work” buying. Many Monday morning purchases from a work-based computer were initiated through a search on a home computer over the weekend. Shut off your ads on weekends? You could “mysteriously” miss out on Monday sales. Google AdWords Ad Scheduler Because ad scheduling (including an advanced approach that lets you boost or reduce bids by time of day, on a set weekly schedule) is now available in the AdWords interface itself, I tend to set up specific scheduling regimes inside AdWords on the rare occasions I make use of dayparting. For my purposes, it’s actually proved to be a clever workaround for making wholesale seasonal bid adjustments, while keeping the original campaign in the same state, for when the season ends. Let’s say I want to set a configuration that bids 130% of the default bid across the campaign on weekends, and 120% on weekdays. That’s easy to set up in a snap. Rather than looking into individual bids across ad groups and keywords, changes are made across the account. So when you want to change back—or revert—to your default bid strategy, you just shut off the ad scheduling and you’re back to “normal.” A colleague of mine suggested that Google could allow you to save multiple bid configurations, and name them for different seasons or purposes. In short, that would allow “bid themes” so you could use my above technique even more cleverly. . . if you can imagine being that clever! How about it Google? Dealing with Foolish (or Rich) Competitors The increasing cost of keywords is nothing new. Every month brings new waves of advertisers testing the waters. Some will muck things up for you. But there’s no need to panic just because some newbie comes in with both guns blazing, badly overbidding on your best keywords. You probably shouldn’t be relying that heavily on those keywords anyway. Advertisers shouldn’t be goaded into bidding wars or overly discouraged by what seem to be high costs per click. Wait until you receive a series of monthly reports with sufficient data to see a pattern. Things might not be as bad as you think! Look again at your data. New competition entering your space is no laughing matter, though, to be sure. For many of my clients, new competition has been the #1 source of rising CPCs in the period 2006–2008. Just two new feisty competitors can raise your CPCs 50% to 100%, especially if you’ve come to rely on the volume generated by juicy, high ad positions. Do I have a magic bullet for this? Of course not. You have to outdo competitors in the ways available to you. Sometimes that can be with CHAPTER 7: Keyword Selection and Bidding: Tapping into Powerful AdWords Features scale and persistence; other times that has to be continued testing, creativity, and laser focus on niches. The chess match here plays out in a somewhat daunting economic-Darwinist format, to a degree. Bigness is no guarantee of victory, but the advent of many big monsters entering the ad space certainly isn’t making more oxygen for the little guys to breathe.4 As much as CPCs may be rising in some areas, in others they might be dropping as advertisers pay more attention to their ROI data. In some fields we see reverse bidding wars taking place as some advertisers take a stand that they won’t bid to position, but rather, to a certain cost per click that seems reasonable. So prices can rise, but they can also fall, and by taking action in lowering your own bids, you can contribute to that fall. When two or three of the top advertisers stop beating each other’s brains out, you can see significant declines in CPCs in areas that were once thought to be cost prohibitive. Endnotes 1. With thanks to Matt Van Wagner, who has been known to use this case example— complete with prop—in his conference presentations. 2. For some further information on the so-called golden triangle, see for example “Enquiro Eye Tracking Report 1: Google,” July 2005. Available at enquiroresearch.com. 3. Disclosure: in fall 2007, I began working with Clickable as a beta partner, trying out advance versions of the product and providing bug reports and feature suggestions. I did so because my initial test drive of the early beta was favorable, and I was drawn to the idea of an intuitive interface that would support human analyst decisions and shorten execution times, rather than monopolizing the process or creating an extra, cumbersome layer. 4. For more on the gruesome logic, see my piece, “Your Paid Search Performance Is Relative,” Search Engine Land: Paid Search, May 15, 2007, archived at http://searchengineland.com/070515-075604.php. 211 This page intentionally left blank Chapter 8 Writing Winning Ads S ince AdWords (not counting the content-targeting program, which is multifaceted) allows no graphics, colors, font styles, or other eye-catching elements, and even limits some powerful textual elements (exclamation points, symbols, caps, and more), your ad copy is the only thing you have to entice users to visit your website. Therefore, it has to catch their attention right from the start. In this chapter I’ll provide pointers on writing effective Google AdWords ads. Before delving into the mechanics of copywriting, you should be aware of two key principles of advertising on the Web, both of which target the user’s experience as he or she makes the journey from a search query to a purchase on your site. Targeting and Testing: Key Principles of Web Advertising First, as you may have heard from various web pundits already, it’s all about personalization. Regardless of whether you call it personalization, targeting, or micro-targeting, the harder you work to achieve it, the sooner you’ll leave your competitors in the dust. Imagine the “Perfect Ad” Tongue in cheek, it’s worth laying some groundwork here by pointing out that the rare ads that get the most extreme positive responses are typically those that benefit from urgency or a favorable buying situation you cannot manufacture; all you can do is be in the game to capture some of those situations. If someone were to type “my pantleg is on fire” into Google, an ad that read “Handheld Fire Extinguishers—Put out the fire now! Delivered instantly to your desktop!” would probably garner a very high CTR and an unusually high conversion rate. The pathological among you will now ask me for tips on how to set people’s pants on fire. The overarching philosophy of this chapter is to talk about principles that seem to matter in generating improved user responses. I know such principles based on long experience across 214 Winning Results with Google AdWords a variety of campaign types. But the other part of the equation is, you have to test in order to find out what fits for your situation. Tips and tricks are just a starting point. A reminder: uncertainty in response (as with worldly events in general) is usually greater than our brains are wired to expect. Sometimes, innovative ideas help you hit the jackpot. In other cases, your job is to deploy an ad budget effectively without embarrassing your company. The trouble is, there is no clear way of predicting whether we are in line for big jackpots (what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the positive variant of black swans, or highly improbable events). As Taleb argues, sometimes we are living in Mediocristan (a relatively stable risk environment that offers little potential for catastrophic losses, but also no huge upsides), and sometimes we are living in Extremistan (a risk environment that eventually produces enormous, unexpected gains or losses).1 I suspect what has made Google AdWords such an object of fascination for so many around the world (myself included) is that it allows us to cheat Taleb’s view of probability: because we’re free to shut off our ads at anytime, and we hold no massive sunk “portfolio” of keywords in the sense of an asset we can lose; yet also, because in certain industries with certain ads, creative in certain circumstances, some rare companies can hit a “jackpot-like” sales result. We get to limit downside while staying exposed to major upside. I’m not telling you that AdWords is risk-free,2 but rather, simply musing on how the positives and negatives of uncertain results don’t seem to hurt advertisers as much as they do, say, investors in subprime mortgages, or the not-somythical turkey who feels like things are going along fine on the day before Thanksgiving, as they have for the past 1,000 days, until…the next day comes. Cater to People and Keep Yourself in the Game The fact that searchers are typing specific, interest-driven keywords into a search engine is part of an age-old phenomenon with a modern twist—the search for a solution to real or imagined problems. Advertisers who recognize this simple truth will, on the whole, enjoy better performance with their online campaigns. In an age of heightened expectations, the user who feels catered to will be a more responsive user. As soon as an ad fails to address the user’s wants, needs, or expectations, there’s a good chance that a potential customer will move on to the next vendor. In Chapter 7 I mentioned Ray Allen of AmericanMeadows.com. Ray knows that it’s not enough just to lure the potential buyer in. He keeps the personal touches flowing even after the user clicks through. This is why he includes things like the regularly updated, beautifully illustrated blog on his site (see Figure 8-1). This kind of personalization combined with a passion for the subject matter can make a difference in retaining customer loyalty in a fickle world.3 Little wonder that, along with the rest of his marketing, Ray’s Google ads look different from everyone else’s. As a former advertising executive, Ray likes to draw on past experience and try out a variety of hooks: up-to-date special offers, seasonal information, and so on. The second principle to bear in mind is that testing is the key to determining the effectiveness of your ads. Empirical data (results) matter more than anyone’s opinion about what kind of ad copy to write. The performance of your ads is so readily testable that your ad strategy should largely revolve around which elements to test as opposed to following some theoretical law of CHAPTER 8: FIGURE 8-1 Writing Winning Ads Ray Allen’s frequently updated blog, like his frequently updated ad copy, gives web surfers the kind of customized, relevant information they seek. ad copywriting from the experts. When testing produces unexpected results, it can be an eye opener, and this helps you take a major step forward in understanding your audience’s psychology and needs. How Your Ads Look to the User In Chapter 3 my goal was to convey a feeling for users’ reactions to search listings and ads. Remembering that you’re not creating a single ad to appear in a predetermined space is vital to understanding the variations you’ll likely see in user response. Impact of Media Type and Location In the advertising business, the choice of media type and location (where the ad is placed) has always been a decisive factor in how an ad performs. The selection of media is, as much as possible, the selection of an appropriate target audience based on what we know about audience demographics. 215 216 Winning Results with Google AdWords Since Google does not currently require users to register with personal information, we don’t have direct clues about audience age, gender, income, and the like. Like everything else on the Internet, that may change in the future. (Microsoft has recently moved to offer advertisers more advanced targeting of this nature.) Even without such clues, the selection of keywords on which to advertise provides an opportunity to select an appropriate audience, albeit indirectly. One key variable to be aware of is the placement of the same ad with different online services. A user who sees your ad as the result of a cobranded search on the Verizon DSL home page, rather than a Google Search, may respond differently. It might be a simple matter of placement, such as the ad appearing in position 4 instead of position 2. Or it might have to do with the ad showing up in the middle of a keyword search as opposed to seeing it on the page where the user is reading an article, or beside a conversation in Gmail. Fitting Big Ideas into Small Spaces If you’re sitting there wondering how you’re going to turn 95 characters (including spaces and punctuation) into killer ad copy that will sell your product or service, don’t worry. Yes, it’s true that the character limit is so strict some advertisers refer to Google ads as “advertising haiku,” but this is not the selling stage and therefore doesn’t require lengthy copy. Google ads are, or should be, qualifiers—the tools that sort, or prequalify, prospects, not sell to them, as I’ll explain shortly. After all, if you were able to write very long ads, and Google showed ten of them to a page, do you really believe that users would read them? Would you read them? Of course not. This system—short ads that people may read but can easily ignore if they wish—works well. The ad you write has to be relevant enough to induce action, but specific enough to limit that action to potential customers only. Forget about cramming your whole sales pitch into your AdWords ad. You only have space for a clearly worded offer, plus one or two of the following: (a) a clear, concise benefit statement, value proposition, or third-party endorsement; (b) a call to action; (c) an offer; (d) special wording that might weed out inappropriate prospects. Remember, there will be plenty of space for detail on your landing page, after the potential customers have arrived on your website. You need to convey one or at most two concepts in your brief ad. Most importantly, the ad must be clear and unambiguous. Avoid using abbreviations, acronyms, and other devices that the target customer may not recognize. That doesn’t mean you can’t use them at all. If your potential customer should be familiar with them and they are relevant, by all means use them. Just make sure they’re appropriate for the intended audience. Clarity is a guiding principle of copywriting. Adopting the Right Tone The correct tone for your ad is the one that best suits your audience. That may sound obvious, but depending on that audience, it may mean simple, exotic, mellow, wild, homey, sophisticated, or even technical to the point of being unintelligible to the average user. In the end, what counts is speaking the same language as your potential customer. CHAPTER 8: Writing Winning Ads Setting the right tone for your audience is a guiding principle of copywriting. Bearing in mind that Google users are probably savvy enough to see through high-pressure sales pitches and other intrusive advertising, you’ll want to avoid ad copy that focuses more on the cleverness of the writer than it does on the product being advertised. In reflecting on the general tone of the ads I’ve seen working well—and their general lack of cleverness—I’ve come to realize that the principles for writing effective AdWords are not so far from what some of the advertising industry icons of the 20th century, like David Ogilvy, have counseled (see the upcoming sidebar, “Giving Tradition Its Due”). What is different is that we’re seeing more ads being written for a much wider variety of situations than ever before, and these ads are often being written by relatively inexperienced copywriters. Inexperienced copywriters should avoid the tendency to stereotype the process of writing ads based on what they’ve heard about contemporary advertising trends. Writing ads is a practical task and one that’s unlikely to win you a major award. (I still haven’t won any Grammys or Webbys, even for that ingenious “pantleg on fire” ad.) So if you feel a hankering for a major creative release like the one you might get in the traditional advertising industry that creates what amount to short films designed to interrupt people, you’ll be disappointed in this medium, and you’ll probably do wacky things with it. Your little ads play an important role, and some of what you do is creative, but you’re kind of boxed in to a narrower realm. You know what? That can be liberating. To try a sports analogy: a pitcher in baseball has a “boring” life, too. He has to throw the ball over the plate, in the strike zone. But when you learn how much strategy is going on inside those narrow parameters–he can throw some pitches outside the zone; he can mix speeds, throw curveballs, and occasionally throw over to first base and check the runner–it’s apparent that you can lead a pretty full life inside those constraints! Writing and testing AdWords ads is a science. Getting it right can be exhilarating. Getting it wrong will cost you. Certain principles usually hold true, and violating them will waste time and money. For the time being, major ad agencies are relatively uninterested in this science Giving Tradition Its Due The great copywriters of old, such as David Ogilvy, did know a thing or two. Many of Ogilvy’s admonitions in Confessions of an Advertising Man (Southbank Publishing, 2004), particularly the section about writing headlines, still apply to search advertising. He counsels directness over cleverness and offers suggestions such as ensuring that headlines appeal to readers’ self-interest, for example. He says that copywriters must resist the temptation to entertain, and that their performance ought to be measured by how quickly they can foster the adoption of new products and ideas. Ogilvy’s views on such matters seem to have great foresight considering that no one could have foreseen the flexibility of the Internet, the fragmentation of media, and the demanding and highly measurable Google AdWords environment. 217 218 Winning Results with Google AdWords because those billable hours aren’t as profitable as other agency activities, like creating TV commercials and purchasing TV ads. More to the point, they don’t have the analytical personnel who can do it properly. Anyone who understands that this is not so much a buy as an ongoing test can thrive even if large agencies begin to run campaigns against them. Many of those who work in the ad industry today repeatedly ignore the wisdom of pioneers such as Ogilvy, preferring to create ads that impress peers.4 But peer recognition isn’t what we’re after here. As Ogilvy aptly put it in Confessions, “juries that bestow awards are never given enough information about the results of the advertisements they are called upon to judge.” Instead, they fall back on “their opinions, which are always warped toward the highbrow.” Fortunately, with all the data at your disposal, your opinion is the last thing you’ll be forced to rely on when it comes to writing effective Google ads. Trying to win an award in such a small space would be difficult, wouldn’t it? Let’s look at a hypothetical ad by Tad, a transplanted agency type who is so bored with writing search engine ads that he comes up with this ad to sell software from a company called Reemar: Reemar’s On Ya Devgeeks say w00t! to PrSolvR 2.0. Yo BigCorp: we’re here to destroy u Apparently, Tad thought this ad would be “triply ironic.” No one would think anything like this would be cool, so by some convoluted logic, Tad believed this ad would imprint his “signature style” and really have them talking (not customers, but ad industry people and awards juries). The only thing that would probably happen is that the ad would confound users, they wouldn’t click, and the Quality Score gods would soon have their way with Tad’s account. Not only does the ad fail even to hint at what PrSolvR does, or indicate any benefit whatsoever, it violates Google’s editorial guidelines. (Different versions of Tad’s ad also had even weirder punctuation, in addition to the veiled threats against BigCorp.) The word yo would also be seen by the AdWords spell checker as a misspelling, and the author of the ad would then have to wait for Google Editorial to grant an exception. They might not grant it. Now let’s look at a non-Madison Avenue approach to Reemar’s ad. Perhaps you believe that a more industry-centric ad would speak to your target audience, who, you think, are savvy in the extreme. So you try this: Faster DWW Func in FWall? GMUI modules 3X beat KLT security “best pligtonferg of ‘07”-WRSS Mag Well, maybe the people who read your ads are not that savvy. Or, like most average people, even savvy ones, they prefer not to read gibberish. This ad fails too. With the use of less jargon and more plain English, you can turn the previous ads into a winner: Easy & Powerful Firewall Reemar ProblemSolvR beats BigCorp Terminator by 74% in industry tests
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