Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 3: Search Terms

Do you know exactly which search terms are bringing you conversions in your campaigns? If not, you could be leaving money on the table (you’re actually leaving it in your competitor’s pockets, but we’ll try to be gracious with you here).

The search terms are not just keywords you’re bidding on, but the specific terms that are being searched. For example, you could bid on the phrase-match keyword “buy shoes”, but the actual term being searched might be something like “buy shoes for people with high arches”.

Once you know exactly which terms are converting well, you can:

  1. Add them into your campaign as an exact/phrase match keyword
  2. And raise the bid on that keyword to make sure you’re in one of the top 3 positions

By adding the exact phrase into your campaign, you’re able to increase your relevance/quality score for that search term, which helps you pay less for your converting keywords. It also means that you’ll be shown much more often for that search term (due to relevance), and it means that you’ll now have more advanced data regarding that keyword.

Here’s how to find out the exact terms people are searching:

  1. Navigate to the campaign/ad group you want to work on.
  2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Search Terms”.
  4. Sort by conversions. Date range: it’s good to go back to a point where you have at least 20+ conversions recorded if not much more. If that requires you to go back a few months, so be it. If you need to go back a year, that’s fine too.

From here you can see quite a few columns. You’ll want to start by making sure you’re looking at keywords that have conversions, especially any keywords with more than 1 conversion. You can do this by sorting the “conversion” column to the top.

adwords-conversions-3

Once you’ve sorted your columns, the most important column to look at is the “added/excluded” column. This lets you know whether you’ve already added this keyword to your ad group/campaign.

Any promising keywords that are driving conversions should be added to your campaign as phrase/exact match keywords. If they aren’t currently added, then you’re missing out on an opportunity (previously described).

In the above campaign, what opportunities can you see?

There are quite a few keywords in this campaign that are receiving conversions, but aren’t added into the campaign as keywords. If you look at the 2nd keyword on the list, you’ll see that it actually has a very low CPC – this is called “low hanging fruit” because it’s not very competitive, but still drives conversions.

If for some reason you see keywords that don’t belong in your campaign, you can always add them in as negative keywords as well. We’re not sure why you would want to block keywords that are driving you conversions, but depending on the way you track conversions, it might not be equivalent to a true sale.

Putting this into place should help to increase your ROI. If you wanted to really limit costs, you could even bid on exclusively the keywords that are bringing you sales, and eliminate everything else. You probably wouldn’t receive as much traffic, but your costs would decrease significantly (while your profit stayed very similar). Not a bad trade if you ask us.

Next week we’ll be covering how to rotate your ads like an agency.

Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 2: Hour Of Day

By looking at which times of the day your conversions receive the most ROI, you can eliminate the hours that don’t convert well.

  1. Start by going to the campaign that you want to improve. Don’t go into any ad groups though (you can check it ad group by ad group later).
  2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Time > Hour of Day”.
  4. At this point you should see all the hours listed from 0 (midnight) to 23 (11pm).

Just like part 1 of this series, you want to look at your conversions for each hour. Are there any hours that don’t convert (or convert poorly)?

Pay attention to your “cost per conversion” as well. If you have some hours that have a very high cost per conversion, you’ll want to pay attention to that and adjust accordingly (possibly removing that hour from your schedule).

Let’s take a look at an account and see which hours work well, and which haven’t. The identity of the advertiser has been hidden for their privacy.

<p”>Google Adwords Conversion Optimization

  • Although many of the early morning hours (1am, 3-5am) don’t have conversions, they also don’t spend very much. It’s simply a lack of traffic, so we don’t have to worry too much about limiting them.
  • Conversions at 3pm (1500 hours) cost quite a bit, around $342/conversion. It might be a good idea to remove ads at this time to help lower cost per conversion. The same goes for 1700 hours and 2100 hours, though they only have 1 conversion so it might be worth waiting for more data on all of these fronts.
  • 1800 hours (6pm) has VERY cheap conversions at only $68/conversion. This could be a lucrative time to increase the bid using an automated rule, and then decrease the bid afterwards. You might even increase your budget just for that hour of the day.

You can also pay attention to CTR if you’re wanting to increase your quality score (QS). By eliminating hours that have a very low CTR, you can increase your overall campaign CTR, which helps to optimize your campaign even further and get a better QS.

From there you’ll want to modify your ad schedule so that it excludes certain hours of the day. This will be on top of the “day of week” schedule that you did in part 1. If you’re not sure how to make an ad schedule, start with this Google support tutorial on custom ad scheduling.

<p”>This post is a shorty, so why don’t you spend the remaining 3 minutes you would have spent reading a longer article on analyzing your “time of day” data? In part 3 we’ll be covering the search terms dimensions report.

Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 1: Day Of Week Testing

When designing this adwords series, we put a bit of thought into what would be the biggest focus.

We could have focused on click-through rate or Quality Score, which both indirectly contribute to your ROI (return on investment).  We decided to focus on ways to directly increase your ROI from your Google Adwords campaigns instead.

That’s why this whole optimization series will be focused directly on conversions, although you will be able to use these lesser-known skills to get yourself boosts in CTR (click-through-rate) and Quality Score too.

Check Your Day Of Week Dimension

By checking which days of the week provide the cheapest conversions, you may spot an opportunity to eliminate a day or two from your schedule, and spend more of your money on the remaining, more profitable days of the week.

  1. Start by going to a search campaign that you want to focus on.
  2. Once you’re in the campaign (you should be seeing the names of each ad group), click the “Dimensions” tab.
  3. Click “View > Time > Day of Week”.
  4. At this point you should see Monday through Sunday listed. They may not be in the right order, so sort them by the “Day of the Week” column.
  5. Check the date range and make sure it’s the times you want to measure. If you have a large account with hundreds of thousands of impressions a month, try to keep it at the last 30 days. Otherwise you may need to reach further back in time for useful data.

Now it’s time to evaluate. Do you notice any trends? What is the cost per conversion for each day? Do you notice any particular days that cost far more than the others?

adwords-optimization-part-1

In the sample account above, we can see that Monday, Friday, and Saturday all yield no conversions, yet cost a similar amount as every other day.

We also can see that Tuesday’s conversions cost a particularly large amount ($145/conversion) compared to the other days (approx $50/conversion). It might even be worth it to turn off ads on tuesday as well if the client doesn’t mind receiving a few less conversions. This will give more budget to the cheaper days of the week.

This type of analysis is a “quick win”.  In the above example, we were able to lower the cost per conversion from $103 down to $59/conversion. That’s a 42% savings, just from this simple 5 minute fix!

By making a quick change to your ad schedule, you can eliminate days that are costly to your conversions, and increase your ROI by quite a bit. The bigger your account, the bigger the waves you’ll make with this.

Next week we’ll talk about another dimension that’s almost as exciting as the day of week! It’s a secret, so you’ll have to wait until next week to find out!

5 Tips For Writing Google Ads

Chilliwack Marketing Firm Google Adwords Advertising

Have a higher click-through-rate (CTR) on your Google Ads means a few things:

  • more traffic to your website, especially if there are limited people searching for your line of business, because more of your impressions are turning into visitors
  • you can lower your overall cost per click (CPC), because a high CTR increases your quality score.

Increasing CTR is one effective way to pay less for your traffic. You can increase your CTR by choosing keywords that are relevant to your ads (this means having different ad groups for different areas of your business), and by writing ads that are wickedly good!

Here are some tips for writing ads that “get the click”.

Include A Call To Action

Calls to action such as “Hire Us Today!” or “Call Us Now!” tend to get more clicks. Include them in your ads for the best results.

Other examples of calls to action include:

  • Sign up today
  • Learn more
  • Start a free trial
  • Call us today
  • Let’s get started
  • Try us today
  • Save now
  • Subscribe
  • Get our free app
  • Try our demo

Capitalize The First Letter Of Each Word

Ad text that capitalizes the first letter of every word tends to get a higher CTR. It’s possible that this might change in the future as the practice starts to make people “ad blind”, but for the time being it’s an effective way to increase your CTR.

What Are Your Biggest Benefits?

If you’re Volvo, then people know you for one big thing – safety. If we were Volvo, our ads would read something like:

“5-Star Best-In-The-Country Safety Rating. Drive America’s Safest Car Today”

Safety is their big benefit, and it helps to drive it home.

So what are your biggest benefits? What do you offer your customers that is really valuable to them? You can even list off a feature or two if you’re feeling to lazy to derive emotional benefits from those features. Examples like “30 minute delivery” or “Free shipping” come to mind.

Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic keyword insertion, at its most basic, puts the keywords that the visitor was searching in the text of your ad.

It’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Here’s how it works, and how you can implement it.

Say you had a headline that read:

{KeyWord:Nike Shoes}

If a visitor was searching “Blue High Tops”, and your ad was triggered (because you were bidding on that keyword), then your headline would now read:

Blue High Tops

Now they see exactly what they searched, making your ad more relevant!

So, why did we put the term “Nike Shoes” in there at all? That’s the default text that’s used in case the visitor searches a term that’s too long to appear in the headline. If they search “Blue and green hightop shoes with black laces”, that would be clearly too long for the headline, so the headline would default to:

Nike Shoes

Make sense?

Dynamic ads don’t always outperform regular ads, so try using variations of each. Speaking of variations…

Test, Test, Test

Always create at least 3-4 ads for each ad group. After you’ve received at least 1,000 impressions on each ad, delete the losers and keep your winning 1-2 ads. Then write a few more ads, and repeat the cycle again!

You can even just test different headline variations with different ad text. Test dynamic keyword insertion VS no dynamic keyword insertion.

Any variation you can think of, you can test!

With all of these tips, you should be on the right path to writing halfway competent ads. As your CTR goes up, try lowering your bids. You’ll be surprised that you can get very similar results with bids that are much lower than your original if you have a high CTR.

Gaining Traffic For Your Website: Quantity, Or Quality?

If you’re working on a content marketing strategy for your website (that is, writing content in order to drive search engine rankings), it can be tempting to push out something less insightful in favor of producing more content.

 It’s a trap; don’t fall for it.

1 insanely high-quality article could drive more traffic than 100 low-medium quality articles.

Think about your own trip to your email inbox. Are you thinking: “I just don’t have enough email to check – anything at all is fine, I just need some reading material!”. I doubt it. You’re likely thinking “I don’t have time for any of this, I’ve more important things to do”.

It’s a rare occasion for you to spend time reading an article that’s come into your inbox – except for the 2-3 newsletters that you’re subscribed to that always have incredible content to share. They’re always fascinating and severely related to you, so you’re willing to take time out of your day to read because they enrich your life.

You want to make it your goal to write content that’s that good.

Google Panda Update

Another reason to really put yourself in the “great content” game is Google’s “Panda” update. This is a special system created by Google to penalize websites that produce low quality content.

So write all you want, if your content is just regurgitating the same old ideas found everywhere else on the internet, you could be straying too close to a ferocious stray dog.

If you’ve been hit by the Panda algorithm, the simplest way to reverse your penalty is to increase the quality of the content on your website. This might be a large job, depending on how much content you have.

The Hallmarks Of Quality Content

Adding in a unique perspective or commentary based on your expertise is the easiest way to make your content more unique and original. While you’re adding that in, make sure your voice and personality really represent the business well; this way visitors get to know you and come to expect your brand of information.

Some key indicators of incredible content include:

  • It has that “been there – done that” voice and flair.

  • It has specific knowledge that comes from real experience.

  • It supports a depth of useful information – you link to sources, such as this link to Make Your Content PreSell, which is where this “incredible content criteria” was originally listed.

  • It is spun or positioned in a way that is uniquely yours.

  • It is consistent from web page to page, newsletter to newsletter, Facebook post to post, tweet to tweet, from week to month to year.

Beyond those criteria, you might also consider creating content with:

  • professional images to help illustrate what you’re teaching

  • a catchy headline to grab a visitor’s attention

  • infographics or videos that make difficult concepts simple

Because you’re the expert in your field, you’re the best person to write this content. You might not have time though, in which case you should hire a writer to interview you and ask you questions related to whichever subject you’re talking about.

If you don’t have time for regular interviews, then you’ll want to find a writer who has knowledge and experience in your area of business.

And lastly, if you can’t find a writer who has experience in your area of business, at least find a writer who’s really good!

Summary:

  • Create content that blows visitors away

  • Producing huge amounts of low-quality content is a sure-fire way to get hit by Google’s Panda algorithm.

  • Hire a writer if you don’t have time to do it yourself

How Does Google Work? (Part 3)

What To Write About

If you were to write a book on your business, what would the chapters be? Heck, you might even consider visiting Amazon.com and looking through the chapters of their books based on your industry – you might find some great ideas right there!

After that, you might consider keeping a notepad handy and writing down questions that your customers ask you. Maybe you can answer those questions on your website in the form of an article?

Regardless of your ideas, it’s very useful to try out a keyword research tool to find out what people are searching for online.

Wordtracker is a useful keyword research tool. Just type in a keyword related to the article you’re considering, and you should be able to find the demand (and competition) for related topics. They have a monthly subscription that you might consider if you’ll be writing a fair amount of content for your website, but if you just need it for a few articles the free limited tool may be useful to you.

If you hire an SEO company to help you with your optimization, they should have keyword research tools available to do that type of research for you.

Regardless of what route you take, remember the golden rule of ranking online:

Information, information, information!

Let’s Remember

To recap on this series:

  • Google is in the business of providing the best information to its visitors. It’s where they make their bread & butter.
  • On the web, it’s “information, information, information” not “location, location, location”.
  • If you want to be found by Google, you need to provide great information that answers customer’s questions.
  • Do keyword research to find out what information in your niche is “in-demand”. Feel free to sprinkle a few of these keywords throughout your articles to help give Google cues to what the content is about.
  • The best person to write content for your website…is you! An optimal solution is to hire a writer who can interview you and get the best information from you directly. If not you, they can interview one of your expert employees.
  • Make a content plan for what you want to write about on your website. Not sure how to do this? Pretend your site is a book – what would the “chapters” be?

Once you start getting a steady flow of content to your website, don’t be surprised when the visitors start to naturally flow in. As long as your site has a professional design to go along with the expert content, you should be converting customers very quickly.

After you’ve got them hooked in, what are you going to do with those customers? In order to keep them engaged with you, you may want to consider starting a mailing list (newsletter) if you don’t have one already. It’s an incredibly effective tool to sell your products and services.

Stay tuned as we cover mailing lists on a future post.

How Does Google Work? (Part 2)

How Does Google Know Who Has The Best Information?

In part 1 we spoke about how Google about information, not location. Instead of location, location, location – now it’s information, information, information.

Now that you’ve written the best valuable content about your niche, how does Google KNOW that it’s the best? After all, they aren’t going to physically read all the billions and billions of pages on the web, are they?

Well, yes and no. No, Google can’t have a real human read all of your web pages, but they can see how real humans (your visitors) react to your content.

For example, when a visitor clicks onto your site:

  • do they stay there long?
  • are they so impressed that they click through to the rest of your site, or do they leave immediately, back to Google?
  • are other websites linking to your site to help educate THEIR visitors?
  • are your social media pages thriving, thus displaying how active the community surrounding your website/business is?

There are over 200+ factors as to why Google might rank your website highly. Many of them revolve around how good your content is. Beyond writing something good, you can also help the search engines know what your site is about through something called SEO (search engine optimization).

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of helping your website gain better rankings in Google. Writing content is actually a big part of SEO, but there’s more that can be done to give Google clues about what your content is about, such as:

  • sprinkling in keywords that are relevant to the content
  • getting your articles published on other high-profile websites (such as a local newspaper, or an industry-leader’s website)
  • running an active social media presence for your business

Not only does building and marketing your expert content build your rankings online, but it also builds credibility for you as an individual, and for your business.

Think about it. When someone finds you on Google, they don’t know you from a hole in the wall. But when they arrive on your site to find content that answers all their questions, they can’t help but be convinced to call you.

Great content builds traffic, and simultaneously increases your conversion rate. If you want to get your website ranked on Google, build content. We recommend either;

  • writing the content yourself
  • hiring a writer to interview you (the expert), and write the content for you.

Unless you can find a writer who coincidentally is an expert in your field (it does happen occasionally), we wouldn’t recommend just hiring any old writer to “research” it themselves.

They’re likely to recycle the same-old information that’s available online, providing little real value to your visitors; Google notices that type of thing. At the very least, they need to interview someone who is an expert in your field (but who better than you, or one of your knowledgeable employees?).

In the final part of this series, we’ll talk about some ideas for you to write about that can really provide value for your visitors, and drive paying customers to your website.

How Does Google Work? (Part 1)

Click.

If you have a website for your business, then you know that your goal is to “get the click” from potential customers to your website.

Where is that click coming from? It could be social media or from an email, but most likely it’s coming from Google. Getting ranked highly on Google’s search results is a vital part of “getting the click”.

Getting on the 1st page of Google is much easier said than done, so knowing why Google would put you on the 1st page can help you learn how to do it.

How Google Works

Like any business, Google provides a service.

When John’s car breaks, he goes to a mechanic. When his sink plugs, he calls a plumber. And when he needs to find something online, he goes to Google.

Google helps you find information online. How do they get paid? Through the online ads you see when you search. Because they’re paid whenever you click on an ad, it’s in their best interest to keep you (the searcher) coming back.

How do they keep John coming back every time he needs something? By delivering the best websites possible! That keeps him from going to competing search engines like Yahoo! or Bing.

If John’s mechanic fixes his car poorly, what do you think he’s going to do next time? He’ll go to another mechanic of course.

In the same fashion, if Google fails to deliver what you were looking for, what will you do? Go to another search engine!

With all those Google motives in mind, how do you make sure that your website gets found on Google?

By delivering the best results!

Location, Location, Location…Not On The Web!

With your offline business, location if a key facet. But on the web, there is no “location”, there’s only…

…information!

The valuable information that you write from your real-world experience about your industry is your new “location”, and is what will get you rankings on Google.

So instead of “location location location”, now it’s:

Information, information, information (at least online it is).

If you want your website to be ranked organically (without buying Google ads) on the first page of Google, you’ll need to provide top-notch information about your industry.

Sometimes a client hires us to write content (information), because they don’t have the time or know-how to write it themselves. In order to get the best information for our clients, we tend to interview them about a certain subject and take notes. Most business owners are not trained to write, so having a professional writer picking their brain can help to create:

  1. credible information (because it’s coming straight from YOU, the business owner)
  2. well-written content (because it’s being written and formatted by a professional writer)

If you have the writing skill and time, then you can do it yourself. You’ll want to write content that is both in-demand (people are searching for the topics you’re writing about), and relevant to your industry.

Stuck on “what to write”? Here’s an endless idea:

What questions do your customers ask? Anything that a customer might want to know is worth writing about.

Go overboard on your content and write something excellent that answers your customer’s questions better than your competitors websites do. Once you’ve done that, it leaves a question:

Now that you’ve written the best valuable content about your niche, how does Google KNOW that it’s the best? After all, they aren’t going to physically read all the billions and billions of pages on the web, are they?

We’ll cover this in part 2 of this article series, “how does Google know who has the best information?”