About Business Development

Personally, I find that late December is a good time for investing time in planning activities in January-March next year so that I can hit the ground running while competitors are still nursing a Christmas hangover!

If you are able to spare a few moments, I’d value your opinion on something:

In between client projects, I’ve been creating a one-hour AdWords consultation. This enables businesses like yours to quickly learn how to make improvements to your campaign performance. Using some great online tools, we can share a view of the same screen while we talk.

Also, I’m considering offering some sort of support contract for AdWords: a monthly fee for unlimited advice and support to improve your AdWords campaigns (but not hands-on management). If you have any thoughts on this, please drop me a line.

On the subject of Google Checkout, were you aware that you’re currently able to securely process credit card transactions for free for up to 10 times your monthly AdWords spend? It’s an opportunity not to be missed.

Answers to recent questions:

Q: I’m using AdWords, what about Yahoo! and MSN?
Taking a broad marketing stance here, it’s good practice to use multiple marketing channels to develop opportunities and greater sales. Using just one channel is simply too great a risk. What if AdWords clicks start costing far too much to justify your advertising? How do you judge how successful AdWords is without a comparison? What if you could get twice the clicks and twice the conversions from the Yahoo! network that you do from Google - that would be a 400% increase! Without trying those other PPC channels, even with a small budget, you’ll never know how good AdWords is. And your business will be in a risky position, relying totally on AdWords for all of your sales.

Q: What about SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation is good practice too. If you’re unsure what SEO is - briefly, it’s the practice of creating the pages on your site in a manner that best suits the search engines. Done well, it will put your page at the top of the organic listings for the search terms that most relate to your business. It’s not just a case of creating a page and waiting for the search engine to index your site.

There are businesses that survive on organic search alone to generate business, but they are few and far between. Most businesses will run SEO alongside PPC campaigns. From my own perspective, I find that when I’m researching something, I don’t click on paid ads: I’m not in the mood to buy something, I want some information. When I want to buy a product or service, I want to be sold to, so I click on paid ads. To use a pretty rough analogy, if you wanted to restore an old dining table, it’s like walking past the DIY store on your way to the library: you know the DIY store is there and you’ll come back to buy something, but right now you want to learn not buy.

Q: My business operates in a limited geographic location - what do I do with AdWords?
Actually, this is pretty simple. Google has a tool that allows you to only show your ads to people within a given radius of a given location. This then only shows your ads to people who are likely to become a customer, and excludes those that are not. You’ll get a better Click Through Rate and waste less on clicks that won’t turn in to sales.

In addition to this, you might also want to consider creating campaigns for different locations to assess performance, or to better target ads. Work I recently carried out on one campaign included splitting one campaign in to four; one to target UK search, one to target UK content, one to target European search, and one European content. Why? Because it becomes much easier to monitor, assess and invest more money on the campaigns that generate sales, and revise or stop those that don’t. Also, in UK ads, we might advertise free shipping, but this doesn’t apply to overseas clients and it’s totally irrelevant - we’re able to create ads that target that market in a different way with a more relevant message. The keywords and structure of the account remain almost identical, so it’s little effort to accomplish this - but can help turn a good campaign in to a great one.

Q: I can’t see my ads on Google, or they appear in really low positions.
There are a number of reasons why this happens:

1. If you use ad scheduling, your campaign might not be set to run right now.
2. Your ads are set to ’show evenly throughout the day’ - they don’t show all the time.
3. Google uses personal search: placing cookies on your machine and registering your IP address against each search you make, the engine registers which links and ads you click on and which you don’t. Based on your individual search history, you will be presented with different ads. It’s quite possible, therefore, that having never clicked on your own ad, Google thinks that it’s not relevant to you and therefore decides to show an ad that you might click on instead. To overcome this, use the ad preview tool which takes no account of personal search, and does not affect your all-important CTR.