By default, Google will display your ads on the content network. If you haven’t switched it off, you’re advertising to an audience you know little about, and you’ll find it difficult to measure and manage the results that you’re getting from your whole account.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is a bad strategy, far from it. But remember that to be successful you need to test, measure and refine what works and what doesn’t, and mixed together in one campaign, you’ll find it tough to understand where keywords are generating clicks and turning in to sales.

Google search is simple; it’s Google. You type something in to it, you get results, and sponsored links across the top and down the side. The audience here is specifically searching for a solution to a problem or to fulfil a need. If it’s a product or service, they probably have a budget and are ready to part with it.

The Google Search Network is a little different. The same principal applies; someone has a need and they are actively searching for a product or solution and have already identified their budget. But search network partners include Amazon and e-bay, Sky.com, Orange and many others, no doubt. A different audience, right? Firstly, you’ll appreciate that ads are shown in a different way on these sites, in different positions on the page. Secondly, this is a different audience: yes, they are searching, but a searcher on e-bay isn’t compelled by the same messages in your ads as a searcher on Google. Ditto for Amazon.

Let’s put it this way: identical products are sold in some swanky boutique in London and in your local car boot sale or market. They will be sold for a vastly different price. I appreciate the argument about overheads, but that isn’t the driver here - if your market trader could sell for the same price, he surely would! The audience’s perspective and expectations are different, and so is the surrounding competition.

Thirdly, there’s the Content Network, also known as AdSense. AdSense is an easy program to sign up to for any blog publisher or site owner to monetise their web site through displaying and generating clicks on Google ads. You’ve seen them all over the place, and probably ignored them, mostly.

The main principal is the same though, you bid on keywords (much broader ones) and Google matches your ads to pages that feature those keywords. So the mere fact that Suzie reads Helen’s blog about Helen’s friend who bought a Prada bag at the weekend means that Google might just match your keyword bid on ‘Prada bag’ and show your ad.

That’s OK? Sure, it’s OK. Will Suzie click on your ad? Well, perhaps, but unlikely. That doesn’t really matter, Google doesn’t measure your CTR here or judge your overall campaign performance on it either. What does matter though, is that what compels Suzie to click your ad will be a different message to that which compels someone to click it on Google Search, or it’s Search Network. It will achieve a different CTR, and more importantly, a different number of sales, or conversions for the cost of the clicks.

Even if Suzie were to click your ad when it appeared on Helen’s blog, do you think she’d be more, or less likely to buy than our friend who searched on Google?

The best way to tackle this is to split your campaigns. You’ll then be able to test, measure and refine what works for each audience, what you’re spending and what’s converting to sales. Depending on your product, service or market, you might want to split it three ways for each media network, or perhaps just Search and Content.

Learn more stuff like this.

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Why a broken Sony strengthens the brand.

I’ve known plenty of people that called themselves ‘Sony men’. That is to say, they bought in to the brand in a big way, particularly years ago. They’d only buy Sony hi-fi gear or their TV had to be a Sony. Personally, I’ve never considered myself a Sony man, but you’ve really got to respect the strength of the brand that makes someone want to only buy Sony products.

I discovered one of the methods they use to maintain that brand strength.

A slight contradiction here, but I’ve always owned Playstations. I had two of the first version (one got stolen), and two of the PS2s (one scratched discs until they were unusable) and Father Christmas kindly bought me a PS3 this year.

So here’s the lesson; the PS3 was bought from Amazon and yesterday, it just stopped reading discs altogether. After searching a few forums, I established that it’s probably a problem with the laser. I called Amazon, who took a whole bunch of details and then said I needed a reference number from Sony and gave me their telephone number.

The number turns out to be a generic one, and there’s another, dedicated number to speak with the Playstation team. A tiny bit irritated, I redial the Playstation team.

Another guy takes a few details about the fault, I’ve already tried all the options he suggests, so he registers the unit and then simply says:

“That’s fine. We’ll have our courier deliver a replacement to you tomorrow and collect the faulty one at the same time”. No repackaging the box with the accessories and cables - just the unit on its own.

What a pleasant surprise. No grief whatsoever! I really don’t mind stuff breaking down if that’s the service I’m going to get.

The alternative version of this story, full of grief and endless form-filling, tests, paying for shipping it back, being without the unit for days or weeks, would almost certainly have affected a decision to buy the next generation of Playstation. As it happened, the outcome of it breaking has actually made me even more likely to buy Sony again.

It’s a sad state of affairs when this level of service is extraordinary - surely this should be the standard level of service anyway?

So the lesson is this: your customer service doesn’t have to be extraordinary, it just needs to fulfil (or exceed) expectations - and you’ll have a customer for life.

Google announced today that it is to commence testing on Demographic Bidding. You can already target specific geographic locations for your ads to be shown, and pretty soon you’ll be able to target particular demographics too.

Even if you don’t want to target specific demographics, there could be an incredible amount of value in the new reports you’ll get to measure and compare your success across a demographic spread.

Inside AdWords: Demographic bidding beta test

Google says:

Demographic bidding and reports are available to advertisers who run contextually targeted or placement-targeted campaigns (with CPC or CPM bidding) on certain sites in the Google content network. Here’s how it works: Some publishers in our network, such as social networking sites, know the gender and age of their users because their users sign in with that information when they create a profile or fill out registration or subscription forms. Participating publishers anonymize this user reported demographic data and then send it to Google in aggregate form, allowing us to adjust which ads are shown to members of specific demographic groups. (To protect user privacy, AdWords receives this data only from publishers that have permission from users to share their data according to the site’s terms and conditions. Users are never identified personally, but only as anonymous aggregated data in the demographic reports. And to protect the privacy of minors, users under 18 can’t be targeted demographically.)

Bear in mind that this only applies to the Content Network, not Google Search or the Search Network.

Watching Property Ladder last night (a show about buying and developing property, if you don’t know it), I was dumbfounded (as was the host) by the developer of a £650k house adding a double garage door to the front of the property, despite the fact that the area wasn’t large enough to get a car in and was used internally for storage.

Sure, it made the house look great. It completed the appeal of the property amongst it’s neighbours. The finish of the property was awesome inside and out.

The problem though, is that this makes a promise to a potential buyer and then fails to deliver. It’s a big damned lie, one that might just convey the wrong message and kill your potential sale. The buyer may not have even wanted a garage, but the seeds of doubt and mistrust are already planted.

There are many examples of simple untruths out there on the web too. Buy now, in stock! Click the ad, and land on a page all about the product you want to buy and guess what: awaiting stock! If you promise next day delivery, deliver it next day. Again, the customer may not even demand next day delivery - but you promised.

Don’t make promises you can’t fulfil - it WILL cost you sales and customers.

If you’ve spent any time at all in the settings part of your AdWords campaign, you’ll have seen that Google offers a location targeting tool. By default, Google runs your ads everywhere in your chosen country, to everyone, across its Search and Content networks.

That’s fine, to a point - but what if you don’t, or can’t sell to everyone, everywhere?

If you’re selling a book, a CD, a set of golf clubs or some consumer product online, you might want to advertise everywhere. But in one campaign? Perhaps not. And if your service or product is most often supplied in person - let’s say hairdressing, construction, car repairs, plumbing, new or used cars, houses - whatever, you’d be well advised to target people local to you, particularly with a smaller budget.

You should first know how location targeting works:

1. Google predetermines a searcher’s location through their IP address. Most of us have a unique one, assigned by our ISP. And again *most* IP addresses are geographic in nature, meaning that rather like a telephone number, it identifies which country or town you are in. This is true for the majority of IP addresses. However, a minority of users’ IP addresses do not accurately reflect their location. The result is that your ads could be displayed to a user outside of your chosen location(s). In all fairness, this is an IP address issue, not Google’s problem.
2. Google also uses the location you have selected to include the place names as keywords. Let’s say that you’re targeting the Birmingham area, and 50 miles around. Google decides that your bid on the keyword ‘pest control’ is more relevant to someone searching for ‘birmingham pest control’ than a competitor targeting the entire country, as indeed would a search for ‘walsall pest control’, or ‘dudley pest control’.

Just how granular these location-matches are is unclear. For example, it is possible to choose a town to target, but not all towns are available in the list: London, of course, is fine, but what about Guildford? Or Mansfield? Or Marlow? And how about Richmond - that is in the list, but means Yorkshire, not South West London (and they don’t tell you that unless you ask, by the way).

So, for a service provider, you might want to use the option of a radius of your location. Start with a larger radius, monitor your budget usage each day and reduce the radius until your budget lasts the whole day. I know that you might quite happily sell your service to a market beyond this and agree that it seems odd to not advertise to that audience. But unless you’re going to increase your budget to capture all those clicks all day, you’re better off concentrating on clicks that have the best chance of ‘converting’ to a sale, picking up the phone or actually becoming a customer - and those are the people that are closest to you.

Selling country-wide or internationally, you should still use location targeting. Split your campaign(s) - target each for a chosen location. Perhaps there’s a slightly different message for people in different locations - no point in telling people in Ireland or Canada that there’s “FREE UK NEXT DAY DELIVERY!” - why do they care? Even if that doesn’t put them off clicking your ad, you’re wasting valuable space for a more compelling message.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, splitting your campaigns will mean that you’ll be much more able to measure how the campaigns are performing. Here’s an example.

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Given the cost of the conversion, if we’d spent that £689.89 budget on the UK instead, we’d have made 252 sales - nearly twice those made in Canada, and double the profit.

If a cost of £5.38 per sale is fine (and I’m sure it is for most businesses!), you’re still better off knowing where your budget is working hardest for you and where your successes and failures are coming from. The tools are at your disposal - use them to your advantage.

So, to summarise: with careful keyword selection and location targeting, you can easily create a message that compels each specific audience. The keyword ‘magazine printing’ might get your ad lots of impressions, but targeting 30 miles of Birmingham with the keyword ‘cheap magazine printing’ means that you’ll know a whole lot more about that searcher before they even see your ad, right? In your ad, tell them you’re in Birmingham and tell them your prices are keen, too - they’ll be much more likely to click your ad, and more likely to land you a sale for the cost of a few clicks.

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Recently, a number of AdWords campaigns I’m working have been sailing very close to the limits of what Google will permit in a single AdWords account.

Anyone who is a subscriber to the ‘long tail‘ principal will know that generating variations and combinations of keywords is good practice to find lots of niche little terms that will build a strong click through rate, a lower cost per click and help you beat your competitors with a stick.

If you’ve read my free AdWords paper, or taken part in one of my online consultations, you’ll also know that a well-structured account improves your quality score and reduces your cost-per click.

Given these two principals, it’s usual practice therefore to create an ad group for ‘widgets’ and then variations of that ad group for additional qualifying keywords like ‘best widgets’, ‘cheapest widgets’, ‘cheap widgets’, ’small widgets’, and further still for ‘cheap big widgets’ and so forth. Obviously, this strategy leads to thousands of potential combinations of keywords and ad groups.

So, here we are with our tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of ad groups - and we’re stuck. An AdWords account can’t take them all. For reference, the advised limits are 3,000 keywords in any one ad group, 100 ad groups per campaign, and 50,000 keywords per account. If you want more than that, you’ll need more than one account.

However, if you want to keep just one account to make it easier to manage, Google suggests that they match broad terms on singular and plural - so there’s no need to bid on ‘widget’ and ‘widgets’. Really? I’m not buying that at all. The whole system is based on relevance, and some plurals invite a whole different kind of traffic, producing better (or worse) click through rates than their singular counterparts.

Following on from that little gem, how about other variations of a word? Does bidding on cheap, also mean that you’re bidding on ‘cheaper’ and ‘cheapest’? Google declined to answer that one.

But know this: if you do bid on the variations, they’ll generate different results. Some better, some worse, but different.

My advice? If you’re near those account limits, bid on singular and plurals of your core keywords and perhaps keep the qualifiers down to singular only and expand on those that generate impressions.

Another little gem popped up in my conversation with Google too - one I’ve not seen officially published anywhere: having lots of keywords that generate no impressions has a negative impact on your campaign. Logical? No. True? Perhaps. But it’s difficult to find out what doesn’t generate impressions or clicks until you try, right?

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A guest post by Media Relations guru, Tony Garner, Viva PR.

Web Sites that Work

We live in an exciting age. In some ways it has never been easier to communicate with people and a lot of that is thanks to this T’interweb thingy. Blogs, websites and e-shots are cheap and relatively easy to set up, even for techno numpties like me.

But therein lies one of the problems — how, amid this plethora of words and images can you stand out and get your voice heard?

Websites are funny beasts. One of the common traps businesses fall into when they commission a site is to concentrate exclusively on how it looks NOT what it says. Flash images, break beat sounds and pictures of the chairman’s cat are all well and good but somewhere along the line the fundamental purpose of having a web presence appears to have got lost.

They’re potentially great communication and marketing tools but you have to remember the basics: what you are trying to achieve with a particular web page and what you hope the reader will do next.

So what’s the answer? Easy. Combine dazzling eye-catching design with fresh and original content. Don’t get blinded by the look. Instead, commission copy that’s well written and easy-to-follow and then keep it fresh by regularly updating it.

If you can manage that then you are probably in the top 10 per cent bracket already. Unfortunately, a lot of what is churned out these days is poorly constructed and chock full of spelling and grammar errors. Like sloppy service in a shop, these errors are offensive to the potential customers because they say, “we don’t care about your experience here in our cyberworld”.

Another cardinal sin is a failure to do regular updates. Once the novelty of the communication tools wears off, too many firms leave their website or blog to fester.

So please don’t have news pages that haven’t been updated for more than a month. What message does “Latest News — November 2003” convey about your business?

Another thing to keep in mind is that — thanks to Pay Per Click campaigns — a visitor to a website might arrive anywhere in the site. For example we do some work for a solicitor who has a number of specialities. The bulk of his traffic arrives via his Google Adwords campaigns, but it is directed to a page linked to a particular service. The visitor may never see the ‘home’ page.

So, it’s worth pausing here and thinking what that means. It means you’ve got a number of different entry points or ‘home’ pages. We’re getting a bit technical here, but it’s simply a case of putting yourself in the shoes of the visitor and working out how and why they’ve landed where they have on your site.

I’ll close this little rant by revealing our own office pet hate when it comes to B2B copy. It applies to copy we see both online and offline. Sadly, we see it daily. It’s when a company refers to itself in the plural. We lost count of the times we have read Firm A are expanding. The firm is one. It’s singular. It’s Firm A is expanding.

Here endeth the lesson.

No, actually, here endeth the lesson — don’t lose site of the most precious marketing tool you have – words! There are millions of them and they’re mean, moody and magnificent.

Tony Garner
www.vivapr.co.uk

Tony Garner is a media relations specialist and a student of my AdWords success programme.

A colleague posted me this article about the online marketing economy.

Big Bubble? Maybe. Big Trouble? Definitely.

There’s nothing like a bit of Google-bashing, huh? Bill Gates must love it! It certainly takes some of the usual negative attention away from Microsoft.

If Google is squeezing the AdSense partners, and I don’t especially advertise on the content network so I wouldn’t know or be too bothered, there are competitors in the marketplace like Yahoo and Microsoft that will happily take their advertising real-estate. If sites have any decent level of traffic, they’ll actually be able to sell ad space on their sites through an agency anyway, or at least those smart enough will enter in to affiliate programs to monetize their sites.

Pay per click is the same as any sales and marketing tool – if the ROI doesn’t stack up, dump it. This is true of telemarketing, direct mail, billboard, TV or radio advertising or even your humble sales guy or gal.

There’s also some confusion of the facts here – AdSense isn’t search, it’s the practice of Google displaying ‘relevant’ ads on a site based on a page’s content. Most visitors to these sites aren’t actually searching for a solution to their problem. This is incidental advertising, not the ‘qualified customers’ that this article mentions and Google search produces.

With AdSense (the content network), ads are displayed to a viewer that might be interested in what you’re selling, but far more often than not isn’t: just because the term ‘cat food’ is mentioned on a page a viewer happens to be reading, doesn’t necessarily mean that the viewer even has a damned cat, let alone looking for some food for one!

Is the economy a bubble about to burst? Well, perhaps and perhaps not - but advertisers will keep using a medium that generates a good return on investment, and dump it when it doesn’t. And if web publishers are getting a raw deal, the smart ones will always go elsewhere for a better deal too.

Dr Steven Covey calls it ’start with the end in mind’, in his recent post Seth Godin suggests it as ‘follow through’. The lesson for both is the same:

Work with your customers in the knowledge of the end result. If your end result is a quick sale and no repeat orders, where is the motivation to do a good job, or make sure that they are happy? If the profit in acquiring new customers is in the long term relationship, you’re much more likely to be considerate, helpful, supportive and understanding. You’ll consistently work hard to do a good job.

Seth compares the follow-through to the action required in Tennis or Golf - the ball is long gone, so why keep swinging? The same is true for football, boxing and my personal favourite, snooker - if you keep your cue continues in a straight line after the shot, you know the stroke itself will also be true.

Seth’s Blog: Follow through
If you know that the last two inches of your follow through don’t matter, then you’ll start slowing down at three inches, or even four, and suddenly it does matter. If you draw the line on money back guarantees you’ll keep sliding backwards, bit by bit, until it does matter. If you’re quick to fire the employee who needs a lot of help, you’ll be quicker with those that need just a little, and then, pretty soon, it’s a very different place to work, isn’t it?

Initially, I was a little sceptical about this change, and I still am. As Google suggests in its post, we’ll have to monitor campaigns over the next few days or weeks (depending on the number of clicks you usually achieve) to see what difference this makes.

Actually, I have established a circumstance where this is beneficial. During the last week, I was revising a campaign. One particular ad was consistently achieving #3 or #4 spot. On increasing the bid price to put it in to the top spot, the ad actually achieved less clicks and cost more per click, but remained in the #4 position.

The advantage is this: with these changes, assuming your ad and landing page fulfils the required quality score, you can now get to the top spot much more easily. Before, you had little control over your average CPC; you do have control over your max bid price, although it may be more than you’re willing to pay.

Inside AdWords: Improved top ad placement formula now in effect
Beginning today, the actual CPC you pay for an ad in a top spot will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, your actual CPC will be discounted and the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay.

And yet, I still think this move says profit, not (e)quality. What do you think? Comment below.

See more AdWords comments here, or learn how to achieve AdWords excellence.