Does pausing Adwords affect performance?
Yes it does, undoubtedly. Look at every keyword as a separate market. The market dynamics are affected constantly by changing consumer and advertiser behaviour. Your involvement in the market affects that dynamic, and as Google always rewards relevancy, a good clickthrough rate (CTR) and a good conversion rate will always earn a lower cost-per-clickthrough (CPC). But don’t rely on Google to give you the lowest possible CPC - you’ll need to explore a little bit. If you’ve got a well optimised landing page (so your keyword matches your ad, matches the title tags and body content of your landing page), you can lower CPC further and still achieve the same Ad rank and conversion rates.
But all of this good work is destroyed when you pause your ads. You’ve withdrawn from the marketplace (this is analagous to selling shares, you’ve left the market), and you’re no longer playing. When you re-enter the market you can’t expect the dynamics to revert to the point when you exited.
It’s a pain though, because there’s lots of times when you need and want to pause - your site might be down, or performing badly or you might be releasing new products. You’ll need to make the call on what you do at this stage. Perhaps the safest strategy would be to reduce your keyword bids to very low levels. You’re still in the market, but your traffic will be practically non-existent.
TurboAds : it’s Adwords on steroids!
Peter Turner works at Webreality SEO and he’s an Adwords API genius. Yesterday I was lucky enough to trial out his new TurboAds product.
The team has written a new OSCommerce contribution that exports all product data to TurboAds. Using a sophisticated template system, TurboAds then lists Adwords for every product. With Healthspark we have 106 products. TurboAds created 3 variations per product and promptly listed 106 Adgroups with 3 variations per group, that’s 318 Ads!
Best of all, each Ad is very specific, e.g.
So, the ad lists on the keyword ‘psyllium husks’, the prod description, price, display URL and destination URL are all pulled from Peter’s OSCommerce Adwords Feed.
I’ll post more about what we’ve learnt from the TurboAds data, but I’d thought you’d like to know about it. If you’d like to sign-up for TurboAds just fill out the Contact Baldy Form.
Needless to say I’ve been dancing around the room a lot.
Conversion Rate Optimization
SEM agencies typically will do a lot of work on your Adword account, they’ll fiddle with copy, keywords, etc., but they’re less happy rolling up their sleeves and hacking your site to improve conversion rate.
But when should you start work on conversion rate optimization? Never without stringent testing. Assuming your site is reasonably designed, and your product offering is reasonably priced, you should be able to achieve 6-10% click through rates (CTR), and 6-10% conversion rates. So roughly 1 in 10 clickthrough, and 1 in 10 of those on the site buy.
You can increase your CTR by analysing your copy and keyword cohesion. Spin out the higher CTR keywords into their own ad groups, and just use the target keyword in the Ad title. Speak the language of your customers.
But to increase your conversionr rate, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and start someone serious work on the design and information hierarchy of your site. But again, I’d stress, don’t do it without testing. These guys know their onions, and their 101 tips for using the Google Optimizer are an excellent place to start.
Roll up, roll up! Get your title tags here!
I’ve blogged a lot on title tags recently. There’s no better way of advertising to Google what your page is about.
If you’re in a competitive market, you’ll see from the amazing Google Trends tool that customers really shop around. Look at this analysis of the Vitamins Minerals & Supplements (VMS) sector.
In order to compare prices, browsers are tending to cut and paste the product title into their browser bar, e.g. Rosehip 2000mg 60 Tablets. So, an easy win against your competitors is to take the product title from a leading product on their site, and incorporate it into the title tag for your equivalent product page. Then you’re making it even easier for consumers to compare prices with your competitors - everyone wins.
Google drops pay-per action beta
Yesterday Google announced that it was retiring its pay-per-action beta. The beta programme followed the acquisition of DoubleClick, and at the time I was convinced it intimated a move by Google to take an even bigger slice of global ad revenue.
High conversion value sectors like recruitment or real estate carry Adword campaigns that are almost incidentally cheap. For instance, I’m running an Adword campaign for my parent’s house which is yielding ten targeted leads a day - the estate agent complains he’s getting more enquiries for this property than his entire portfolio. Cost so far : £54.13. Value to estate agent upon sale: £8,300.
So you can see why Google would be motivated by a pay-per-action model. I’m a great fan of Google’s conversion tracking tool, but I’m still skeptical about Google seeing the value of the sale. The temptation to artificially lift CPC must be irresistible, but at least for now, it looks like we’re safe.
Slow site = More expensive Adwords!
Just over a week ago, Google introduced a new aspect into its Quality Score for Adwords. Google’s Quality Score for your Adwords affects your rank and your minimum bid amount - a high quality Ad will generally rank better and cost less. As always, Google rewards relevance. And a relevant (high Quality Score Ad) will be rewarded.
Take a look at Ten things Google has found to be true to find out more about Google’s founding principles. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow”. And now, this philosophy has been extended to Adwords. If you’re landing page is slow, your Quality Score will suffer. It’s worth checking out how Google scores load times, as if your site is slow you’ll be hit on the Quality Score, and you’ll be hit by customers leaving before the page has finished loading.
Testing times: split-testing rules
Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy a full page ad in the Daily Telegraph, but the print morphed evenly throughout the day, so you could see which ad was the most effective?
One of Adwords most powerful features allows you to do just that. For the same set of keywords you can display as many Ads as you like. By default, the Adwords manager is set to optimize which means Google will establish which is your best Ad, and favour that Ad.
If you’re checking into Adwords once a day (I live there), you should set to rotate. This allows you to choose the winner from your split-testing. You need 20 clicks before you can declare a winner, anything less is just not enough data. There’s a great tool at www.splittester.com that helps you check your analysis.
In split-testing we tend to focus on getting a high clickthrough-rate (CTR). CTRs are definitely important, as Google always rewards relevance, but a high CTR and poor conversion rate is a fool’s game. Don’t lose sight of the end game, which is winning customers.
What’s wrong with this adword?
My apologies to Ink Cycle in advance, but here’s what’s wrong with this Ad:
This Ad was served as a response to a search for ‘HP 57 printer cartridge’. With the exception of the word ‘cartridge’ the adword makes no effort whatsoever to use the language of the customer.
The title and body copy carries no specific price information. This Adword will gain clicks but from browsers who don’t know what they want to buy. That’s wasting clicks.
The destination URL is to a general landing page. Now the customer is faced with a bewildering array of choices. More often than not the first choice will be to leave. Taking customers to a general landing page will often yield a deservedly high bounce rate.
‘Absurdly low prices’ is marketing speak. What’s absurd about them? If they’re so absurdly low, let’s see them!
Finally, the display URL is not utilised to enforce any messaging. If you’re really stuck with absurdly low prices, you might try: www.inkcycle.co.uk/aburd_prices.
Writing for the web
Jakob Neilsen’s definitive article, How to Read for the Web, happily gives us guidelines for writing content that is optimised for search engines. It’s summarised below, and you can see immediately why it is Google friendly.
As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
Meta tags: what’s it all about?
Meta tags are read by browsers and search engines, you won’t see them on a web page unless you click view source. There are three main kinds of meta tags that people normally obsess over.
- <title>Meta tags: what’s it all about</title> - this is the tag that generates the page title that appears in your browser bar. I’d say the page title is about the most important semantic location for your entire page. If you’re targeting a keyword like ‘arthritis pain relief‘, you’d want ‘arthritis pain relief‘ in the title, but don’t forget to make the rest of the page about ‘arthritis pain relief’. Google’s looking for good content, and the page title should correlate with all other content on the page. [notice that Word Press with Permalinks switched on is generating a url with the page title included in the URL - these friendly URLs are also an important aid]
- <meta name=”description” content=”Baldy’s Blog is the definitive and accessible guide to the latest SEO and Adword techniques”> I don’t think (and I’m happy to be corrected) that meta description makes any difference to your weighting in Google, but the meta description is normally used as the description in Google’s search results. So, if you’ve written a good meta description, you’re likely to get a better click-through rate (CTR). A better CTR = more traffic = a higher ranking.
Note, your meta description must match the content of the page, and must only use the vocabulary found on the page. Anything else, will signal spam.
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEM, Google, Adwords, Baldy” />. In the old days you could slam your meta keywords full of anything, and it would deliver traffic. Meta keywords very vital in the days when searchbots couldn’t digest the content of pages. But they can now, and in my view you can forget meta keywords. If you do feel tempted to use them, make sure the keywords absolutely reflect the page’s content.