Description Line 1: 35 Characters

Description Line 2: 35 Characters

Display URL: 35 Characters

As an Adwords advertiser, the above are the parameters we have to work with when creating our Ad Copy.

Let’s face it. It’s really not a huge amount of characters to work with. Let’s consider that an effective PPC ad text should ideally contain the keyword that the user searched for within the text in order to look relevant and stand out. Furthermore, it ideally should also contain any USPs you are able to offer over your competitors to help you stand out and appeal to potential customers. Finally, the perfect type of ad will also be written in a tone that appeals to the right types of users, but also puts off the wrong types. (For example, let’s say you sell expensive watches and want to bid on the term ‘watches’. A user that searches for this term could be after cheap watches, or they could be after expensive watches. Your ad should therefore make it clear what type of watches you sell to avoid wasted click spend from the users seeking cheap watches).

That’s a lot of things to consider for such a short space! As a result, paid search advertisers (myself included), often try to think of every little trick possible to squeeze as much out of this space as possible. I have always tended to use as much of the 25, 35, 35, 35 limits as possible; as this has felt like the only way I can get the full message across that I want. In some market sectors though, you may be one advertiser out of a possible ten who have all got the same sort of idea. The end result? A page of search results where no individual ad stands out from any other. Users more often than not in my experience will then opt for the ads in positions 1 to 3, as the eye is drawn more to the centre of the page above the fold. You could simply bid higher to ensure your ad is seen in these positions, but for campaigns with tight budgets or working towards low CPAs, being in the top positions isn’t always feasible due to the higher costs involved.

So what’s the answer?

Clearly as advertisers in this situation, we need to find ways of standing out from the crowd. When users run searches on Google, more often than not, they will take only a matter of seconds to scan the results page before deciding which paid ad, or organic search result to click on. As a result, even the smallest subtle difference between your ad and your competitors can help you stand out. This may be the use of a symbol in your ad such as ™ or © to help you get noticed. Alternatively, you may look to numerically bullet point your key product offerings or USPs in the main ad text (e.g. 1) Buy Joe Bloggs Product Now 2) Free P&P 3) Fast Delivery!). I have tried the above techniques on a number of campaigns and see varying results.

However, a new method I’ve been trialling recently is what I would call the ‘Less is More’ approach. I feel that I’ve become so fixated on trying to get the most out of every single character available to me, that sometimes taking the opposite approach can work surprisingly well too.

One of the markets I currently do a lot of work in is the magazine sector. Whilst the examples below are fictional, the theories behind the content are based on similar ads I’ve written and real results that I’ve experienced.

The example below is similar to a typical ad I have run with initially utilising as much of the ad space as possible whilst also ensuring I included a USP and relevance of the product.

Typical results:

CTR – 4%

Conversion Rate – 9.5%

Using the ‘Less is More’ approach, for my next advert test, I decided to actually try and cut down on the number of characters I was using to see if this would help my ad stand out from the crowd and came up with something along these lines:

Typical results:

CTR – 7%

Conversion Rate – 8.5%

A nice high surge in click through rate – brilliant! Interestingly though, the conversion rate fell slightly which I put down to the decreased information about the USP (some users may have presumed they would get 6 free issues as a one off, whereas the deal is for 6 initial free issues, then if they choose not to cancel, they then start paying). However, as I’m now recording a much higher CTR, although my average CPA is a little higher (but still within target), my conversion numbers overall are far bigger.

At this point, I wonder if I can push it even further, and so decided to push the ‘Less is More’ theory even further to produce one final test:

Typical results:

CTR – 9%

Conversion Rate – 7%

Once again, another nice increase in click through rate! Now, if you visualise the above advert in a search results page full of adverts that look my first ad example up the page, you can see how an ad using less characters could stand out in the crowd. Again, we see an increase in click through rate, yet a decrease in conversion rate. This saw the average CPA rise again, but once more, with the large increase in click through rate, conversion volumes were much higher.

So in summary, in the tests I’ve carried out, having shorter, punchier ad copy messages certainly has a positive impact on clickthrough rate. Whether that positive impact is due to the adverts standing out more from their competitors in search results, or whether using less information makes those ads more intriguing to click on remains to be seen.

One thing is clear though, and that is that showing less information in your adverts in order to stand out can have a detrimental impact on your conversion rate based on the results I’ve seen (which when you think about it, isn’t surprising at all).

However, as an advertiser, you must weight up the balance between the two. Do you make a higher profit from acquiring 50 conversions at £10 a conversion compared to 30 conversions at £7.50 a conversion? If you can afford it, and volume is key, then less may well be more.

Have you tried advert tests similar to those mentioned in this post? If so, please drop me a comment – I’d like to hear what kind of results you found too.

For many searches there were ads with over 40 characters in the first description line and then the second description line would be shorter. The screen shot below shows my search for ‘ladies shoes’. The three ads that have more than 35 characters in the first description line are highlighted:

This could be highly significant for those writing PPC ads, as it reduces the limitations currently set. It also makes the first description line of the ads a lot more prominent. With more room to put the best message/offer in that line, it could be a competitive tactic from advertisers. Although it does change how some people traditionally write their ads with an offer in the first line and a call to action in the second line, for example. Some advertisers also use repetition as much as Google will allow, ensuring the keyword is seen on all lines of the ad, this could also change that idea.

The change in the character split does not appear to happen on ads not shown with Google Instant where the ads appear to have the normal character limits. The PPC ads below for the search term ‘pizza’ show the difference searching without Google Instant and then with. For the Domino’s ads, they may prefer the ad to be appearing with the full bottom line “Hurry, offer ends Sunday” rather than the “hurry” part now appearing on the first line.

Having spoken to a Google representative they were not aware of this being allowed, and when I tried to add an advert with a longer first description line, my ad was unable to post. So I am presuming this was not a deliberate change with Google Instant rather than a new feature. But it would certainly be interesting to see this change in the future!

“John’s a pretty smart guy. He runs a company that sells specialty pet foods. He manages his own investments. He keeps an eye on his taxes. But I’ve found a way to turn John into a blithering idiot. I’ve asked him to figure out how to use Google’s (GOOG) AdSense profitably. Are you interested in a mind-numbing exercise? Give AdSense a shot. Or Yahoo SM or MSN AdCenter. Don’t you know how much to budget for “clicks” on your ad? Are you just a little suspicious as to who exactly is counting these “clicks” that conveniently turn into revenue for these companies? Like John, you’ve just entered the alternate universe of Internet advertising! Here’s a word of wisdom: Leave the mass-market advertising to Coke (KO) and Pepsi (PEP). Small business owners should stick to less mystifying forms of promotion.”

Tech ‘Solutions’ Your Small Biz Can’t Use Now, I’m not going to go into detail about his argument – he doesn’t even know the difference between Adwords and Adsense, and I can’t actually FIND an explanation of what he thinks is wrong with PPC – but it does highlight a problem that the industry seems to have at the moment. There are a lot of ‘have-a-go’ advertisers who decide to give Adwords a go, and don’t make it work. That’s fine and dandy, but for a few people, when their egos clash with a dismal failure, they simply write the whole thing off as somebody else’s fault. I’d hazard a guess here, that Mr Marks decided to give Adwords a go, perhaps for his own site, or on behalf of one of his clients, and got bad results. Unable to accept responsibility, he decided that nobody could have done better. Cue some more bad publicity for the PPC industry. So what did he do wrong? What are the mistakes that business-savvy people make when setting up Adwords accounts?

Paying For Clicks

Well, there’s a big difference between PPC and just about every other form of advertising. Imagine that you’ve got a shop, but you have to pay every time somebody walks in through the door. You’d soon stick a bouncer on the door, making sure that only people who look like they might buy something get in. Compare this to any form of traditional advertising – whether it’s posters, e-mails or even SEO, you just want to get as much traffic as possible – if 90% of them aren’t really very interested, who cares? You may a (more or less) fixed price regardless of how many people visit your site. So PPC may be the only form of advertising where you want to deter the wrong people from visiting you.

Google Are A Bunch Of Con-Men

How dare they keep charging me more and more to advertise with them? This keeps cropping up time and time again – people seem to think that Google is some kind of business directory, and that you should pay a fixed amount for a certain amount of space on their SERPs. Let’s be clear on this – Google is a Search Engine, and the only thing that keeps them running is the number of people that use them to find things. If people stop using Google Search, their whole business will go south in record time. So they make sure that people keep using them, by making the search results as relevant as possible. This is, after all, why people use Google in the first place. And they do it by rewarding the adverts that people are clicking on it, and relate to the search, and penalising the ones that don’t. So if people aren’t clicking on your advert, Google doesn’t want it to appear (or, if you believe they’re evil, they want to be compensated for bad adverts messing up their nice, relevant search results). Why is this so hard to understand? Is it really that unreasonable? The point is, you can get profitable traffic from Google – all you have to do is to focus on keywords that are relevant to what you do, and write compelling adverts. Perhaps the people that accuse Google simply can’t conceive that their adverts suck (if you’ll forgive the American colloquialism). Where else do advert-writers have to go head-to-head with ten other advert writers, competing for the same traffic? No fancy graphics to play with, no superlatives, and only a few words to play with? For old-school advert writers, I can only guess that Adwords must be advertising hell!

Small Businesses Can Make Money From Adwords

We used to represent a restaurant in Leeds, who were getting bookings through Google for about £2 each. They were raking it in, and there’s no reason that other businesses can’t do the same. We’ve had plenty of campaigns over the years with small budgets that have worked well. Perhaps the problem is that they believe that it’s too difficult to manage a campaign themselves, and too expensive to hire an Agency. The truth is that Adwords really isn’t all that difficult – as long as you’ve got a reasonable level of numeracy, and the time to build and manage your campaign, then as long as you read up and understand exactly how Adwords works, you can do it yourselves. If your campaign is big enough or valuable enough that you want to get the very best from it, then talk to an Agency – they’ll generally be able to tell you upfront whether they can make you sufficient extra profit to cover their fees. You can make money from Adwords, if you just follow these basic steps:

1. Only target keywords that relate to what you do, and nothing else. What percentage of the people searching for that keyword are actually looking for what you have/do?
2. Group your keywords, so that the adverts and landing pages are relevant to every search that shows them. If your landing pages are product pages, or you want to include prices in your adverts, then group your keywords around individual products. If you want to land on a page helping people to choose a product (e.g. a kettle), then have an Adgroup for kettles.
3. Stand out from the competition. Most businesses are very similar to their competitors, and this is often reflected in their adverts. Why should people visit your site rather than anyone else’s? Tell people how great you are (even if you aren’t all that great).
4. Bid sensibly. You can see what percentage of your clicks are turning into sales or leads, and you should know what a sale/lead is worth to you, so don’t bid more than a click’s worth. There are no prizes for appearing at the top of search results!
5. Test new adverts. Simple, really – keep writing new adverts, running them alongside the old adverts, and keeping the one that works better.
6. Monitor and adjust your campaign. If a keyword is performing badly, reduce the bid or remove it. If it’s doing well, consider bidding a bit more.

That’s really all there is to Adwords. I’m not saying that every business is suited to Adwords, but it’s certainly worth the time and effort of trying it…

1. All of the competitors increase their bids by 50%
2. The competitor immediately below you increases his bid sharply, to move top.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the number of impressions has no bearing at all of the sweet-spot. If each position gets the same percentage of the clicks, then it makes no difference. In effect, if you double the number of impressions, you’ll double the number of clicks, the number of conversions, the cost and hence the profit, in every position. I’ve assumed that everyone has the same Quality Score here – it’s unlikely to make a major difference to the So, for the sake of simplicity, I’ve left the traffic volumes where they are. They’ll impact the total profit that you make, but not the most profitable strategy. Here’s the first scenario. Each conversion makes a profit of £100, the conversion rates are fairly healthy, and the cost per clicks are quite high.

This is the data for a typical month. The most profitable position is 5th, with a cost per click of £2.11, though 6th position is only marginally less profitable. What happens if everybody increases their bids by 50% for Christmas?

Should you drop down the results page, or increase your bids? In this case, a bit of both. Your CPC has increased from £2.11 to £2.79, and you’ve dropped a position in the search results. Here, the higher cost of staying in 5th has more than outweighed the additional conversions that you’d get there, compared to 6th. On the other hand, leaving the CPC at £2.11 would have cut your conversions by more than half (compared to staying in 5th), which would cost you more in lost profits than it would save you in terms of cheaper clicks. Note that the profit appears to have fallen here, but that’s because I didn’t increase the traffic volumes. If the traffic doubled over Christmas, your profit in 6th position would be just under £20,000. One final note here – in this instance, if the bids increased by more than 15%, the correct position to appear in changes to 6th. To make it drop to seventh, the bids need to increase by a massive 70%. Interesting, but hardly conclusive. This is just one scenario, so let’s try another one. Here, the profit per conversion is lower – £60 – and the cost per clicks and conversion rates are also much lower:

Here’s the scenario for a typical month. The optimum position is 4th, though 2nd – 6th is very flat. So it seems plausible that the impact of a big increase in bids would be greater. Again, increasing the bids by 50% for Christmas…

The results are similar to the ones in the first scenario – you increase the bid, but not enough to retain 4th position in the results. To make 5th the optimum position here, the bids need to increase by a factor of 35% – 82%. Here’s one more scenario – in this case, the profit per conversion is low – £15, the conversion rates are very high and the bids are moderate.

Again, in this example, 4th is the optimum position (I’m not suggesting that this is always the case – it’s just convenient when comparing the results from different scenarios). Once more, here’s what you get when you increase the bids by 50%.

Once more, the conclusion is a kind of half-way house. You increase your bids, but not by enough to maintain 4th position. In this case, the range of bid increases for which the 5th spot is the optimum is 38% – 159%. So what are the conclusions here? In all of these cases, an increase in bids of 50% led to the sweet spot dropping by one position. But this isn’t the whole story – an increase in bids of 30% would have resulted in the sweet spots in the last two scenarios remaining in the same place. And an increase of 100% would have led to the first two sweet spots dropping by two places. So, to a certain extent at least, the impact on your optimum bid depends on your particular circumstances. However, there are two conclusions that are true in every scenario I could think of:

1. You should never reduce your bids.
2. You should never move further up the search results.

So your new bid is bounded by two values, the amount required to retain your old position, and your old bid. At what point between these two values you should set your bid depends on individual circumstances. One further point here – if you see the conversion rate increasing in the run up to Christmas, then there is clearly scope to increase your bids, and possibly your position within the search rankings, as the value of a click increases. Similarly, if your average order value increases, then your clicks become more valuable, in which case you may find your sweet-spot moving up. At the start of this blog, I asked two questions. All of the work so far has been based around a scenario where everyone increases their bids. But what happens if only one competitor does. If their increase doesn’t affect your position (they were above you before they increased their bid, or below you even after increasing their bid) then it makes no difference at all. Your sweet spot will not change at all, barring very unusual circumstances. If they move above you, then there are two possibilities – you can either increase your bids to retain your old position, or you can leave your bids alone, and drop one place in the search results. No other option makes any sense, if you think about it. Regrettably, there is no absolute answer to this one. However, in the vast majority of cases (including the three from earlier) the correct decision is to leave your bids where they are, and drop down one position in the search results. The company that has made this decision has made their campaign less profitable, as well as a number of other people’s campaigns. All of which leads to the conclusion hinted at in the title of this blog. Whenever competition on keywords rises, and people start a bidding war, Google makes more money from PPC. But then, Christmas is all about giving, and not receiving…

1. My minimum bid is too high! Why?

Simply put, your minimum bid is high, because your Minimum Bid Quality Score is low. This is Google’s measure of how relevant your advert and site are to the person searching on Google for your keyword. Google lists the following as being the inputs into this calculation:

• Clickthrough Rate
• Relevance Of Keyword To Advert Text
• Landing Page Quality
• Other Relevancy Factors

A low clickthrough rate indicates that your advert doesn’t appeal to the searcher. They are seeing your advert, but not clicking on it, because

• They aren’t reading it – it blends into the other adverts
• It doesn’t give them a good reason to click on it – why should they visit YOUR site?
• It doesn’t relate to what they’re searching for – do you have what they want?

Your advert text should relate to your keyword. Ideally, you should have the keyword in the title of the advert – this is especially important for new campaigns, as Google has no clickthrough rate data to judge your advert, so it has to guess how popular it’ll be. Google go into great detail explaining what they are looking for on a landing page. Click here for full details. In summary, there are three main points

• Relevant And Original Content
• Transparency
• Navigability

Can the user find what they were searching for easily? Are your advert claims backed up? Is there unique content on your website, or is it just links and copied information? Do you provide important information about your business, like contact details, your privacy policy and your business address? Are you running an above-board, honest business? Can users easily find their way around your site? In summary, if you’re running an honest business, and your advert is clear about what you do, and relates to the search term, then you should get a low minimum bid.

2. Why Are My Keywords Inactive?

Your keywords are inactive if your minimum bid is higher than your actual bid. I’d suggest that on the page with the keywords on it, you customise your columns and show your minimum bids (and Quality Score). If your Quality Score isn’t ‘Great’ read the answer to Question 1.

3. Why Can’t I See My Advert?

There are a number of reasons that you may not see your advert. The main ones are:

• Your Keyword Is Inactive (see Question 2)
• Your advert has been rejected
• Your keyword has been rejected
• Your advert is running, but you aren’t seeing it.

There are rules about what you can and can’t say in an advert. The full Editorial Guidelines can be found here. The most common problems seem to be breach of trademark, use of superlatives without backing them up on the site and banned content. The policy on keywords is quite similar (though superlatives are allowed) – bidding on other companies’ brand names is very hit-and-miss. Are you getting results, but not seeing your advert when you search for it? Five major reasons there are.

• Your advert is not on page one.
• Your advert is targeted to a region, and you aren’t in it.
• Your daily budget has run out – remember that there’s a delay on your results.
• You are only targeting certain times of the day.
• You’ve seen your advert too often, so Google thinks it’s not relevant and doesn’t show it to you.

If your average position is below about 8, click onto the second page of results. Your advert may simply be getting shown outside the top ten… If your advert is targeted to a region, use www.google.co.uk/adpreview to check that it’s working. If your daily budget has run out, you’re bidding too much. Reduce your bids and try again tomorrow. If your advert is shown at certain times, search then. Failing all of these, use Adpreview (see link above). Google mixes up the results a bit if you see your advert a lot without clicking on it.

4. Are There Any Cheap Keywords Left?

If you’ve read this through, you should already know that any keyword can be cheap – all you need is a good Minimum Bid Quality Score. Of course, bidding your minimum bid won’t get you very far up the search results…

5. How Many Keywords Should I Bid On?

There’s no answer to this one. If a keyword’s generating profit, why wouldn’t you want to bid on it. If a keyword isn’t generating profit, then why would you want to? Ideally, you’ll bid on all of the profitable keywords and none of the unprofitable ones. And since, by adjusting your bids, any keyword that generates conversions can be profitable, you should bid on any keyword that you think will lead people to visit your site, and convert. The only caveat I would put in here would be if you’ve got a very limited budget. In this case, you may not have the funds to bid the most profitable amount on all of the profitable keywords – in which case, you should focus on the most profitable ones (it’s hardly rocket science, is it!) Just bear in mind if you do this that your lack of budget is costing you profit.

6. How Much Will It Cost Me To Appear Top?

If you understand how Google uses the Quality Score with your bid to place your advert, you already know the answer to this one. If not, read this. Consider the following example. I’m currently top, with a Ranking Quality Score of 2.0 and a maximum bid of £1.50. How much do you have to pay to appear above me? If your RQS is 1.5, you need to pay £2.01. If your RQS is 1.0, you need to pay £3.01 If your RQS is 0.5, you need to pay £6.01 If your RQS is 0.1, you need to pay £30.01 So the answer depends on your competitors’ bids, their RQS’s and your RQS.

7. What’s The Best Position To Appear In?

I have a real problem with asking me this question. It’s unreasonable, I know. Newbies are just trying to set up a campaign, and bid roughly the right amount… But the answer is pretty obvious! You should appear in the position that makes you the most money! The further up the page your advert appears, the more clicks (and hence conversions) it’ll get. The further down the page it appears, the less you pay for each click (and hence conversion). So bounce your advert around a number of positions, work out how many conversions you get, and how much they cost, in each position, work out your profit, and Bob’s your uncle. I’d suggest that starting in about 3rd – 5th is a good idea, if you’ve got the budget to appear there all day. This is because the top couple of positions are often taken by people who are more interested in appearing top than in making money – not always, but in my experience, more often than not. If you appear much lower than this, your adverts may start dropping down to page 2 from time to time, which can make your figures far more complicated. If you’re advertising in an area where your competitors are very clued up on PPC, you may find that there’s very little difference in profit between appearing 2nd and 8th (for example) – this is not surprising, if their campaigns have been optimised to the same extent as yours, and they make similar amounts of profit from each click, then they will all have a similar optimum bid.

8. How Much Budget Do I Need?

It’s not really all that surprising that there’s no clear answer to this. You should be able to generate profitable sales no matter how low your budget, though it may take longer to optimise your campaign. Ideally, you’d want enough budget to put all relevant keywords in their most profitable positions, all the time. This would generate the maximum levels of profit for you, if you can afford to. A more meaningful question would be “How Much Budget Do I Need In Order To Make My Campaign Profitable?” This is a much more difficult question to answer – you certainly don’t want to blow a fortune while you learn your way around Adwords. If this is your first attempt with Adwords, then limit yourself to a fairly small budget, and gradually build it up as you gain more confidence (and better results).

9. I Have A Low Clickthrough Rate – What Should I Do?

There are a number of reasons that you have a low clickthrough rate. Here are the most likely:

• You don’t really have what they are searching for.
• You have what they are searching for, but they think you may not.
• You have what they are searching for, but they don’t see your advert.
• You have what they are searching for, but they don’t trust you.
• You have what they are searching for, but somebody else persuades them to click onto their site.

The first one is a problem with your keyword. You should only bid on a keyword if most or all of the people searching for it are looking for something you have. The others are problems with your advert. It needs to stand out, be clear about what you do, be honest (more or less) and be compelling. Here’s a more complete guide to writing an advert that people will click on.

10. What’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion, And How Should I Use It?

Dynamic Keyword Insertion allows you to insert any one of your keywords into your advert text. This sounds great, but there are a few problems with it… To use DKI, you need to use the following syntax in your advert. {KeyWord:default term} Where the default term is what Adwords uses when the keyword isn’t allowed to be inserted (e.g. if it makes the line too long). Note that Adwords adds in your keyword, not necessarily the search term. If you’re using Broad Match, the advert may not be all that relevant. Also, be careful around singulars and plurals. If you’ve got “toaster” and “toasters” in your Adgroup, the advert: Buy {Keyword:Toasters} Now looks great with Toasters in there, but with Toaster in there, it reads: Buy Toaster Now which is terrible. People will immediately recognise that you’ve just put their search term in the advert, and won’t click on it. E-bay does this all the time… Finally, be aware that this doesn’t improve your Quality Score. The default term is used to determine your QS, so using DKI as an alternative to grouping your keywords appropriately is not really a very good idea.

11. Why Can’t I Bid On Brand Names

If a company has a word with Google, they’ll stop anyone from bidding on that brand name. So if you want an exception (e.g. you sell Blackberries), you need to talk to the company in question, and get them to tell Google that you’re allowed. Similarly, if people are bidding on your name, have a word with Google, and they’ll generally sort it out…

12. Should I Use The Content Network And/Or The Search Network

As a general rule of thumb, the content network produces cheaper clicks than the search network, but they are of poorer quality. How much cheaper, and how much poorer understandably varies from campaign to campaign. If you’ve got the budget, you should do everything that makes money. So try them both, see which are profitable, and do that.

13. I’m High In Natural Search – Do I Need PPC?

Is PPC a waste of money, or does two results mean twice as many clicks? There are no absolute answers on this one – everyone’s got an opinion on it, and mine is that it’s generally worthwhile on everything except your brand name. With your brand name, you may not benefit from PPC unless there are other people advertising using your name and you can’t stop them. If you’re the only advertiser, it doesn’t make much difference, since your minimum bid will be very low (and hence so will your cost per click). My reasoning is that people don’t look at the whole page, then decide which company to click on – they see an advert that appeals, and click. If this is the case, then more adverts equals more clicks, and your PPC won’t cannibalise your natural results to any great extent. So, I’d say to go for it. If you disagree, feel free to reply…

14. When Does The Quality Score Get Updated?

Nobody knows. It just happens from time to time. I suppose if Google told people, they could change their landing pages just beforehand to improve their QS, then change them back to break all the rules and get away with it.

15. Can I Have Overlapping Campaigns?

For example, if you have a nationwide campaign, can you target another one with the same keywords just on one city in the country? Yes, you can, though it may not work as well as you’d like! Google allows you to have the same keyword in multiple campaigns – but it shows the one with the higher Quality Score – so there’s no guarantee that your locally targeted campaign will ever be seen! That said, if you have locally targeted advert text, you’ll probably get a better clickthrough rate, and with a local landing page, your Quality Score should be better, so you’ll probably be fine.

16. How Do You Maintain Your Youthful Good Looks?

Photoshop. Hope that helps, Steve

You Need A Big Budget

The simple fact is that you can run a successful Adwords campaign with very little money. I used to manage a campaign for a local restaurant that spent £5 per day, and typically got 10 – 15 bookings per week through Adwords. It’s probably true that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you need a big budget on Adwords, but that’s because Google don’t have a fixed minimum bid for a keyword. Instead, they establish how relevant they think your advert/site are to the searcher, and reward or penalise you accordingly. If you know how to manage your campaign properly, your minimum bid should almost never be more than £0.05, and usually it can be £0.02 or £0.03. At these prices, you can get 200 clicks per day for your £5. Of course, that’s a little unrealistic for most campaigns, for a few reasons:

1. Not everyone will click on your advert – typically, if there are a lot of PPC adverts showing, your clickthrough rate will be 2% – 10% (less if you write a poor advert), so you’d need 10,000 to 50,000 searches in order to get this many clicks per day. I doubt there 50,000 people a day searching for a restaurant in Leeds!
2. Your competitors are probably all bidding more than you are. If there are more than ten of them, you won’t be on the first page of the results, so you’ll only get a small percentage of the search traffic…

So. in competitive areas, if you just bid the minimum bid, you’ll only get a small volume of traffic. On the other hand, if you bid enough to appear near the top, you’ll spend your (small) budget in an hour or two. The trick is to find the balance between the two. If 1st place would get me 200 clicks per day at £0.50 each (cost of £100 per day), and 10th place would get 20 clicks per day at a cost of £0.05 each (cost of £1 per day), to spend my £5 per day, I may want to appear in about 7th, and get 42 clicks per day for £0.12 each. It may be that you don’t convert enough of these visitors to justify paying £0.12 per click. For example, if a booking generates a profit of £10, and only 2% convert, it may be more profitable to bid a bit less, and not spend your entire budget. Since you only pay for the clicks you get, there’s no fixed charge by Google, so you are completely free to get as much or as little traffic as you can afford. Getting back to the original myth, you can get traffic for only a few pence per click. If that traffic is profitable, then the campaign’s probably worthwhile. Just make sure that you understand how to get cheap clicks by managing your Quality Score before you start.

Competitors Will Click On My Advert And Cost Me Money

Understandable concern, but Google are pretty good at handling this. They look at the IP address, time of the click, duplicate clicks, and various other suspicious patterns, and only charge you if the click appears to be genuine. They probably don’t catch them all, but they do catch the majority, and if you think you’ve got a problem, you can always raise it with them. Any invalid clicks that they find will be refunded to you. I manage a large number of accounts, and have never seen a problem with any of them. And I’ve always found the folks at Google to be approachable when I have had a query, so this certainly shouldn’t be considered a reason not to advertise on Adwords.

There Are Some Clever Tricks That Mean That Agencies Will Do Better Than Me

No, actually there aren’t. Google are very open about how Adwords works, and there are plenty of guides to tell you how to run your campaign successfully. Basically, all you have to do is this:

• Keep an eye on your Quality Score, particularly on a new campaign. Make sure your landing page and advert text follow Google’s recommendations.
• Write eye-catching, honest adverts, and keep testing new ones. Don’t mislead people, or you’ll get clicks that don’t convert.
• Bid the right amounts on the right keywords. If it isn’t converting, bin it. If it delivering cheap conversions, bid more. If it’s delivering expensive conversions, bid less.
• Group your keywords in such a way that your adverts are relevant to every keyword.

There really isn’t much more to it that that!

Free Adwords!

Google “Free Adwords” and you get a long list of PPC adverts. To quote some of them, “Beat The System”, “Top PPC Secret Exposed”, “Adwords Ads Exposed” and my personal favourite “Man Makes $300 Million Because He Gets Pay-Per-Clicks Free. He’s Giving Away His Secret Here”. Sorry guys, but there is no way to get free Adwords, though selling an e-book about how you can may make you a few dollars… Ironically, people are now using the truth to sell their products. There are just as many adverts saying “Are Adwords Really Free? Read This Review Before You Buy” and “Warning! Getting Free PPC Is A Scam. Get The Truth Here”. As I said in my last point, there are no secrets, tricks or cons to make you money without putting in the work. There are good ways and bad ways to write adverts, and some interesting theories about things that may or may not work, but that’s about it. That’s the easy part out of the way. Now to tackle some more contentious ones…

The Google Slap

A regular question that appears on the Digital Point forum (which is a really useful resource, by the way) is “Have you been Google-slapped today?” or alternatively “I’ve been Google-slapped. What do I do about it?” Here’s the thing. Google tries very hard to deliver relevant adverts to its users. It has to, or they’d all go and use Ask or something! There are a lot of people out there who’ve built and advertised their sites solely to make money from affiliate adverts. The idea is that they pay a few pence when somebody clicks on their advert, and then make a lot more from the site that the visitor clicks on to from their site. But Google doesn’t really like this (even though they also run Adsense, which is what a lot of these people are using. I know that if I was looking for (for example) a printer, and I saw a PPC advert on Google for printers, but when I clicked on it, I just ended up on a page full of links, I’d be a bit cheesed off. So Google took steps. They decided that the landing page needs to be relevant and not covered in adverts. If they don’t like your landing page, they destroy your Quality Score (usually putting a £5 minimum bid on your keywords). This isn’t to make them more money, it’s to stop you from advertising with them. In addition, they reward three things – relevance, transparency and navigability. Is your site relevant to the keyword you’re bidding on? Do you have “Contact Us”, “About Us” and “Privacy Policy” pages? Can people easily find their way around your site? Google changes the algorithm quite often, but it can take a while to get around every account, so one day without warning, Google ‘slaps’ you, and gives you a high minimum bid. But this is the important thing. If you are using Adwords as they intended – to promote your own product or service – you shouldn’t get slapped. And if you do get slapped, it should be very easy to fix. I’ve never had a Google slap, and I doubt many other PPC agencies have either. The people that get slapped are generally trying to use Adwords to make money as a middle-man – in effect making money from trying to get between Google and the page that the searcher is looking for. So it’s not that surprising that Google penalises them!

Google’s A Ripoff

If there’s one claim that’s bound to wind up an experienced PPC manager, it’s people saying “Don’t use Google! They’re just trying to rip you off! They’ll keep increasing your minimum bids to gouge as much money as they can out of you!” This is usually as a result of them starting a Google Adwords account without bothering to read up on how it works. As I’ve already said, Google Adwords isn’t a fair auction. It doesn’t claim to be. Google want the most relevant and appropriate adverts to appear, so they give them an advantage by utilising the Quality Score. To get a good Quality Score, you need three main things.

1. A good landing page
2. A good clickthrough rate (taking into account the advert’s position)
3. A relevant advert

If you see your minimum bid creeping up slowly over a period of time, you can probably rule out the landing page – a problem with that would generally give you a single, big jump in your minimum bids. Also, the advert relevancy is unlikely to cause the problem – as your campaign gets more history, the advert relevance seems to play a smaller part in the calculation.

• So, if you’re seeing your minimum bid slowly increasing over time, your clickthrough rate is almost certainly not up to scratch.

No Machiavellian plot to take over the world, no evil plan to gouge money out of innocent advertisers, just a penalty for writing adverts that don’t appeal to the people searching.

Bid High To Get A Great Quality Score

This one works if you assume that Google don’t know what they’re doing (or they’re doing that Machiavellian thing again!). Basically, you bid high to get a great clickthrough rate, Google rewards you with a low minimum bid, and you can stay top paying only a few pence whilst the people below you have to pay pounds regardless of their Quality Score. Or something like that. Google make it quite clear that when they are assessing your Quality Score, they take into account the position that your advert appears in when looking at your clickthrough rate. So a 2% clickthrough rate in 7th place will probably get you a better Quality Score than a 3% clickthrough rate in 2nd place. This seems to be another myth perpetuated by somebody who bid a lot and wrote a good advert, and found that they had to bid less over time to stay in the top position. What they didn’t realise was that they could have bid that amount initially, appeared lower, and then watched their advert gradually creep up the search results, until it nestled happily at the top. Watching this ‘cream rising to the surface’ effect is one of the great pleasures of PPC management, in my opinion. Once it starts to creep up, you know that the number of conversions is going to keep rising and rising, and the cost per conversion isn’t going to change very much. Or for a variation on this, you can keep cutting the bids a bit, and watch it rise (more slowly) but the cost per conversion come down. This latter option is probably more relevant if you have a restrictive budget, and can’t afford to pay for more clicks at the same cost per click. And so, dear reader, we come to the end of my epistle. Feel free to suggest some more myths, and I’ll see if I can add them in…

Really, this was the wrong question – what they should have been asking was how they could possibly manage a campaign with 250,000 keywords.

Do a few sums, and you see what I mean. Suppose that a typical click costs £0.20. How long do you need to run a keyword before you can hazard even a rough guess at its conversion rate? 100 clicks? If you’ve got a low conversion rate, even this may not be enough. But to get 100 clicks on 250,000 keywords, at £0.20 per click would cost £5,000,000. And how long would you have to wait to get 25,000,000 clicks anyway???

Realistically, the majority of these keywords would get no traffic at all, and 90% of the clicks would come from 1% of the keywords. So you can still optimise the keywords that get the vast majority of the traffic, so the problem isn’t that big an issue.

So what about the other 99% of the keywords? If you can’t optimise them, then what’s the point in bidding on them – they may never be profitable! On the other hand, people keep saying that ‘the long tail’ is the key to successful PPC campaigns.

The above example is quite an extreme one – most campaigns won’t have 247,500 keywords generating very little traffic. But the 90%, 1% issue is probably true of most campaigns. If a handful of big keywords eat your entire budget, how will you ever make the other 99% profitable? They’re supposed to be the most profitable in general, with their low cost-per-clicks and their high conversion rates…

One option would be to pause the big keywords, and spend your entire budget on the smaller keywords. This will, in turn, lead you to find that 90% of your traffic is STILL coming from 1% of your keywords, as the largest of the keywords you didn’t pause take most of your budget. These keywords are probably more profitable, but it doesn’t really feel very optimal!

If you’ve read through my case study you can see how I would go about this problem in most cases.

My keywords are generally grouped by product or service, with extra Adgroups for the more generic groups of terms. So in the case study, I had one Adgroup for each printer, one for each printer type/manufacturer etc.

Then I optimised at Adgroup level initially. I optimised this by trying to equalise the ROI from each Adgroup, such that the total daily budget lasted (on average) just until the end of the day.

This should maximise the number of conversions that you get per day.

Having done this, I look within the Adgroup that’s getting the most traffic, and start adjusting the bids on the keywords that generate the majority of that traffic, looking at the ROI again.

If you have a situation like the printers, where the products are largely similar, once you’ve got a few Adgroups done, you can see patterns emerging. Certain keyword formations will perform better or worse than others. So you can make the adjustments to Adgroups even without having enough data individually. This is quite good, as you can have a stab at optimising keywords that haven’t got enough traffic.

I would also do one more thing here. If a keyword’s had no clicks after a month, I’d delete it. Even if you get a 5% conversion rate, if a keyword gets a couple of clicks per year, it’s not important; it’s just cluttering up your campaign.

Just be aware that there are clear limitations to this approach. Just because a group of keywords works on printers doesn’t mean it’ll work on photocopiers, telephones or PC’s.

Consider again the campaign that I mentioned at the start of this post. He was promoting a worldwide hotel booking service.

Clearly, the approach is likely to be valid here. If “Hotels in Moscow” converts better than “Moscow Accommodation”, then it’s likely that “Hotels in Durban” will convert better than “Durban Accommodation”.

It’s likely that each city has exactly the same keyword list, with just the city name varying. This is a huge opportunity to save a fortune when optimising. Rather than just switching the whole thing on from the start, why not work out using a few cities which keywords are profitable or not, and how much to bid for each type of keyword? Rolling this out on the others would give you a huge head-start, saving you a lot of money.

But if it works here, why not use this approach for any campaign where you have the same keywords in each Adgroup with just a different model number/city?

Sadly, it’s not really something that I can do, in my position here. When a client asks us to start up a campaign on their behalf, they expect us to build it and switch it on ASAP. After all, one of the main benefits of PPC is the immediacy of the results. You turn on a campaign at 9am, and at 9:02, you’re getting clicks.

But if it was my money on the line, and I had a lot of keywords, and only limited cash, I’d probably use this method.

What do you think? Is this better than the ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach? Give me your thoughts or experiences…

Suppose you’ve been paying £0.50 per click, and making some money, you figure that since a click is worth £1 to you, increasing your bid to £0.70 would be worthwhile. So, you increase your bids, you move from 5th to 4th in the results, and get 120 clicks instead of 100. Job done, and all is well with the world. Erm… no… You are now paying £84 instead of £50, and getting 120 clicks instead of 100. That’s £34 more, for 20 more clicks, or £1.70 for each additional click! Which is more than they’re worth. The extra clicks each cost you £0.70, but every other click (that you were going to get anyway) has cost you more, and so you have to include this extra spend in your calculations…

The only way to use this sort of approach is to look at the cost per additional click, rather than the overall cost per click. When the cost per additional click reaches your breakeven point, you have reached your sweet spot – this is, in fact another way of calculating the sweet spot. Right then, example time…

Take the above example. Clearly, since the additional clicks would cost £1.70 each, you don’t want to do that. In fact, it was such a bad idea, you probably want to go the other way…

You reduce your CPC from £0.50 to £0.45, and the clicks falls from 100 to 95 per day. Instead of spending (£0.50*100) = £50, you’re now spending (£0.45*95) = £42.75. A quick sum tells you that the clicks you just ditched were costing £7.25 for 5, or £1.45 each. Too expensive, so you should move your advert down.

So you try £0.40, and now have 85 clicks. Another quick sum, and you can see that the clicks you have got rid of were costing £0.88. You were making money on these, so you should keep them. And so you have your sweet spot.

To prove it, here’s the profit you would be making in each position:

This is a quick way of telling whether you are in your sweet spot, and whether the change that you just made was a good one or not… Since you can see on your campaign summary how much you spent, and how many clicks you got over a specified period, so you can certainly get a quick and easy answer to whether your latest change worked, without having to do lots of sums…

In the first case, the sweet spot is in fifth place (profit = £26), and in the second case, it’s eighth (profit = £10). But in both cases, the Cost Per Click is the same. This is because the optimal cost per click has nothing whatsoever to do with the number of clicks or conversions that you get – it’s purely dependent on the conversion rate, cost per click and the profit (exc. the ad cost) you make on a sale. And these things are totally independent of where your advert appears in the search results. It’s not that surprising really, if you think about it. If your cost per conversion is lower that your profit per conversion, you make money – otherwise you don’t. And cost per conversion can be expressed as cpc/conversion rate. Since the conversion rate is (usually) unaffected by result position, then a cpc will be profitable or not irrespective of your position in the results. One interesting implication of this is that it answers the question – “what should I do if somebody jumps above me in the search results?”. The answer is of course (!) that you should do nothing, and accept the reduced profit (my blog on the numpties makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it!). In summary, ignore what everyone else is doing – work out the right bid for you, and stick to it.

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The advert does quite well, and gets conversions occasionally. But you’re concerned that the second line is a fairly weak call to action, so you decide to try something different.

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You run it for a while, and it doubles the click through rate, so within a day or two you bin the old advert and go forward with the new one. Then you look at the third line. It doesn’t really extol the benefits of the e-mails, so you try another line.

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Even better click through rates, so you keep this one. But the changes in the second line may lead people to believe that there is free information on your website, rather than from a marketing company. Whilst you’ll get more traffic to your site, it’ll be of poorer quality. And the change to the third line reinforces this. But surely you’ll see a fall-off in the conversion rates, and keep the old adverts? Not if you’re changing your adverts as soon as one appears significantly better than the other, based on click through rates. Suppose that the campaign above starts out with a click through rate of 3%, then increases to 6% and 8%. At the same time, the conversion rate falls from 10% to 7% to 4%. Finally, assume that the cost per click moves from £0.30 to £0.28 to £0.25 If you accept a 90% level of significance, your results look something like this. There is no real falloff in the number of conversions, and a significance test of the difference in conversion rates is totally insignificant. In fact, to get significant results (even at the 90% level) for the conversion rates, you’d need to wait much longer. To put that in context, if you were getting 400 impressions per day, the tests for click through rates would take (1 + 3 =) 4 days, whereas the tests for conversion rates would take (38 + 8 =) 46 days. That’s quite a lot longer. So, what’s the conclusion here? Should you run your campaigns for ten times as long, to confirm that the new advert doesn’t hit your conversion rates? Bear in mind that the changes above are quite extreme , it’s unlikely that your results will show anything after waiting ten times as long , when do you draw the line, and say that the change is too small to matter? Even here, we’ve not taken into account the impact of reducing the cost per click (which will slightly offset a reduced conversion rate), or the impact of increasing the total number of conversions (even at a slightly higher cost per conversion, this could still be a good thing). Alternatively, should you just ignore the conversion rate, and hope for the best? Or try very hard not to change the meaning of the advert? You only need to write one bad advert to wreck your campaign. Perhaps the best approach is to physically look at the conversion rates of the adverts that you are dropping , if they are lower, then ask the question œhave I caused this to happen? The fewer conversions that you are getting, the harder it’ll be to stop a problem , so monitor the conversion rate, and if it starts to drop, check to see if you’re the cause.

1. Decide before you run your new advert how long you are willing to wait for a result , this’ll depend on how long you’ve been testing (as you go on, the chances of finding a quick, big win decrease) and (obviously) how many impressions you are getting.
2. Set the advert live, checking regularly for significance. I’d recommend www.splittester.com, but any testing tool will do.
3. If, after a few days (longer if you’ve got little traffic), the new advert is worse than the old one, kill it, and write a new advert.
4. Once you’ve got 85% significance (or 90%, if you’re of a nervous disposition), keep the better advert.
5. If the deadline set in step one is reached without a significant result, keep the better advert, regardless of how small the difference is.

And that’s all ducky. But it assumes that the lines of your advert work independently of each other. What happens if this isn’t the case.

Consider the two adverts below:

A)
ABC Mortgages
Free Advice And Valuations
Competitive Rates

Suppose that you’ve been running A) for a while, and try a new third line œQuick And Friendly Service:

B)
ABC Mortgages
Free Advice And Valuations
Quick And Friendly Service

You get the following results:

A) 10000 impressions, 1000 clicks, click through rate = 10%
B) 10000 impressions, 800 clicks, click through rate = 8%

So you keep advert A)

Then you try it against another advert, with a second line of œYour Local Mortgage Broker:

C)
ABC Mortgages
Your Local Mortgage Broker
Competitive Rates

You get the following results:

A) 10000 impressions, 1000 clicks, click through rate = 10%
C) 10000 impressions, 800 clicks, click through rate = 8%

Again, you keep advert A).

But have you missed something here? We’ve no idea if advert A) is better than an advert with both changes:

D)
ABC Mortgages
Your Local Mortgage Broker
Quick And Friendly Service

It’s quite possible that the two new lines work well together, as they have a similar tone. This being the case, you could potentially get the following results:

A) 10000 impressions, 1000 clicks, click through rate 10%
D) 10000 impressions, 1200 clicks, click through rate 12%

This is quite possible, but you can’t run this test instead of the others, in case one of the lines was better, and the other worse. And if you run it as well as the others, it feels a bit like you’re wasting time. And if you wanted to try varying all three lines, you’d need to run seven different tests, instead of just three.

In principle, the solution is quite simple. There’s an easy way to test your three adverts in the time of two tests, or if you are changing all three lines, eight tests in the time it would take to run four tests:

Simultaneously, run all possible combinations of the adverts against each other at once.

The above tests ran for a total of 20,000 impressions each, but how many impressions would it take to get the best of the four options?

Only 40,000 impressions, because you don’t need to waste 50% of your impressions on the control, only 25%. This is the same amount of time that you’d have spent just testing A against B and A against C.

So your results would have looked something like:

A) 10000 impressions, 1000 clicks, click through rate 10%
B) 10000 impressions, 800 clicks, click through rate 8%
C) 10000 impressions, 800 clicks, click through rate 8%
D) 10000 impressions, 1200 clicks, click through rate 12%

In fact, you can save a bit more time by ditching one of the adverts early on, if it’s clearly not going to be the best.

So perhaps testing one change at a time isn’t necessarily the best idea , the stronger the synergy between the lines of your advert, the more likely you are to miss positive changes.

However, there is a price to pay for this approach (isn’t there always?). The test is slightly more likely to come up with the wrong answer (it’s slightly less significant), so you’ll probably want to run it a little bit longer to get the same degree of confidence in your results.

In summary, if you think there’s likely to be a strong synergy between two lines of your advert, it’s worth testing all four combinations of the two lines at the same time. If there’s no reason to believe that the two new lines work particularly well together, but poorly individually, then there’s no benefit to running the four options at once, and you should run two a:b tests as usual.

For example, if you have the advert:

Dave’s Confectionary
Buy Our Chocolates!
Free Next Day Delivery

And you want to try a second line of œGet Luxury Chocolates Here!, and/or a third line of œGift Wrapping Available, you have to decide whether these lines are likely to complement each other, but are unremarkable individually. Here, it looks like the lines are pretty much unrelated, with one being an alternative call to action, and the other suggesting a different feature. So two standard (one change) a:b tests would be quicker or more reliable (depending on how long you wait for your results) than running all four possibilities together.

Any comments? Disagree? Let me know¦

Here’s what’s happening. Picture the scene , a big company decides it’s time to advertise on Google, so they call up their analytical people, and ask them to make it happen. Perhaps they call a few PPC agencies to get some quotes, perhaps they don’t, but either way, they decide to do it themselves (how hard can it be?). They read up on Adwords, maybe even do the Google exam (or maybe not) and launch themselves into it. So what happens next? They work out how much they have to bid to get to the top of the search, and bid that. Maybe they get their wordy people to write some adverts, and away they go. Needless to say, they are losing money more often than not. But why should the rest of us care? They’ve got plenty of cash, and if they want to give it away, let them. Maybe this was true in the past with poor advertising campaigns , after all, if a big retailer puts a bad advert on the TV, or in a magazine, it doesn’t affect anyone else. But this is PPC , and the whole concept is based around an auction. If you’re paying £0.50 per click, and appearing fourth, then somebody else appears and pays £5 per click to appear first, you’ll drop down to fifth. And get less clicks. And make less money. And if you’re an agency, working on behalf of a client, all they know is that they are getting less traffic, making less money and their rival is top of the pile , try explaining to them that you know what you’re doing and the competition don’t. Suddenly everyone’s under pressure to increase their bids or lose traffic , and every time somebody increases their bids, they make the whole problem worse. It’s called inflation, and as long as there are have-a-go companies jumping onto the PPC bandwagon, it’s here to stay. The solution? There isn’t one, really. You do the maths, and stick to your sweet spot, and accept that your campaign has just become less profitable. Now imagine if you will, a world where everyone does the maths or hires a good agency to do the sums for them (and, believe it or not, most agencies don’t bother, they just guess). Suddenly, everyone is paying according to their site’s conversion rate , the more likely your clicks are to convert, the more you can afford to pay. So the sites that most closely match customer requirements win, and the ones that don’t, lose. The customer is happy as they are finding what they want, Google is happy, because it delivers relevant results, agencies are happy, because they can compete, not with unlimited budgets and silly bids, but by optimising the campaigns better. Everyone wins, except the people with poor websites or uncompetitive prices. Will this ever happen, or is this just a dream? I’d like to think that one day it’ll happen. Google are trying to make it clearer how the whole thing works (whilst not leaving their processes open to abuse), and over time, I think that people will learn to use this new medium. But it won’t be soon. There are still agencies out there that take the money and do nothing in return, and agencies that simply don’t understand well enough how to make campaigns truly successful. So, for the time being at least, we’ll just have to keep explaining to customers why, contrary to intuition, top of the table is not the best place to be.