How do you possibly tie everything together that you 've learned in the first five chapters of Your Google Game Plan for Success? Well, in this final chapter of Part II, I'll come up with some hypothetical situations, possible solutions, and thoughts based on my years of expertise in this field. By no means will we be finished talking about extracting insights, taking action, and being successful online. However, since AdWords is where your money is spent and your visitors and conversions are gained, it's appropriate to dedicate a chapter to it at this point.
If that subhead sounds familiar to you, you've read Chapter 1 of this book, where I talk about what signals, metrics, and key performance indicators you use to measure effectiveness. It's the equivalent of the meaning of life, but in online terms. You can't possibly run a successful AdWords campaign without knowing how to measure success and, subsequently, how to take actions as you deem appropriate.
Notice that I wrote "as you deem appropriate." A lot of the self-proclaimed experts whom you'll see blogging or tweeting about what you should or shouldn't be doing are looking at things in general terms, which don't always apply to your specific situation. In their defense, they don't know what your online marketing goals are, what your boss's goals are, or what your boss's boss's goals are. So when they lay down their 10 commandments of expert pay-per-click marketing tactics or their five triple-platinum rules for success, always think about your goals first and decide whether their advice works for you. Keep an open mind, though, because sometimes there are a few "experts" who do know what they're talking about.
Back in Chapter 4 I showed you that you have three bidding options to choose from for each campaign. You can focus on impressions (which apply to content-network campaigns), you can focus on clicks, or you can focus on conversions (if you have conversion tracking enabled and have received a certain number of conversions within the last 30 days — the "certain number" is always different). These three foci make a good starting point for us as we're thinking about how to measure the success of your campaigns. You don't have to label yourself as "focusing on impressions," because chances are very high that you will want to focus also on clicks or conversions (or all three).
You're running campaigns in the Content Network because you want a high number of impressions — eyeballs seeing your ads. You don't necessarily care whether visitors click your text, image, or video ads, as long as they're seeing them.
It's hardest to measure success when your primary goal is eyeballs, because you require very little effort from your potential audience. You don't care whether visitors click your ad, much less what they do on your site if they get there, and you can't even be sure that they're paying attention to your ad in the first place. Remember that an impression is counted when the page that the ad is on loads, not when a user mouses over the ad or scrolls down the page to where the ad is placed.
Does this mean that you should change your focus? No. Keep sending ads to as many eyeballs as possible, if that's one of your goals. However, you'll want to maximize the dollars you spend by applying advanced AdWords features like frequency capping, which limits the number of times a unique visitor can see your ad without clicking it. If you're using the CPM bidding model on your Content Network campaign, a safe bet is to set your cap at no more than 20 per unique visitor. If visitors are exposed to your ad more than 20 times and still haven't clicked it, chances are good that they're simply not interested, and there's no need to waste your money on uninterested eyeballs.
If you're using a standard cost-per-click (CPC) bidding model, try using the Site and Category Exclusion tool to remove manual placements that just aren't working out. This means placements on any Content Network sites with lower-than-average click-through rates (take the average click-through rate of all Content Network sites, and remove the ones that don't cut the mustard). Keep in mind that a click-through rate should be evaluated in terms of its network — a one-tenth of 1 percent click-through rate is probably very bad for the Search Network, but for the Content Network it is probably very good. Excluding sites with low click-through rates allows your impressions to be directed to websites that seem more interested in your ad, as indicated by the volume of clicks they receive. That way you're not just showing your ads to as many eyeballs as pos-sible; you're showing them to as many interested eyeballs as possible. The same rules apply if you also created a conversion action and are tracking conversion rates and cost-per-conversion figures.
Since there is no shortage of impressions on the Content Network, it won't hurt you to perform some searches on the sites you're advertising on to see what your ads are looking like on those sites. Google Content Network Partners, as I discussed in earlier chapters, have the freedom to modify your ads as they deem appropriate to fit their websites. This can be a scary thought, but I will say that little by little, the number of really bad practices has been declining. However, a change that a Content Network site owner made or the placement of your ads on a site may be reasons they aren't performing as well as they should. Or this particular website could be one that you're still trying to decide about. Just keep in mind that you are in control of which sites show your ads. If you're not comfortable with the way your ad looks or where it's positioned, exclude the site in AdWords or contact the site owner to see if he or she will listen to your request (but brace yourself for a rejection). There are plenty of fish in the Content Network sea and plenty of other Internet browsers out there — use tools like Ad Planner to see what other sites you can advertise on and what other sites users visit.
Text ads on the Content Network may only get you so far. Remember that 95 percent of Content Network websites accept image ads, and more and more Content Network sites are accepting video and rich-media ads. When you win a placement for an image, video, or rich-media ad, your ad is the only one shown in that partner's ad space; text ads, on the other hand, appear alongside those from other advertisers. So it may be to your benefit to create some image ads and possibly some video ads to gain even more impressions and really expose your ad to the masses. You can easily create image ads using the Display Builder tool within the Ads sub-tab within any AdWords campaign, so you don't need to break the bank to make an eye-catching image ad. But, just as with text ads, you'll want to cut image, video, or rich media ads with higher CPM prices, and keep the ads that work on the websites that get you maximum exposure and the best bang for your buck.
The Content Network isn't the only place within Google AdWords to accrue impressions: you can spread the word on the standard Search Network as well. You're not going to get anywhere near the volume of impressions you do on the Content Network, but you'll reach an audience that is searching for a specific product or service directly. On the Content Network, visitors are going about their business visiting their favorite sites, shopping, doing research, or discovering new sites when they basically stumble across your ad. On the Search Network, they're expecting (and possibly demanding) ads, so this audience is prequalified because it wants to be engaged. All you have to do is enable the Search Network, and you're sure to have visitors reading your text ads more carefully than they would read an ad on the Content Network. They may even be able to spare a click, and who knows; they may wind up converting on your site!
On the Search Network, you'll want to pay attention to the volume of impres-sions on particular ads and keywords. Usually the more impressions you get, the more clicks you'll get, which forces you to raise your ad and keyword bids and decrease bids on other ads or keywords, or to remove ads or keywords that aren't generating impressions. This way you're able to make better use of your daily budget and spend less money on ads and keywords that don't get shown as much. If you really want to get the most bang for your impression buck, place your phone number on your ad, and possibly in the headline of your ad. Some searchers may just call you instead of clicking, which saves you a cost-per-click. However, be careful here, because this will also lower your cost-per-click rate, which may drop your keyword Quality Scores, thereby lowering the number of impressions you receive. Closely monitor calls you get from users who saw your phone number on Google search results, and try to maintain a balance.
To recap, when you focus on impressions, you'll want to do the following:
Use frequency capping when bidding by cost per impression to limit the number of times unique people see your ad without clicking it.
Add site and category exclusions to block unwanted Content Network sites from displaying your ads.
Visit some sites that you're advertising on to see what your ads look like and where they're placed.
Create a profile on Ad Planner to find new Content Network sites with high impression volumes.
Make the Display Builder your friend, as you can create image ads easily and at no additional cost.
Reach out to the standard Google Search Network for an even broader impression share.
You're running campaigns across the search or Content Network, or both, and you want people to click your ads to visit your site. You have a special message, offer, or brand to promote to interested web surfers, and getting them to see or read the ad simply isn't enough.
When you focus on clicks, you're able to better measure performance and success compared to when you focus only on impressions. Metrics like cost per click and click-through rate, which I introduced in Chapters 2 and 3, allow you to quantify your efforts and stack them up against your bottom line. Metrics like Quality Score for keywords and ad position for ads allow a rich analysis of your campaign performances. In Chapter 7 you'll begin to see how you can take your analysis efforts even deeper when you see how traffic that comes to your website via an AdWords ad performs.
I have yet to meet an advertiser who did not want to be on the first position for any ad. Almost everyone wants to be number one, but most advertisers shouldn't try to be number one at all costs. As I noted in Chapter 3, it's far too easy to get yourself involved in a bidding war with a competitor (and there will be competitors, guaranteed), which can very quickly drive up your cost per click and eventually reach a point at which you're spending too much. When you consider raising your bids in hopes of leapfrogging over a competitor or inching closer to the number-one position for a keyword or ad, it's important that you practice a conservative approach. In other words, don't raise your bids just to beat out the next advertiser today when you can save your money for other ads, keywords, campaigns, and landing pages tomorrow. Focus on your AdWords account structure, your target audience, writing great ads, and sending users to content-rich, relevant landing pages, and your cost per click will start to come down.
Your landing page is just as important as the ads you write. When users see your ad, whether on the search or Content Network, they're going to read the headline and possibly the description lines before making a decision about whether or not to click. If they do click your ad, you've won only half the battle. You now need to prove to your new website visitors that your ad wasn't just telling them what they wanted to be told — your landing page must reflect or "sync with" your ad in order not only to keep visitors engaged with your site, but also to lower your cost-per-click price and raise your keyword's Quality Score. What you should do is perform some test searches using the Ad Preview tool (covered in Chapter 5) and then visit your ad's landing pages, putting yourself in the visitor's shoes. And as I wrote in earlier chapters, it's really simple: if your ad mentions "20% off," your landing page needs to clearly state "20% off." It's a very simple practice that gets overlooked so often.
Unlike when you focus your efforts on obtaining impressions, when you focus on clicks, volume shouldn't always be your priority. As with impressions, you may get uninterested clicks on your ad from visitors who are just browsing around without a specific intent in mind. You'll also get searchers on Google and other partners who perform searches that bring up your ads, but who won't give you that click. These will inflate the ratio of impressions to clicks, lowering your click-through rate. Low click-through rates are poisonous to Quality Score and cost-per-click bid prices, and when your Quality Scores start dropping, so does your ad exposure. You'll need to be sure that your location and language targeting are suited to the audience you're trying to reach, that your keyword match types and negative keywords help eliminate irrelevant traffic, and that you're using tools like the Search-Based Keyword tool to find new, relevant keywords that your visitors are searching for.
The Content Network may not be your best friend if your focus is on clicks. As I observed a few pages earlier, people who see ads on sites can be frustrated with them, can ignore them, or even if interested may be reluctant to click them. Any advertiser who ever ran a Content Network campaign will tell you stories of 0.02-percent click-through rates and hundreds of thousands of impressions across a vast network of sites. If your focus is on obtaining clicks, play the Content Network cautiously in order to avoid "wasting" thousands of impres-sions. Use demographic targeting options to refine the audience that may be relevant for your ads, and create separate bids for Content Network placements. Again, advertising on the Content Network really needs to be done with its own dedicated campaign(s), not lumped in with a search campaign. You wouldn't feed both your dog and your cat the same food, and you shouldn't run the same campaign on both the search and Content Networks.
To recap, focusing on clicks means that you should do the following:
Focus on your cost-per-click and click-through rate metrics, using best-practice techniques discussed throughout this book to lower costs and raise click-through rates.
Pay attention to your keyword's Quality Score so that you can work on lower-scored keywords and allocate more budget to higher-scored keywords.
Avoid getting into bidding wars with competitors in an attempt to be in the number-one position at any cost.
Use tools like Ad Preview to ensure that the message in your ads is the message on your website.
Add more relevant keywords that your users are searching for with the Search-Based Keyword tool, while simultaneously pausing or removing keywords that don't bring in clicks.
Watch the Content Network carefully, and remove irrelevant click possibilities with demographic targeting.
Restructure your AdWords account so that Content Network efforts are in separate campaigns from Search Network efforts.
You have a specific mindset when you focus on conversions. You have a product to sell, a service to offer, or a white paper to give out. You're asking an awful lot from your visitors, and with good reason — you have a business to run and you have customers to satisfy. You're not asking visitors only to view your ad and click it; you're also asking them to take the time to find your offer, add an item to their shopping carts, or contact you for more information. You're ask-ing them to go through your website's system, submit their information, and eventually arrive at your receipt, confirmation, or thank-you page, where they can either download their document or receive a ticket number for the item they just purchased. That's an awful lot!
When visitors convert on your site, everyone wins. They get what they've been looking for and you get a lead or a new customer. You can measure performance, because you can calculate the total number of conversions, the cost per conversion, and the conversion rate for any campaign, ad group, ad, or keyword. Clearly, these metrics will become the center of attention, and they routinely are for the majority of advertisers. Some advertisers have specific cost-per-conversion figures already set in stone that the AdWords campaigns must meet. Website owners usually add the costs of doing business to their cost-per-acquisition (CPA) figures. If you have the AdWords conversion tracking script installed, and if your campaigns receive a certain number of conversions within 30 days, you may be eligible to use CPA bidding. AdWords will cut down on non-converting clicks and impressions and do the best it can to fall within your limits. Generally, the lower the CPA bid, the lower the chance Google will match, so be reasonable when entering a CPA bid price.
Performance measurement doesn't just happen at the aggregate level — it also happens at the ad and keyword levels. Each ad group should contain a few (three or four) active ads, with the goal being to see which ad performs the best. If you focus on conversions, you can add the conversion rate on top of the click-through rate to measure ad performance. The ad or ads that have higher conversion rates win, and the losers get either eliminated, or edited and put back in the rotation. You should use the optimize option under Ad Rotation within your campaign's settings to ensure that the best-performing ad gets served up more often to your visitors. This way, more impressions and clicks are faced with a well-performing ad, which should raise your conversion rates while lowering your minimum cost-per-click bid prices. Be careful, though — just because an ad or a keyword has a good click-through rate doesn't guarantee that it will have a high conversion rate. These metrics are not dependent on one another, so you'll have to make tough choices from time to time on ads with high click-through rates but low conversion rates. (In that scenario, the ad's landing page usually isn't as good as it could be.)
With respect to keywords, you'll find upon close analysis that your keyword's match type will change its conversion rate. More often than not, exact-matched keywords will have higher conversion rates than broad- or phrase-matched key-words. However, don't switch all your campaign's keywords to exact match just yet. AdWords has a fairly new tool called the Search Funnels report, in which keywords that help in the conversion processes are highlighted and credited with a conversion assist (you can read more about search funnels in Chapter 14). A lot of the keywords in this report will be broad-matched, and some will be phrase-matched, so in order to obtain conversions on your exact-matched keywords, you'll need to have the right broad- and phrase-matched keywords in your ad groups too.
There is a fairly new concept in AdWords called remarketing. To briefly recap, remarketing can persuade those visitors who haven't converted yet into making that decision, using some specific advertisements that you des-ignate. These visitors will see ads that the general population won't, which ideally will change their minds and persuade them to convert. In AdWords, when conversion tracking is enabled, a 30-day cookie is dropped on a visitor's computer. If the visitor converts within that 30-day period, AdWords will credit the original keyword, ad, ad group, and campaign with the conver-sion. Remarketing in AdWords becomes a very powerful tool to help increase conversion rates, because many of your visitors won't convert on their first visits. It may take your visitors 2, 3, 10, or more visits to finally pull the trig-ger. When you remarket to visitors who have already seen your website, you remind them of your offer, keep your brand fresh in their mind, and can even modify your offer for customers who aren't sure yet. As I discussed in the previous chapter, remarketing does require a bit of setup on your end, but if your focus really is conversions and conversion rate, you'll gladly spend the time to reel lost customers back into the buying cycle.
At the end of the day, regardless of your focus, you must ask yourself if your efforts are worth it financially. Is the return on your investment worth the impressions, clicks, and conversions you receive? Intelligent marketers will never settle for a "yes" answer and will continually optimize, refine, and edit their campaigns to increase their ROI while cutting costs. This means working hard at writing great ad copy, organizing ad groups with tightly themed keywords, geo-targeting appropriately, and working on landing pages to reduce costs and raise keyword Quality Scores. All of this has an effect on ROI, and as you'll learn in later chapters, Google Analytics can show you the ROI for your AdWords campaigns at the campaign, ad-group, ad, and keyword levels. Generally, most advertisers start out wanting an ROI of higher than 300 percent (or a 3:1 ratio of dollars earned to dollars spent). Depending on several factors, one's desired ROI can actually be much higher than 300 percent.
To recap, when you focus on conversions, you should definitely do the following:
Monitor your conversion rates and cost-per-conversion metrics, as these are crucial to your campaign's success.
Use cost-per-acquisition bidding for a "hands-off," intelligent approach to managing your AdWords campaigns.
Optimize your ad rotation by displaying the best-performing ads more often to your visitors.
Convert at higher rates by allocating more money toward your best exact-match keywords, while leaving enough for other match-type keywords that appear in the Search Funnels report.
Use the remarketing feature in AdWords to reach out to undecided visitors to attempt to reengage them and thereby raise your conversion rates.
Calculate your return on investment and decide if the conversions from your keywords, ads, and campaigns are worth the money spent.
Regardless of your focus, there are some general actions that you will prob-ably want to take if you haven't already. These are day-to-day actions, as well as some things we've already discussed in this book to further improve your AdWords campaigns.
First, log in to your campaigns and view the important metrics for your website landing pages at least three times a week, even if you are the most hands-off person in advertising history. Spend some time on your Home tab (Account Snapshot) to get a briefing on recent events, account alerts, and cam-paign performance across your account. Segment your campaigns within the Campaigns tab to find out more details on their performance, and whether or not they're meeting your goals. Run reports from the Report Center to get a detailed, downloadable file telling you what takes place across campaigns within your account. Don't let your account sit unattended for an extended period; even a few days can be considered extended by lots of advertiser standards.
In the same breath, I want to tell you not to make changes to your campaigns simply for the sake of making changes. A lot of advertisers fall into the trap of changing bids, adding keywords, or pausing ads simply because they feel that if they don't do anything, their AdWords will cease being good or a competi-tor will take their traffic. Online marketing doesn't work well when knee-jerk decision-making takes place. No one should rush through changes. My advice is to make changes reasonably, sensibly, and when you have enough data to justify them. Use the My History tool within the Settings sub-tab within any campaign to keep a running tab of all changes made, so you can replicate the changes that work well and forget about replicating the ones that don't.
Another great action to take is to click the Opportunities tab. Make this a once-a-week habit to discover what insights AdWords has to offer for your cam-paigns, ads, and keywords, and to take the recommended actions as necessary. Sometimes AdWords will want you to raise your daily budget, which may not be possible. Other times it will suggest relevant keywords and other information, as I mentioned in Chapter 2. You should also use tools like the standard Keyword Discovery tool to find new ways to expand your AdWords campaigns.
Growth in AdWords isn't limited to simply writing more ads and bidding on more keywords. As you learned in Chapters 2, 4, and 5, you can expand your AdWords reach by syncing your account with the Google Local Business Center to allow local information to appear on your ads. You can link your Google Merchant Center account with your AdWords account and allow product images to appear within search results, and use options like Sitelinks to show visitors additional information within your ads.
You'll also want to run the gamut of regular maintenance tasks, like checking your e-mail for important alerts and other information regarding your account. Depending on how large your account is and how active you are in managing your campaign(s), you may receive a lot of e-mails suggesting you take a certain action. Chances are that an ad may be disapproved or your campaign's end date may be approaching, or something to that effect. Use a tool like the Ads Diagnostic tool to ensure your ads are online and, if they aren't, to find out what you can do to get back up and running. And, obviously, keep track of everything that occurs within the My Billing tab to ensure that your campaigns stay online.
Finally, check out what your competitors are doing. In Chapter 17 I'll cover tools like Google Insights for Search and Google Trends that you can use to discover the rising search terms on Google, as well as the sites your visitors are visiting. You'll also want to perform searches on Google once in a while for keywords that you're bidding on (block your IP address with the IP Exclusion tool so that you don't waste impressions; visit http://www.whatismyip.com to find out what your IP address is). This way you can view how your competitors are advertising to the same audience as you. Do they have better offers than you? Do they write their ads better than you? Do they send their traffic to more relevant landing pages than you? You'll know the answers to those questions when you perform these searches, and you'll gain insight into how you can better leverage your visitors and persuade them to view, click, and convert on your website instead of a competitor's.
To recap, you'll want to take the following general actions:
Log in to your AdWords account a bare minimum of three times a week, focusing on your Account Snapshot page for a high-level review of account activity.
Avoid making useless changes just for the sake of making changes in your campaigns; make sound, logical changes when appropriate.
Use the Opportunities tab to view Google's recommendations for next steps to take on your account, from budget to bids to keyword changes.
Collect new keywords using the standard Keyword Discovery tool.
Take your AdWords campaigns to the next level by inserting Sitelinks, Local Business information, and Product Extensions.
Check your e-mail frequently for AdWords updates, and visit the Ads Diagnostics tool (covered in Chapter 5) to find out why ads may be offline.
Search for your competition without accruing impressions by excluding your IP address within the AdWords interface.
The following few pages highlight common scenarios that play out regularly in offices and meetings, and within advertisers' minds. Knowing what to do and how to do anything in AdWords is great, but as with many things in life, timing is everything. Knowing when to take an action can make the difference between a higher and a lower click-through rate, a better and a worse conversion rate, and more and fewer happy customers.
Let's pretend that the keyword bunny slippers consistently does fairly well. Over the last few months the ads within that keyword's ad group have averaged a position of 1.3, its click-through rate has been 9.5 percent and you're paying $0.25 on average per click. (You're bidding $0.50, but you hold the top position and the next-highest bidder isn't bidding anywhere near $0.50, so you pay only one cent above the next highest bid, which in this hypothetical scenario averages out to $0.25 per click.)
Because you're on top of your AdWords game, you routinely check to see what your competition is doing by performing an occasional search for bunny slippers on Google. This week, you see that you're no longer holding the top position! Some fly-by-night competitor has overtaken you and is now hold-ing the top position. You refresh your screen and try searching again, only to see the new competitor still holding the top position. Oh, by the way, you're the online marketing manager for the client who pays the bills and sets the budget amounts for Bunny Slippers, Inc. The CEO of Bunny Slippers, Inc. is on the line and wants to talk to you because he performed a search on Google this morning, and his company was no longer number one. Now what?
First, don't panic. Yes, it's the easiest thing to say and not the easiest thing to do when you're put on the spot like that, but panicking is going to get you nowhere fast — and your client will sense it and become even more irritated that the precious ad isn't appearing in the number-one position. Second, calmly explain to the client that you are aware of the situation and would like to follow up with him or her within the hour so that you can collect some information and come up with a strategy. You'll want to look at your ad's click-through rates and average positions before doing anything.
Now, a client who calls you to vent about not being number one anymore prob-ably isn't aware of (or doesn't care about) the full AdWords picture — Quality Scores, conversion rates, and all that. Maybe not right away, but sooner rather than later you will have to teach or re-teach your client that being number one for a particular keyword shouldn't be a goal — it should be the outcome of hard optimization work and tedious efforts on your part. You should then attempt to explain that your bunny slippers keyword is consistently earning a Quality Score of 10 out of 10, and that you pay very little for high-quality traffic to the Bunny Slippers website. You should also look to the right-hand side and see the very nice 5.25 percent conversion and $15.75 cost-per-conversion figures that this keyword is boasting. In addition, you have high-click-through-rated ads in rotation. Every other imaginable campaign setting checks out well. Your client, who ideally has relaxed a bit and is rational, will now perhaps hear you out and decide not to order you to raise your bunny slippers keyword bid to infinity because of the very nice profit margin and ROI figures that it brings in.
In AdWords, you cannot tell what another competitor is bidding on any given keyword. If this new competitor is bidding $2 per click, you'll have to go to $2.01 to try to reclaim the top position, which you won't know until several bid-change updates take place (remember that your bid price is only one of the many Quality Score factors). Then, the competitor would re-raise your bid and before long, your cost-per-click would skyrocket and so would your cost per conversion. Also, chances are that by avoiding this bidding-war type of scenario you'll eventually reclaim the top spot. In AdWords, the interloper can only temporarily claim the top position before Quality Scores kick in, knock-ing that competitor back to the lower position that it probably deserves. And, if you want to feel a little sadistic glee, reflect that it may have to pay more than you for a lower position. All this happens because you didn't change your keyword bid out of panic.
Change bids only when they don't damage your profit margins, or if it's early in your campaign's life (to build history and determine a profit margin). Change bids sensibly and avoid bidding wars (trust me, though; this is much easier said than done).
Let's pretend that you have an ad group that isn't doing so well in your Search Network campaign, and after you've performed some preliminary analysis, everything points back to the ads as the problem. Your keywords, settings, bid prices, account structure, and landing pages are all good. Your ads, on the other hand, were written by the client herself. You see, she's a hands-on chief marketing officer with a specific message that she's trying to spread to her target audience. However, she's back in the office this week after attending the Search Marketing Extraordinaire conference in New York City, and she now wants you to raise click-through rates from 3.5 percent to 10 percent because conference keynote speaker Jane Doe said that only 10 percent click-through rates are worth it in paid search. Now what?
The worst thing that you can do is dismiss the advice the leader gave your client. This is the equivalent of saying, "You wasted your time at the conference," which is not necessarily true, because conferences are excellent for sharing knowledge with industry peers. However, at the same time, you'd be placing yourself in a most precarious position if you just said, "Okay" and went about the arduous task of nearly tripling your click-through rate within a week's time. (I almost forgot to mention that your client needs this to happen by Friday afternoon or the ad group gets turned off, which cuts into your management fee.)
The first thing you'll want to do is set some level of reasonable expectation. You've historically had a 3.5 percent click-through rate, which isn't the worst rate in the world for a text ad. But there's probably some room for growth. You can't just tell your client, "Excuse me, but I think your ads suck and are bringing down our efforts." What you can do is test different ads within that same ad group. Very quickly — probably by the end of the week — you'll be able to tell that the new ads that you wrote (because you're an excellent marketer who has the pulse of the target audience at your fingertips) are much better and enjoy a 7 percent click-through rate, which is also increasing conversions and slightly decreasing the average cost per click. Armed with this evidence, you can perhaps persuade your client that the new ads are better, and she will figure out that going with your ads equals more clicks and more conversions. The poorly writ-ten ads get removed from the ad group, and in their place you'll add one or two new ads to try to top your 7 percent click-through rate by the following week.
Test ads continually. Write new ads, remove underperforming ads, and repeat this process as long as you're advertising online.
John Doe is an older man who was extremely successful operating a scrap yard for 30 years. He inherited the family business that had been passed down for four generations. Now he's "gone green" and is investing in a sustainable energy company that recycles scrap metal into usable, Earth-friendly everyday items. He hired you to provide him with suggestions for what to do about his single AdWords campaign — but not before he edited the settings himself. Doe does business worldwide and wants people to fill out a request-for-quote form, which is linked from the landing page. Doe doesn't really know much about how online marketing works, but you do, and you're going to help him.
You could ask him to buy a copy of Your Google Game Plan for Success and read it cover to cover. But you surmise correctly that this is unlikely to happen. So your first step is to check out his settings (while wondering why his sole campaign is targeting only Florida and Georgia, when his business is interna-tional). He has the resources to write ads in multiple languages, which means your language-targeting options become broader. You'll also notice that the campaign is opted into Google only (not Google's Search Partners), and that there is no ad scheduling in place. You then click Bidding and realize that it's set to cost-per-acquisition pricing, with a seriously low CPA bid, which means that not a lot of clicks will be coming to this campaign. And the daily budget has been set ridiculously low, because the client thought this was the average cost-per-click bid price instead.
Still, after wondering why only one campaign was set up, you see that the internal structure of the campaign isn't half bad (the ad groups and keywords are structured well enough, and the Settings and Networks tabs check out), so you roll with it.
Your campaign settings are a reflection of your business goals or your client's. They should be edited to match.
Today is your first day at Moving Faster than the Speed of Light, Inc. The com-pany's owner is a thirtysomething with large ideas, grand plans, and every tech gadget imaginable sprawled across his desk. He's also got specific goals in mind: to reach every pair of eyes possible and gather millions of impressions monthly. Your job as the director of all things online is to pick up where your predecessor left off and see how you can manage the company AdWords account to achieve this monumental goal.
You log in for the first time and notice that Subset, a subdivision of your new firm, has the only active campaign in the account. It's running well but is not focused on the corporate goals and is running only in the Search Network. Your first instinct must be to activate the Content Network and start raking in the impressions, but you can't because you don't want to use these Subset keywords or its highly targeted ads.
The company owner, who is always looking over your shoulder, wants to see what you do because he knows a thing or two about AdWords and online marketing. To impress him, you install AdWords Editor and start creating new search and content campaigns that focus on branding the company. You use Ad Planner and placement-targeting options to choose and refine the sites on which you want your Content Network ads to be displayed, and you use the Search-Based and Keyword Discovery tools to find a way to reach out to your Search Network audience. Next, you blow his socks off by quickly creating ads in the Display Ad Builder tool, while globally targeting the most prominent placements. You then finish the job by uploading all your work from AdWords Editor in one shot while you lean back and sip your cappuccino.
Create new campaigns when jumping into a new network (content or search), or to organize tightly themed ad-group categories.
Because of the tough economic climate, you had no choice but to lay off your online marketing person, who was really a nice guy. You can't afford the time to find a replacement or the salary that a new person will demand, and since you have some free time on your hands, you decide that you'll take on the task. After all, how hard can it be to stare at a computer screen? The AdWords account has been run for so long that it has to be doing well already, right?
Not so fast. After 20 minutes of searching for the log-in and resetting your Google account password, you finally see an account caked with alerts, notifica-tions, and disapproved-ad notices, as well as paused keywords by the pound. You find one (and only one) AdWords campaign with 38 ad groups. Each is exactly the same: one ad with a misspelled title, several hundred keywords each, and Quality Scores that could make you lose your lunch. The campaign is targeted globally, which is a shame because you can ship your products only to the United States and Canada. You also find that ad rotation, ad scheduling, and ad delivery options are the complete opposite of what you had originally asked for a long time ago. Then you notice that the campaign is opted into both the search and Content Networks, which is the reason you see click-through rates of 0.01 percent and cost-per-click bid prices several dollars high. No conver-sion tracking is enabled, no reports have ever been run, and the daily budget is virtually unlimited.
The only thing you can see that's right about this AdWords account is the fact that you're finally taking a personal look at it. But there's something else that's right about it — you have the ability to make as many changes as you need to in order to right the ship. No matter that you're knee-deep; you can always begin draining the swamp. You can start from scratch or slowly change things around so that they are what you want them to be. In this situation, using AdWords Editor is the best way for you to start fresh and get back on track.
You should reorganize your account when its structure does not match up with the best practices that I've discussed through the first six chapters of this book.
Now that you have a solid understanding of all things related to online marketing and Google AdWords, let's shift gears for Part III of this book and talk about Google Analytics. I'll cover the Google Analytics account and the web analytics industry as a whole, and also show you some advanced functionality available within Google Analytics that you'll find extremely useful. Get ready, because we'll really start cooking now!