Congratulations, Alan Vickery on passing the Google Certified Advertising Professional Exam.
Posts Tagged ‘Google Adwords’
Google AdWords Conversion Tracking
Everyone wants to stretch their AdWords budget to get the best ROI for their money, but how do you know that you are performing at your best? Google includes a tool in standard Adwords accounts called conversion tracking. Put simply, conversion tracking allows you to monitor a user’s actions on your website and links that data to your AdWords stats in terms of budget. You can setup several different types of actions, which are goals that you want your user to accomplish, such as signing up for a newsletter, clicking on a button, completing a purchase, or submitting a form. The action types are:
- Leads
- Signup
- Purchase / Sale
- View of a Key Page
- Other
Setting up the conversion tracking is relatively straightforward. Once you create and name your action you are provided with a snippet of Javascript to place in your page. Results are tracked immediately and can be monitored at the campaign, ad group, and keyword levels. Once enough results are calculated, you will be able to see how much it costs you for a user to take an action. For example, in a week if you have 100 clicks at $2.00 / click and 15 conversions then each conversion will have cost you $13.33. Using this information can become a metric for performance. You can work on decreasing your cost per click, increasing your Quality Score, and reducing you cost per conversion.
Good Luck!
Online Advertising in 2009
For many industries, things are going to get worse in the first half of 2009, but that might not be all bad. Companies will have to get leaner and meaner which could mean more competition and subsequently more innovation and maybe some better prices. Getting leaner means controlling cash flow and one of the areas that will see the largest paradigm shift is advertising. Many business owners that we have met recently are finding it difficult to justify bloated budgets for traditional print, radio, and television advertising in these uncertain economic times.
One of the questions that we get most often is, “How can I get my message to my target as cheaply as possible?”. We typically have to answer the question by asking a series of questions designed to figure out what they are looking for, who are they targeting, and, of course, what is their budget. The answers to these questions will dictate a plan of action that will most likely involve online advertising. Some form of advertising will always be needed to reach target audiences, but the smart money is advertising online. Why? Because it is rapid, measurable, and affordable. Shifting dollars from traditional ad budgets to online advertising is like taking dollars to Mexico ten years ago; you would have some serious purchasing power.
Does this mean that print, radio, and TV are dead? Far from it, but they are changing. Google has made a foray into traditional advertising by creating the infrastructure for ad creation and campaign management right in your Google Adwords account. Take , for example Google TV ads. Using the same Adwords interface that you use for your pay-per-click campaign you can schedule a TV ad to run literally within minutes. Using the Google Ad Creation marketplace you can request bids on your project from Specialists in Production, Script Writing, Video Editing, and Voiceovers. These are powerful tools that simply were not available to small business owners before, and can be used to reduce advertising costs and make companies more competitive.
Good Luck!
Read Charles Hugh Smith’s article The Web Dismantles Old Media.
Google Adwords and Keyword Quality Scores
A customer has asked you to create a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising campaign to drive traffic to their web site. You do your competitive keyword analysis, research the industry, and develop a targeted plan that should theoretically work wonders. But it doesn’t. What happened? Have you looked at your keywords quality score? In Google Adwords each keyword is assigned a numerical value out of 10 that affects how much you are paying per click. If you are scoring 4 / 10 or lower then you have some work to do. Google calculates your quality score for each keyword based on several factors including historical clickthrough rate (CTR), the quality of your landing page content, and the relevance of the keywords to your ads in the keyword’s ad group. Improving your score for a specific keyword can mean a better return on your adwords budget. In other words, less money for more traffic. Google isn’t stupid. If you are selling real estate and your keywords are for hair care and your ads are targeted for electronics then your quality score is likely to be low. Everything flows from the keywords so be sure that the keywords you are using are actually contained within the content of your landing page and then create ads that are interesting and concise (not like you have a choice with brevity). If one ad doesn’t perform try several variations and weed out the weak ones.
Good Luck!