Google Analytics MindMap
A memory jogger. If you’re still undecided as to whether you need an Analytics package or not… think again, you do! Google Analytics is simple to set up, it’s free & will give you amazing insight into your website & how your visitors use it. This mindmap will help you remember all the parts of the process & our video series (coming soon) will show you exactly how to set it up & how to use the reports.
Don’t delay, install it today (or get your friendly geek to). Invaluable information & free.
Click the image for the expanded version…
GMail voice & video chat now available
If you use gmail you’ve probably already seen this new feature – if not, take a peek at http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/say-hello-to-gmail-voice-and-video-chat.html
or just download it from http://mail.google.com/videochat
Now if only they would take on the likes of gotomeeting or webex….
AdWords Editor – New Version Just Out
Here’s the download link for the new version of AdWords Editor.
Or, if you prefer, just start AdWords Editor on your computer & choose the ‘backup then update’ option when prompted.
Remember you can use this great (free) tool to:
- quickly copy entire campaigns (maybe you want separate campaigns for search & content networks, or for different countries)
- easily search & replace keywords across multiple AdGroups & Campaigns
- instantly adjust bid prices for thousands of keywords in just a few seconds
Some of the new changes are:
Keyword Opportunities – another way to let Google help you generate more keywords & (you’ll love this) a mix ‘n’ match feature called Keyword Multiplier that allows you to combine lists of words for more phrase ideas.
Some much needed View improvements – making it easier to resize/choose columns & date ranges (try autosize!)
Copy the ‘shell’ of a campaign or group – make copies without the contents … sounds weird, try it!
Better import (& export) options – the HTML version is much better & you can now choose specific AdGroups to export to csv (hey – it’s useful for some of us…)
It’s a great tool – grab your free copy today.
AdWords Changes you MUST make
Google AdWords changed the metrics they show over the weekend. It’s now possible to see the traffic from Google & the traffic from Google’s search partners (until now these were always lumped together)
Take a look at the results below – I think you’ll find them very insightful…
First, you’ll need to choose the metrics to display. Find the drop down box at the top of the Campaign Summary screen & choose the appropriate selection (‘Split:
Google search/search partners/content network‘ will show you all three lots of stats – but of course you should already have your search & content campaigns running separately .. don’t you!)
Now for the first time you can see clicks, impressions, cost, average position & conversion data for the Search Partners (AOL, Ask etc)
Take a look at one campaign we’re currently running for a small client – these are the numbers for the weekend just gone… we’ll be turning off the search partners option for this campaign from now on! The difference is more than I would have thought.
Now it’s your turn. Go to your account now & check this for your own accounts. You may be amazed at what you find.
Two Ways to Sell Business Cards (or not)
I’m an idiot. I tend to leave things to the last minute. So it should come as no surprise that I’m getting on a plane to speak in Fiji tomorrow & don’t have any business cards to take with me to the conference! Told you – idiot!
So I do what any normal Aussie does in this situation: call in a favour & jump on Google.
The favour was to an excellent graphic designer (if you need a website designed, artwork done etc let me know & I’ll put you in touch with Karl – he doesn’t want me to link to him here).
Google was to find a 24 hour business card printing service. What follows are two examples of how to sell & how not to sell online. And once again the winner is the little business not the big corporate.
I know there’s a Kinkos around the corner from me, so I jump on there site & fill in the online quote form. It’s not specific to a store – but I figure with my postcode they can figure it out.
Imagine my surprise when I get this email back:
I am currently on annual leave from the 22 – 25th of August, please leave me an email & i’ll get back to you.
Quote requests have been redirected to Leonie to distribute to sales rep.
Thank you
Sendy
I kid you not. When Sendy goes on holiday, all online quoting appears to stop! Unbelievable. But true.
A better way to get customers:
Now compare that to the guys at ePlot
- instant online quote – that changes as I change my specification. Transparency wins online!
- a local address & phone number that gives me the assurance I need that I can walk around the corner & see them if I have to – or in my case cycle round there tonight to pick up my finished cards!
- quick & easy upload of artwork (thanks again Karl!)
- quick & easy payment. OK so PayPal was the only option, but at least it was an option (see Yaro’s take on PayPal here)
The lesson? Make it easy for your prospects to start the process – and make sure the process works all the way through to delivery. Oh & maybe a vacation autoresponder isn’t the best method to use (anyone at FedEx Kinkos reading this – feel free to get in touch & we’ll talk about how we can help 
Sendy – I hope you had a great vacation.. there’s probably a fair bit of email awaiting your return!
How much should you spend on AdWords?
That’s the question we get asked all the time! Want to know the answer… whatever you want to.
There’s a great post over at Lunametrics about Starting Small with your PPC marketing – and for many clients that’s the key. Start with what you can afford. Test the waters. Then increase your budget once you can see some results.
Google has some great tools behind the scenes that will help you make the decisions a bit easier: one is the Daily Budget tool shown above. Google watches how many impressions & clicks you get for your money (in this example a $40/day budget), then it tells you how much traffic it thinks you could be getting & what the budget needs to be to get 100% of it.
Too easy!
Of course it helps when you’re getting a 6.5% CTR across the entire campaign, but hey – that’s what we do & why you might want to consider hiring us!
The only danger with starting too small is that it might take a long time to get decent results. If you can afford to, increase your budget & test faster. Remember to keep split testing your Ads (higher CTR% will mean lower costs in the long run) & measure conversions not just clicks.
Good luck!
Google AdWords – A Change in Display Tactics
Nothing about this on Inside AdWords yet, but it looks like Google are testing new ideas for AdWords.
I have text links set NOT to underline on my browser (I just think it looks neater) but as of an hour ago Google are underlining the search keywords in the AdWords results. Note, they’re not making any changes to the SEO (left side, organic) search results, only AdWords results.
This is an interesting change presumably one that will increase Click Thru Rates (CTR%) – but make sure you kep an eye on conversions. More clicks won’t necessarily mean more leads/sales.
One thing it does mean you should do – make sure you have the keywords in your headline! More than ever this is so important now. Take a look at the screen grab to the left… which Ads jump out more? Having the search term your prospect used in the Ad will now make a bigger difference on CTR.
How do you do this? Lots of different AdGroups (each AdGroup has a few closely related keywords) with a couple of Ads in each one.
How do the Ads look in your country? Is this just Australia for now??
Do You Have Enough Negative Keywords?
Pay Per Click Marketing is, of course, about relevance. Not only choosing the most relevant keywords for your products & services, but also making sure that the wrong keywords don’t trigger your Ads to show. The solution: Negative Keywords (or Excluded Keywords for Yahoo!)
By choosing the right negative keywords you can dramitically reduce unwanted Ad impressions – the maths of which are important to understand.
Let’s imagine that you have no negative keywords at all & your group of keywords gets 10,000 impressions in a day. You get 200 clicks. Your CTR% is 2%
By adding the right list of negative keywords, you might potentially reduce those impressions to 5,000. But because these were (hopefully) all unwanted, you haven’t changed the number of clicks. So still 200 per day. Now your CTR is 4% – a nice increase.
That won’t halve your cost per click (CPC) anymore (it used to be that simple, not any more!) but a CTR% that’s twice as good will certainly improve your Quality Score & reduce your costs over time.
If you need inspiration (or just time saving) Andy Komack has a great list to get you started here:
http://www.komarketingassociates.com/blog/200-plus-negative-keywords-to-consider-for-b2b-ppc/
(also read the comments for a few more useful suggestions)
More info at the Google Help Centre is here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=14791&query=negative&topic=&type=f&%20onclick=
Have you recently added negative keywords to your account? Want to share the results?
Do you need to know SEO for AdWords?
If you’re already using AdWords then you probably know that the Quality Score feature has a lot to do with the Landing Page that you take your visitors to. In fact your whole website is being judged by Google for its relevance to your potential users.
Which really means that if you want to keep your AdWords costs as low as possible you need to read up on SEO best practices. Yep it used to be that SEO & SEM were at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of online marketing, but these days they’re two sides of the same coin.
If you need some SEO help, here ‘s a great post by Matt Cutts (THE SEO legend)
I can also highly (very highly) recommend you get yourself a copy of the SEO Book by Aaron Wall. He also has a huge range of free tools at the website
Small changes can have huge impacts. We recently suggested a few (fairly) minor changes to a client’s site. It took her 30 minutes to implement & CPC for her main dozen keywords dropped by 30% overnight. Add this to some simple changes that boosted conversion on the page by about 90%, and some work with AdWords Editor to setup different campaigns for each major country (more on this later in the week) that helped her better control costs in each area… all up she’s now making about $10k a month instead of $5k with the same spend! Not bad for a couple of hours work. Let us know if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.
3 ways to structure your AdWords account
One of the questions I often get asked by marketers new to AdWords is how to structure their account properly – there just seem to be so many choices.. what’s the best way? Here are a few ideas to get you started.
#1 create a new campaign for every country you want to advertise in. If you sell a digital product in, say, Australia, NZ, UK, USA & Canada, the only way to get sensible statistics for each of those countries is to have 5 separate campaigns. For instance if you mix them all together & pick ‘all english speaking countries’ then that keyword with average position 4.6 might be in the #1 or 2 spot in NZ & Canada, 4th in Oz & UK & position 9 in the States. Information you need to know in order to manage the account properly
#2 always create separate campaigns for Search vs Content traffic. Not only are the bid prices wildly different, the text of your Ads needs to be different too – you’re dealing with 2 very different mindsets. One group are actively searching, the other are browsing & you’re trying to catch their attention & interrupt them
#3 segment by keyword – here are some general suggestions:
- You might have some keywords that are product/service (hopefully experience!) focused & some that are variations on your brand name(s) – if you always want to be found for your brand (and why wouldn’t you?) then you’ll want to set a higher budget for those words & perhaps a lower one for more general product phrases. The only way to do that is to have different campaigns for each
- You might have location specific keywords – these are becoming essential in many markets. You could use groups for this but it’s often better to use different campaigns & set the location of each campaign to the location mentioned in your Ads. eg show the ‘this service in sydney’ ad only in the sydney or NSW state region.
- some keywords are very general – the ones used early in a buyers decision making cycle (eg “plasma tv”), others are very specific (eg “Sony PlasmaPro FWD-42PV1″). You may want to limit your spend each day on the general stuff, but always get found if someone is looking for a particular product number – again 2 (or more) campaigns with different budgets will solve this
And if it all sounds too hard to create different AdGroups & Campaigns, make sure you install the AdWords Editor – it makes moving keywords, ads & groups as easy as dragging & dropping!
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