I’ve been researching keywords for a new client today & discovered that the Google Keyword Tool thinks I’ll need to pay $10.21 for the broad match ‘free credit check’.
From this we can tell that a decent, benefit-driven Ad highly relevant to that keyword & a decent Landing Page will probably cost about $3-4 per click at the top of the page.
And yet 2 of the top 5 results are for American sites (complete with American credit check jargon that most Aussies wouldn’t begin to understand) and another site is broken – see image.
How to avoid a broken AdWords campaign:
1. Check your Landing Page regularly – at least once a month – on all 3 major browsers (IE 6 or 7, Firefox & Safari). There are websites that will show you what your site looks like if you don’t own a Mac
2. Ensure that your list of countries (in your AdWords account) is limited only to those countries that you regualrly sell to. Once you know your account has a great ROI, then by all means extend your reach – but do so with a different campaign, a specific landing page, no jargon & ideally a domain name for that country. A .com.au domain for an Australian AdWords account will make a huge difference to your CTR (how much? it varies by industry, but we’ve seen accounts triple their CTR overnight with a .com.au & that’s without further testing)
3. Ensure that you can actually sell to the countries that are on your list! If your only payment option is PayPal, are residents of those countries even allowed to open a PayPal account?
4. Use Google Analytics to check your Bounce Rate regularly – at least monthly, if not weekly. A higher than normal (whatever normal is for your site) bounce rate indicates that visitors are not getting what they expected. GrokDotCom has an excellent post on this topic this week.
5. Common sense is sadly under-rated! As often as you can, sit down at a computer with someone that’s not a staff member & look over their shoulder as they navigate through your site. Try to stay silent & just watch! You’ll learn a lot. Do this often.
6. Install ClickTale & watch movies of your visitors trying to use your site – probably an eyeopening experience.
7. Hire an expert to look over your site & give you objective feedback.
Did I miss any? Feel free to add more below in the comments. Thanks, Mike
