Website and Software Services

Well, you have been using Google Adwords for some time, you’re getting plenty of clicks from a large selection of keywords, but how do you know which keywords are the ones that are generating your sales? Does it matter as long as the campaign is paying its way?

What’s a Conversion?
A conversion is generally used to describe the moment when a visitor to your website becomes a customer (i.e. when they move from just browsing your site to purchasing something from you), although it can represent the moment where they take any action that you want them to (e.g. completing a survey; asking you for more information etc.).

Why do I need to track them?
If you owned a shop in the high street and got plenty of customers you’d be happy wouldn’t you? If you knew what brought most of those customers to your shop in the first place wouldn’t that be better still? Then you could shift your marketing budget so that more of it was spent targeting that sort of visitor, which sould greatly improve your return on Marketing spend.
The same logic is true for websites. The website is your shop window. You will (hopefully) get lots of people to come in and look around, but what you really need to know is what type of person is buying from you, where did they come from, how did they find out about you etc.

How can I track conversions through my website?
There are actually lots of ways. Google can give you some code which you plug into your website which will capture information about the visitors who arrive via your Adwords Campaign. You can then go to your campaign page in Google and see which keyword clicks actually resulted in a sale / conversion for you. You can also modify your website yourself to track all incoming visitors, and the keywords they have used to search for you.
Whatever method you use the most important thing is to know which keywords / websites etc delivered the most customers to you. If you use Google Adwords you can remove the keywords that are not generating sales, thereby increasing the amount of your budget which goes to the keywords that do generate sales. Simple really, but it’s surprising that many website owners do not do this!

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

Remember to use negative keywords in your Adwords campaigns. Anyone using one of your negative keywords as part of their search criteria will not be shown your advert. This can be useful if, for example, you are targetting the top end of the market for a certain product or service…

Use words like ‘cheap’ and ‘free’ as negative keywords to prevent bargain hunters from seeing your advert….

…or words like ‘rental’ and ‘for hire’ if you only sell products and don’t rent them out.

…or words like ‘britney’ if you sell African Spears!

Anyway, you get the picture. You might reduce the overall number of clicks that you get by using negative keywords, but the average quality of each visitor should increase (and you’ll pay less!).

You can apply negative keywords to specific advert groups within your campaign or to the campaign as a whole.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

Be careful when changing advert headlines, text or urls for any Google Adwords adverts that have been running for a while.

Google builds a history for each of your adverts that helps it to best rank your ad in its Sponsored Listings. This history is destroyed whenever you change any part of your advert!

This means that, for example, if you have achieved a consistently high click-thru-rate for an advert which has resulted in Google showing that advert in a higher position than competitor ads, then this will effectively be lost when you change just 1 letter in your advert copy. This could have a serious impact on your campaign – either you’ll be relegated to a lower position (reducing your clicks) or you’ll pay a higher price for the same position (increasing your costs).

What Can I do?

Once it’s done, you can do nothing to resurrect the history. If you plan your changes carefully, though, you can add new adverts rather than change existing ones, so that the negative impact of a change is diminished. Once your new advert is achieving a decent click-thru-rate you can delete the old advert.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

With Christmas fast approaching I thought it would be appropriate to make a few observations on some of the more seasonal implications for an Adwords Campaign.

Firstly, don’t forget that a large part of the workforce takes time off over this, and other common holiday periods. So, if your campaign targets this demographic you will need to plan for fewer clicks during such periods.

Of course, many campaigns will see the reverse at this time of year. If your target market are individuals who are looking for gifts then you could expect a bumper load of clicks.

Make sure that if your product or service has a potential seasonal appeal (clothing, for example), you might want to introduce some additional keywords and adverts to point this out to the browsers. So, an advert text which reads ‘Order Now, Delivered for Christmas’ might just attract the attention of a search engine visitor who has left his / her Christmas shopping a bit late, and may get you a click ahead of a higher placed advert.

Finally, if you sell products that will appeal to Christmas shoppers and you have a set budget to spend on your Adword clicks each month, why not try to get your entire months clicks within the first week or two of December? That way you will spend the same as in other months, but will possibly convert a few more sales than usual. To do this, increase your Daily Budget and wait until you have captured the clicks that you want. Then reduce the daily budget again and pause the campaign until next month.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

When typing your URL (the website address to which you want your advert group clicks to be targetted), try adding a string such as ?source=adwordsxxxx to the end of the URL. ‘xxxx’ is a string that describes the advert group which is generating the click.

If you check your Web Server Log Files to see how your visitors have interacted with your website, you will clearly be able to differentiate your Google Adwords visitors from the rest, as you will see a record that looks like the following:

195.93.21.34 – - [04/Nov/2005:23:56:10 +0000] “GET /softwaredev.htm?source=adwordssoftware HTTP/1.0″ 200 10463 “http://aolsearch.aol.co.uk/web?query=software+oxford&isinit=true&restrict=countryUK&x=39&y=6″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 5.1; Q312461; SV1)”

As you can see, this visitor arrived at the softwaredev.htm page of my website and was tagged with the ‘adwordssoftware‘ string to indicate that they had been sent to my site from my ‘software’ advert group in my Google Adwords campaign.

If you don’t look at your Web Server Log Files directly, but use one of the many Log File Analysis programs currently on the market, you might be able to adjust your Google Adwords URL ‘tag’ string so that it uses a format that can be readily interpreted by the log analyser program that you are using.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

A client of mine recently asked if I had switched his campaign off. He had searched for a few of his keywords and couldn’t see any of his Adwords adverts in the Sponsored Links results area. I often see comments on bulletin boards and other forums along similar lines, so I thought it was worth a mention here.

The reason why ads do not show is most likely to be because Google spreads the delivery of adverts throughout the day at a rate that will best achieve the campaigns daily budget. It doesn’t want to blow your entire daily budget within the first hour of the day (although it might do if your click cost is a high proportion of your daily budget!) and so it will stop delivering your adverts if the click rate gets ahead of itself.

As a campaign manager, I quite often manually pause a campaign for similar reasons. I regularly set campaign budgets high so that my adverts get plenty of exposure. When I introduce new advert groups (or adverts or keywords), they are often more successful than I had expected, generating many more clicks than I am targetting. So, short-term, I pause the campaign whilst I adjust it so that it delivers the right blend of quality and quantity for the price agreed with the client.

Let’s say that you have a ‘real’ daily budget of £10 for your Google Adwords Campaign. You tell Google that this is the amount that you want to spend, and off it goes. Google will calculate your average cost per click, average daily impressions, and average click-thru-rate, and will then work out how often it needs to show your adverts in order to achieve your £10 daily spend limit. Once it has delivered clicks to the value of £10 it will stop showing your ads for that day – actually this is not strictly the case, as mentioned in our Hints & Tips #1 article, but the effect is the same!

But, what if you regularly achieve your daily budget, and you reach it relatively early each day? This suggests that you could achieve many more clicks if only you were prepared to spend more, right? Well, yes, but…

…if you really cannot increase your daily budget to deliver more of these clicks, then you should consider reducing your maximum cost per click (CPC). This will have the effect of reducing your advert position, and is likely to reduce your click-thru-rate (CTR), but what it will do is deliver you more clicks (overall) for your same budget, as Google will display your adverts for a larger part of the day than it did before.

Of course, all of this assumes that the quality of visitor you get on a lower cost-per-click is the same as those that you got at a higher click cost. This strategy has different results for different types of campaign, so please check that it works for you before committing to it longer term, but it is a useful technique to be aware of!

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

Research shows that search engine users are more likely to click on a Sponsored Link if the Advert contains all, or most, of the keywords that they searched for. This is partly because the search terms are highlighted in bold text by Google in the adverts.

This is easier said than done if you have a large variety of possible keywords, but it’s still worth the effort to create a large range of adverts (or creatives, as Google call them) to make sure that they are all covered. Better still, split the keywords into seperate advert groups to focus on different keyword ranges. This will then ensure that your keywords get great click-thru-rates (CTR), which should in turn mean a higher placement in the listings for the same (or less) money.

For the more confident amongst you, you could try using Googles keyword substitution. This allows you to create a list of keywords that will trigger your advert, and then create an advert that says something like “Buy your {variable} from us”. Google will insert the users search term into your advert in place of {variable} when it is displayed, so that if (say) the user searched for ‘Tomatoes’, then the advert would say “Buy your Tomatoes from us”. It’s quite a powerful tool.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

Google ranks its Sponsored Search Results according to several factors. One of these factors is Click-thru-Rate (CTR – the percentage of displayed adverts that are actually clicked). So your advert could appear above somebody else’s advert, even though they bid a higher maximum Cost-per-Click (CPC). The reasoning behind this is simple – if your advert is getting a lot of clicks, Google will make more money from your advert even if the cost of each click is a bit lower.
For this reason, it is a very good idea to get your advert as high a CTR as possible early on in its life. Google uses historic data to derive the CTR and so the adverts for a new advert group, for instance, will find it difficult to gain a real foothold until they have built up some history. To get some good early exposure for your adverts, and to help them build some useful history for Google to act on, I think it is worth setting the maximum CPC for the group to a high value initially. You can then reduce the maximum CPC (gradually) as the group becomes more established. You may eventually find that you are achieving higher average positions with a much lower average CPC than you were when you started out.

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.

Google will spread the delivery of your adverts over the entire day based upon your campaign daily budget. Let’s look at the implications of this by using an example. Bear in mind this will not work out precisely, it is just intended to show the general effect, and many factors will conspire to make it unpredictable:

Say you have a campaign daily budget of £24, an average cost per click (CPC) of £0.50 and a click-thru-rate (CTR) of 1%.

Your typical spend should therefore be around £1 per hour (daily budget divided by hours in the day).

Therefore, you should get around 2 clicks per hour (hourly spend divided by average CPC).

With a CTR of 1%, Google will then deliver your advert 200 times each hour (clicks per hour divided by click-through-rate).

Now, it may be that your keywords are being searched-for more often than that. If that is the case then you are potentially missing out on some clicks. What’s more, your competitors may be getting their ads shown when your are not!

So what are the options available to you if you want your adverts to be displayed more often? Simple, just increase your daily budget! I have found that my costs rarely exceed my daily budget. I might be happy spending £10 per day, but find that if I set my Google Campaign Daily Budget to £10 I never really get £10′s worth of clicks. If you have a ‘real’ daily budget of £10, then why not try increasing the Google Campaign budget to £20 or £30 and pause your campaign once you have reached £10?

Beware! Actually, Google will balance your advert delivery over the entire month according to your daily budget. So, for example, if your daily budget is £10 Google will assume you want to spend £310 in the month (assuming there are 31 days in the month), and will adjust your advert delivery accordingly. This means that you could, in theory, spend more than your daily budget on any particular day, and Google should then adjust your spend for the rest of the month to meet your budget. If Google “accidentally” delivers too many adverts in a month they will never charge you more than your daily budget multiplied by the number of days in the month.

Finally, I have only shown you how to increase your advert exposure in this article. Future articles will show you how to increase the click-thru-rate once your ads are displayed, and how you might get better rankings for adverts without spending more money per click!

The Author of this series of articles is Martin Jarvis, who creates and manages Pay-per-Click campaigns for a number of clients. To find out more, please visit us at DMJ Computer Services Ltd.