Mint Digital

Since writing the last Click Google AdWords - advertising made easy, I’ve had feedback from people with more experience than me. The thrust of my argument stays: the combination of cost-effectiveness and measurability makes AdWords a great advertising option. But if you are planning to spend lots on AdWords, here’s the detail:

Firstly, AdWords doesn’t always work. One reader pointed to this article by Search Engine expert Andrew Goodman. Goodman says that despite being selective a quarter of his Adwords campaigns are failures. Successful campaigns are for companies that are

“in a hot industry, or one that is very amenable to very close targeting, with only a handful of web-savvy competitors; or selling products or services that people seem to be in a hurry to get at, or have time limits attached (medical needs, necessities for sudden trips abroad, etc.). Or in a competitive industry, they have built in some kind of differentiation that consumers can quickly come to terms with”.

Secondly, there was disagreement about my reasoning as to why a certain ad did better.

Alicia of Succurrolmen thought the phrase ‘3 lovely cottages’ was off-putting:

I figured that if there are only 3 available, it’s a small operation and therefore the cost will be higher, also three cottages will probably go quickly so I’d try it only as a last resort.

My brother, Will Bell, picked up on my lousy grammar:

I thought the reason “sleeps up to 20″ didn’t do so well is because of a grammatical issue, i.e. a plural subject and a singular verb (3 lovely cottages…sleeps up to 20).

Finally, Will Bell also pointed out a number of factors I had glossed over:

a) Is a higher ad CTR necessarily better?
I imagine not. There are high quality clicks and low quality clicks. Improving CTR by specifying location is often going to be a good idea. Improving CTR by putting keywords in Ad Title may not be. In the holiday cottage example, “Dorset Cottage” gets the highest number of impressions. If you made an ad for that keyword with “Dorset Cottage” in the title, the CTR would go up, but there would be a lot of clickers who are set on a thatched place with a flowery garden, who maybe aren’t interested in Scoles.

b) Is higher keyword CTR necessarily better?
For those bedmakers, using “insomnia” or “renovation” instead of “teak bed” will bring the CTR down, but if the number of impressions shoots right up, that may be no bad thing. (You do need to keep CTR above about 0.5 though, or Google will disable the keyword.)

c) Is higher ad position necessarily better?
Again I imagine not. There is some evidence that people look more at position 3 or 4, than 2 or 1.

A completely different point is about drone clicks. A lower position may mean losing good clicks to competitors, but, that said, I’d prefer 1000 clicks at position 8 than 1000 clicks at position 1. People who scroll down, find you in 8th place and then click are better prospects.

(A problem with being number 8 though is that your ad won’t appear on Adsense sites, which show a maximum of 5 ads and often less).

d) Is a higher conversion rate necessarily better?
Well, there is the maybe obvious trade-off between conversion rate and number of conversions. (If you whittle your campaign down to only your star conversion keyword you probably won’t get as many conversions as you want).

On a different note, I have a personal qualm with conversion tracking because the two things that I bought using Google Adwords before I knew they were called Adwords - some software and a garden fork - wouldn’t have shown up as a conversion. Both times I went away and then returned directly to the website. Are some types of clickers (e.g. those using v. specific keywords to research a product) more likely to go away and come back? No idea. Nevertheless, I suppose this is purely good news in as much as conversion rates are a minimum and the actual rate could be much higher.)

All the above makes me think it’s worth spending $70 on Andrew Goodman’s book (I say book, it comes as a pdf file). In his sales spiel he talks about it dealing with, among other things, “how to harmonize the four (sometimes conflicting) objectives that you and every advertiser on the system are facing”. http://www.page-zero.com/products_asroi.asp