I don’t know exactly what caused it, but it was something to do with php databases or whatnot. Anyway, after some fumbling ’round in my FTP client, it’s finally sorted and up again.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

-George.

It seems like there are thousands of companies who offer to “manage your Adwords account” for a fee, but what do they do exactly?

• Is it all hocus pocus?
• Do they actually do anything?
• And is it so complicated only a rocket scientist could understand it?

Aside from a few dubious scamps, most Adwords management companies do make concerted efforts to improve your account.

It’s not hocus pocus and it’s not overly complicated either – at least it’s not when you understand the basic principles.

In a series of upcoming posts, I’m going to show you how to manage an Adwords account with nothing more than Adwords Editor and Excel.

That way, if you do want to hire a professional later on (maybe even me), you’ll know a little bit more about how it all works – and there’s a little less mystery to it.

Today, I’m going to show you how to set up a few filters in Adwords to help you quickly spot problems in your campaigns’.

Let’s go…

If you know at-a-glance which ads and keywords have:

• Impressions but no clicks,
• Clicks but no conversions,
• High costs but no conversions,
• Average position below 7,
• Quality score below 5,

…then you’ll find it much easier to fix these profit stealing problems before you lose too much money.

I’m going to show you how to set these filters up on a keyword level, but you can do the same thing with adgroups, ads and even campaigns if you like.

Log into your Adwords account and select the campaign you want to manage.

Click on the “keywords” tab without selecting an adgroup first. This’ll give you a list of all the keywords in this campaign.

1. To find keywords with impressions but no clicks:

Filter keywords with impressions but no clicks

Click “Filter” and select “Create Filter”.

• To find keywords with impressions but no clicks:
• choose “Impressions >= 1”,
• then click “add another”
• and choose “Clicks <= 0” Tick the “save filter” box then click “Apply”
• You now have a list of all keywords with at least one impression, but no clicks. (If you want to raise the bar and show ads with, say, 200 impressions and no clicks replace the number 1 in the impressions filter with 200.)
• To remove the filter, just click on “close”.

2. Finding keywords with clicks but no conversions is very similar.

Filter keywords with clicks but no conversions

• Again, get onto the “keywords” tab in your chosen campaign, then click “filter” and “create filter” just as before. This time choose “clicks >= 1”,
• Click “add another”
• Then choose “conversions <= 0”
• Tick the “save filter” box and click “apply”.
• You’ll have a list of keywords with clicks but no conversions.
• Again, to remove the filter, click “close”.

3. Next up is finding keywords with a high cost but no conversions.

Filter keywords with high cost but no conversions

• Get onto the “keywords” tab in your chosen campaign, then click “filter” and “create filter” just as before.
• Choose “Cost < £3” (replace £3 with whatever your target cost per conversion is)
• Click “add another”
• Then choose “conversions <= 0”
• Tick the “save filter” box and click “apply”.
• You’ve now got a list of keywords that have cost more than your target cost per conversion, but haven’t generated any conversions.

4. This filter is going to show you all the keywords that aren’t showing on page one.

Filter keywords showing in position 8 or over

Well, over position 8 at least. (Sometimes there are 11 ads on the page, but I won’t complicate things here).

• Get onto the “keywords” tab in your chosen campaign, then click “filter” and “create filter” just as before.
• Choose “Avg. position < 8”
• Tick the “save filter” box and click “apply”.
• You’ve now got a list of keywords that have appeared below position 8.

5. The final filter in this post is similar to the previous one – only that we’re checking quality score, not ad position.

Filter keywords with a quality score of 5 or less

Here’s how to do it:

• Get onto the “keywords” tab in your chosen campaign, then click “filter” and “create filter” just as before.
• Choose “Quality score <= 5”
• Tick the “save filter” box and click “apply”.
• You’ve now got a list of keywords that have appeared below position 8.

And because you’ve saved your keyword filters, you can load them up in seconds the next time you’re in your Adwords campaign.

As I mentioned earlier, you can apply similar filters to the ads, adgroups and campaigns tabs as well.

Most Adwords pro’s use similar filters to this in Adwords Editor – but that’s another post for another day.

For now, try the new filters and enjoy the results.

Cheers,

-George

Their real problem is converting their Adwords clicks into leads or sales.

So a great deal of my work is to do with increasing website conversion rates – not just tweaking Adwords accounts.

Anyway, I recently did a little landing page optimisation for a long term client of mine and got a big lift in conversions.

Here’s the result:

Testing a more compelling offer increased landing page conversions by 215%

As you can see, the new page increased conversion rates by 215%.

So what made the difference?

Well, there were no layout changes or fancy redesigns.

And I didn’t test a new headline, bullet points, text size or colour.

The change that improved conversion by 215% was the offer.

The original offer was along the lines of “Leave us your details and we’ll find you the best deal”…

… whereas the new offer was more explicit: “Get 2 karting sessions for the price of 1.”

The new page’s call to action told the reader to claim their 2 for 1 voucher – and the 3 of the bullets on the landing page explained how the offer worked.

But other than that, the pages were identical.

So remember to test your landing page’s offer before you test other things.

Here are a few ideas to get you started.

I’m sure you could think of more, but they’re a start.

So start testing a new offer and let me know how you get on!

Cheers,

-George

PS: If you want help with Adwords or your landing pages feel free to get in touch for a chat.

New Mobile Targeting Options in Adwords (Click to Enlarge)

It looks like you can target UK mobile users by the type of phone they use and their network operator. So, if you wanted to, you could target iPhone users on the Orange network.

Interesting stuff.

I’ve been rewriting this site as well as creating videos, reports, audios and all other kinds of goodies you’ll be able to get your hands on shortly.

You see, I’m pretty good at sorting out clients websites and landing pages, but shockingly lackadaisical when it comes to my own. Rather like the builder’s house that’s always a mess and half finished.

Anyway, expect some changes round here pretty soon.

About the video…

I made this video below ages ago (or ages ago in Internet years, anyway) and thought it’d help you, dear reader. It’s a little tutorial about how to track who clicked on your links in an email marketing campaign.

This is handy when you’re trying to work out who’s paying attention – and worth spending more time on – and who’s not.

With this technique, you can see what each individual email subscriber did on your website and identify them by their email address.

Here’s the video:

You'll probably get more sense out of a psychic reader than me

I meant to do a post like this last year, but never got ‘round to it. So this year, I’m determined to write something – even if it’s to look back next year and see how spectacularly wrong I was.

Let’s kick off with politics…

I don’t know if I’m being a tad paranoid, but politicians and bureaucrats are taking an unhealthy interest in the internet. And I’m not talking about deviant smut they may enjoy in their spare time either.

It seems Western governments are getting ready to regulate the internet. There’s the Digital Economy Bill here in the UK, the ACTA laws proposed by the US and Australia’s Plan for Cyber Safety.

Whether you agree with these proposals or not, one thing is certain. There’s a battle for online privacy and freedom brewing – and it may come to a head in 2010.

Remove the tin-foil hat and get back to business. The mobile marketing business.

I reckon the mobile phone will be the next big thing in marketing next year, although the medium won’t mature for a few years yet. Not exactly original, I know, but still important if you’re running a business.

Here’s why…

Mobile phones are getting more powerful. The iPhone 3GS for instance has a high quality camera, full web browser, wifi, video players, compass and GPS – all of which can be utilised by marketers. Even on its own, the falling cost and rapid growth of smart phone use is enough to justify my prediction. But wait, there’s more…

In November, Google bought Admob, the mobile phone advertising platform – giving the combined companies an estimated 24% share in the mobile advertising market.

And in the same month, Swindon Borough Council announced free wifi for all their residents. Digital City, the company involved in rolling out the wifi, is planning to do the same thing in other boroughs.

What does it all mean? In 2010 & 2011 a fair chunk of the population will own powerful, location aware smart phones and have access to decent wifi. And “GoogMob”, I am sure, will do all they can to help marketers target users of these handsets.

The possibilities are very exciting indeed.

Another dreary social media prediction…

Or maybe not? I don’t think social media will save the world in 2010. In fact, I think it’ll struggle to save itself.

To me, social media like Facebook and Twitter is still in its infancy. These businesses remind me of the dot com boom from 10 years ago: trendy, VC funded and pretty much unprofitable – with all the investment capital based on vague predictions.

We all know what happened to these businesses back then, and I think something similar will happen again in the coming year or two.  But something better will come out of the wreckage.

(I’ve written about this before, so forgive me if I’m repeating myself.) The problem with all social sites is the user is conditioned to expect the services to be free and ad-free from the beginning. Then any attempt to “monetize” (I hate that word) the site and modify the user’s behaviour results in fierce resistance.

I don’t know if Facebook or Twitter are going to be able to pull off monetization and keep their users happy. My money’s on a new emerging network – possibly based on Google’s Wave infrastructure – that’ll be profitable from the start.

(EDIT: That doesn’t mean it’s not worth testing Facebook PPC advertising. I think it’s pretty good for the right kind if businesses. I just can’t see it being another Adwords.)

The return of direct mail…

It’s never really been away; just out of fashion. But with rising bid prices for pay per click traffic, and the coming demise of objective SEO with personalised search results skewed to individuals, the smarter money will be spent on direct mail.

Targeting and fulfilling has never been so easy. Self service list brokers like Selectabase and cheap DIY print and postage with CFH Docmail makes direct mail a serious alternative to pay per click in tougher markets.

Why pay £3 for a single website visitor when the same money could hit a similar prospect 3 times with a 4 page colour mail pack – and there are no minimum order quantities?

Come again?

So 2010 will be the year politicians smear our lovely internet with their oily little fingers, mobile marketing gets serious attention, the Web 2.0 crash (and recovery), and the resurrection of direct mail – even though it wasn’t really dead.

I’ll revisit this post next year and see how right (or wrong) I was.

Let me know what you think in the comments. Do you agree? Disagree? Think I’m insane? All thoughts welcome.

Enjoy Christmas and good luck for the New Year!

(Picture courtesy of David Sifry via Flickr)

(If you’ve got 5 minutes, re-read the original article here. The example will make a lot more sense if you do.)

Little did I know this one article would spark some great online and offline discussions. In fact, it’s the most popular article on this site by a mile.

Anyway, fellow mastermind member Mike commented on the post and suggested I create an example account and post it here on the site.

It was a great idea, so here it is:  the “widgets” worked example:

Click here to download the Adwords Editor file.

When you upload it into Adwords Editor and poke around the campaigns, you should get a better feel of what I was getting at in the other article.

Here’s how to import the file into Adwords Editor…

1. Open Adwords Editor and go to File >> Import Account Snapshot.

2. Find the “Widgets Demo.aea” file you just downloaded and open it up.

3. When the file has imported, click on “Review Imported Changes”.

4. You should now see the 3 widget example campaign in Adwords Editor. Click on “Keep Proposed Changes”.

5. Click around and enjoy yourself! Look through the campaigns, adgroups, ads and positive and negative keywords to get a feel for how the account is structured.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

-George

Here’s an excerpt from their blog:

Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature that allows you to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within your sites. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs on your search-based text ad for users to choose from. By providing users with more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords.

I haven’t had chance to try it out yet, however I can foresee some benefits and pitfalls.

Let’s start with the bad…

You’re setting these links on a campaign level (not adgroup), then Google’s algorithm calculates which 4 destination URL’s to serve for each ad on the fly. This means you’re giving up an element of control and trusting Google to do what’s best (is that best for them – or best for you?). Not sure if this is a good thing.

Now onto the good…

It looks like a great way of testing calls to action and intent.

Let’s take the ad above as an example. If the keyword that triggered the ad was “holidays” or something equally non-specific, after a few dozen clicks, you’ll a have a good idea of what people are really looking for when they search for that keyword. In this case you’ll analyse the most popular link out of the four options:  ‘Hotels’, ‘Rental Cars’, ‘Flights’ or ‘Vaction Packages’ and find a winner.

When you’ve found the most popular link of the four, you can write a new ad and landing page that’s a better matched to the searchers “itch” on this keyword.

I’m sure there’s a lot more of nifty things you can do with this new feature – I just can’t think of any yet.

So if you, dear reader, have any other ideas for Ad Sitelinks, let me know in the comments section.

Anyway, here’s how to activate them in your account:

1. Log into your account and select a campaign,

2. Click on the “Settings” tab, then scroll down to the “Networks, devices and extensions” area.

3. You should see a new option called “Ad extensions” like this:

Finding Ad Extensions In Campaign Settings (click to enlarge)

4. Click “edit” and enter your multiple URL’s and ad text:

Editing Ad Sitelinks (click to enlarge)

Give ‘em a try and let me know what you think!

-George.

So if you sell online with no offline contact, you’re better off skipping this one.

Let’s go…

If you’re still reading, I guess the bulk of your online business comes from website enquiries that you contact, qualify, follow up with and then close offline.

It might just be a humble email address to put into an autoresponder series or a highly detailed form, asking for everything about the enquirer – from what they had for breakfast, to their inside leg measurement – to follow up with on the phone.

Whatever the case, you could end up in a pickle if you don’t measure enquiries properly.

Here’s what I mean:

You could have a high enquiry conversion rate – maybe 30% of people who land on your page fill out your enquiry form – but when you get their information, it’s fake.

Or if you can contact them, they’re un-contactable, disinterested, rude or flat-out deny ever enquiring.

On the other hand, you may have a very low enquiry conversion rate, but most of those who do enquire go on to be excellent (big spending) customers.

Sound familiar?

Two extreme ends of the scale – high conversion/low lead quality or low conversion/high lead quality – neither of which is a good place to be. And both of them are profit killers for different reasons.

High enquiry conversion rate but low quality is a time waster. You have to call twenty or more ‘micky mouse’ numbers, get insulted and waste your life explaining who you are – just to speak to someone who may convert to a sale. It’s only a little better than cold calling, no fun and a waste of time.

Low enquiry conversion rate and high lead quality isn’t much better either, although it doesn’t eat your time and jangle your nerves like the other end of the spectrum does. The problem here is scale. Because conversion rate is so low, it’s hard to extract enough business from the market and your budget. This is especially true in niche or local businesses where search traffic is limited.

What causes these extremes?

It’s impossible to list everything because factors change depending on your market, business, location and a plethora of other variables. There are, however, some common ones that seem to affect landing page conversion rate and lead quality consistently.

They are…

Friction:

• The higher the friction (things that cause resistance to enquire) the lower the enquiry conversion rate.
• This isn’t always a bad thing because if you use friction subtly, you can put off the people you don’t want, while letting in the ones you do (think a ‘no trainers’ policy in a night club).

Information, questions and objections:

• If you answer common questions most people ask you when they enquire, you’ll automatically disqualify some of your visitors. (For example: if a common question is about price, publishing prices on your landing page may decrease conversion rate, but should improve lead quality, as those who enquire have accepted your prices to some extent.)
• This can work both ways though. If you or your staff are good at selling, it may pay to leave questions unanswered on your landing page. Then you (or your sales people) give the prospect answers on the phone and immediately address objections, which ups the odds of closing the sale.

Relevancy:

• The closer your ‘scratch’ is to your visitors ‘itch’, the higher your conversion rate will be.
• Same goes for lead quality. If your offer is just what your prospect is looking for, they’re going to want to talk to you and find a solution.

From that list, it’s pretty clear that there’s no fool-proof way to get good quality online leads while holding a good conversion rate.

Even the best of us can only make educated guesses about what’s going to do well – and even then, there are no guarantees we’ll get it right first time.

And like all good direct marketing, you’ve got to test variations to figure out what works best.

This is mercifully simple online – so simple that even a hapless, non-technical, self taught web designer like me can do it.

But before I show you the details, let’s dive in and talk about the principles of tracking leads, because that’s where the money is.

The trick to tracking…

The trick with online lead generation is linking up:

• the keyword,
• the landing page,
• the prospect,
• and what happened to them after they enquired.

So for each person who enquires, you know the keyword they typed in, the page that persuaded them to enquire, whether they bought anything – and if so, how much they bought.

That means you can directly tie revenue to a particular person, a landing page, a keyword or an ad.

Think about that for minute.

You get the luxury of knowing – not guessing – which keyword is making the most money. A luxury that’s usually reserved for strictly e-commerce websites, not lead generation sites that sell offline, like yours.

Why this is so important:

When you’re generating leads, lead conversion information in analytics is very limited, because it’s very difficult to directly link a keyword to an offline sale.

This causes all kinds of problems where you end up guessing about what’s working or not, rather than knowing for sure.

The terrifying reality

Let me explain with an example…

Picture this: you’ve got two top keywords, and you’re trying to work out which one is producing the best return. Let’s say for the sake of simplicity, each keyword has had 1000 clicks each this month – and cost per click is £1…

Keyword 1 converts 25% of visitors to enquiries, costing £4 per enquiry in clicks, and has generated 250 leads for you.

Keyword 2 converts 15% of visitors to enquiries, costing around £6.67 per enquiry in clicks, and has generated 150 leads.

Based purely on this information (which is all most of us have in online lead generation), Keyword 1 looks like a clear winner.

But wait… let’s add our sales information we’ve linked to this data.

For Keyword 1, 20% of our enquiries lead to a sale and average spend was £150. That’s £7500 in sales and an average revenue per enquiry of £30.

But for Keyword 2, 45% of our enquiries lead to a sale and average spend was £195. So that’s £13,162 in sales and an average revenue per enquiry of £87.75.

Who’s the winner now?

Keyword 2 is dwarfing Keyword 1 when it comes to revenue.

But the scary thing is, if we hadn’t linked our keywords to sales, the worst of the two would’ve been declared the winner – and money lost. Not at all pretty.

In fact, if you’re generating leads online to follow up with offline, you’ve probably got a few keywords like this in your Adwords campaign.

And if you’re not tieing leads to keywords, you may be losing money or at best, missing out on more.

Let’s talk about getting it fixed…

Some of you will have in-house marketing and web designers or agencies, but a large chunk of you do most of it yourself and call in help as-and-when you get stuck.

For the folks who have in-house people, you just need to ask them to pass the keyword from Adwords to your enquiry form using dynamic URL parameters and hidden form fields. They should know what you mean.

For everyone else, I’m going to be releasing a series of videos that show you how to do it step by step. It’s pretty straight forward if you’ve ever tinkered with a web page.

And in the mean time, remember that when you’re testing advertising of any kind, go for the biggest picture you can. That’s input vs. output.

Anything else is like measuring temperature with a ruler: you’ll get data, just not the right kind.

-George.

• Call up all your prospects who’ve registered an interest in what you do,
• Point out they’ve been registered on your site for 6 months, then strongly imply they’re indebted to you because they haven’t bought anything yet (being registered on your site and logging in a few times is expensive, right?),
• Suggest they either become a customer, or bugger off.

So let me ask you…

What kind of response would you get?

Reckon it would help sales?

How about your reputation in this web 2.0, socially connected world?

Exactly.

That’s why I was so surprised when a reasonably well known list broker – abandoning their charm, common sense, long term strategy and reputation – decided to try this ploy on me today.

And the more I think about it, the more insane this strategy becomes. Let’s reframe it in a B2C online situation…

Imagine you’re a registered Amazon customer. You’re new to Amazon and haven’t bought anything for a few months, but you’ve been browsing reviews etc. Out of the blue, you get a call from Amazon asking you to either buy something from them, or stop visiting their site and cancel your registration.

Charming, eh?

Of course, list segmentation is very important – especially the basics of segmenting buyers and non-buyers. It’s marketing 101.

But the idea is to try and get the non-buyers to buy. Not irritate them to the point of walking away through sheer indignation – and advising everyone they know to avoid you like a coughing pig.

….

At this point it’s very tempting to reveal who these short-sighted people – who strive to isolate and annoy all but their paying customers – are.

But I’m going to resist – and here’s why:

The Tar Baby Principle is true in this case: “You are attached to what you attack.” The last thing I want is any attachment to these idiots.

That and the fact I’m so confident in their own unique brand stupidity, they need no outside help from me.

So sorry to disappoint, but naming and shaming isn’t what this post is about. It’s a reminder to us all that:

• If you’re nice to your prospective customers, they’re more likely to buy from you.
• If you give away something to attract prospective customers, don’t be angry when less than 100% of them fail to become customers – then blame them for your lacking sales conversion abilities.

Yes, yes, it sounds obvious, but going by my experience today, even companies in the marketing business (who should know better) still need a reminder occasionally.

Furthermore, if insolent imbeciles like this are competitors in your market, then treating your prospects with respect (something we should all do naturally) suddenly becomes a strong selling point for you.

Rant over.

~George.