Monthly Archives: January 2009

Hyper Responsive Adwords Marketing

What’s wrong with this statement … “Help me flood my site with Traffic?”

You don’t want a flood of VISITORS, you want VISITORS WHO BUY … that’s what’s wrong with it.   (Most people learn the hard way)

Let’s look more closely.  I’m seeing an average conversion in client accounts these days from 0.75% to 1%.   The first implication of this is that only a small percentage of adwords visitors are responsible for their entire business.  

But when you look at distribution of income in your house list –(you DO analyze your internal customer list, right–   most marketers will find about 5% of CUSTOMERS responsible for 40% or more of their income.  

(The 80/20 rule says 80% of profits come from 20% of customers … if you apply it again to the top 20%, it says 4% of customers are responsible for 64% of profits.  On a practical level, however, I’ve observed more businesses in or around the 5% of customers = 40% of profits.

What does that mean?

Well, for starters, let’s translate so we can compare apples to apples and talk only about percent of VISITORS responsible for profits in your business.  (I’ll bet you’ve NEVER thought this thru!)

If 1% of VISITORS buy (being generous), and 5% of purchasers produce 40% of your profits, this means 1% x 5% = 0.05% of your VISITORS are responsible for 40% of your profits.

0.05% of your VISITORS = ALMOST HALF  your profit.

OR … it’s only ONE PAY PER CLICK VISITOR OUT OF 2,000 who really drives your business.  1 of 2,000 clicks!

This is radical for most adwords advertisers.

Virtually NO ONE understands this, and even fewer make concrete alterations in their ppc campaigns to go squarely after HYPER-RESPONSIVE customers.

And here’s the thing … hyper-responsive customers are almost always know what the rest of the market wants because they are, well… hyper responsive.   They spend a lot of time studying, searching, absorbing all they can about your market, trying to solve every last problem and get every last benefit they can from it.  

So when you sell to them, everything else falls in place.

Now, the obvious question is … how do you find them, and figure out what they want?

Stay tuned!  (I’ll give you a hint … they leave clues in surveys, they leave clues when you talk to them, they leave clues on your competitor’s site copy, they leave clues in your Adwords history, they leave clues in the blogosphere, they leave clues in offline media, they leave clues in the ppc keyword tools … they leave clues everwhere!)

 

more split testing magic

Earlier today I introduced you to www.SuperSplitTester.com … the free utility which does the math to help you stop choosing the WRONG ads in your adwords split tests and helps you choose the one which makes you the most money PER IMPRESSION.

I wanted to explain in more detail.  Here’s the thing:

Google has everybody focused on Click Through Rate (CTR).    You can also see conversion … for example, when split testing two ads, you can see which one gets a better CTR, and which one gets a better conversion rate
But CTR + CONVERSION individually don’t give you the right information to make your critical split testing decisions.

You might be surprised to note that Google isn’t really pricing their traffic according to Click Through Rates, even though that’s how you pay for it**
All they have to SELL you is SPACE (impressions) … so they’re doing the math behind the scenes to figure out how much money they make PER IMPRESSION

Doesn’t it make sense to you that if that’s how Google is selling you the ad space (according to how much they’ll make per impression), that’s the same number you should be looking at?

Sorry if I confused anyone earlier … this is what I was getting at.

——————-
** Note: no one really knows exactly how Google prices their traffic.  This is a (strongly) educated guess based upon information available in their learning center and I’m only representing it as my personal opinion.  (So Larry, Sergey, please don’t send your “Uncle Charlie” to my house OK?)

Split Testing – Why You’re Doing It Wrong

WARNING: “99% of Adwords Advertisers Are
Making Split Testing Decisions Using The Wrong Numbers!”
(And if you make Adwords split testing decisions based on click through OR conversion alone, you’re definitely one of them)

You can pick up the spreadsheet here

Or there’s a FREE utility to fix the problem here

pay per click search marketing focus

If you had to choose ONE keyword which represented your best customer, which one would it be?   If you can’t answer that in 10 seconds or less, you’re lacking pay per click search marketing FOCUS.  

Everything on the internet is indexed by keyword.  And every ppc keyword is a conversation … a unique set of desires, concerns, … and a unique mix of qualified and unqualified prospects and customers.

What’s your pay per click search marketing focus?  EVERYTHING in your business depends upon the answer to that question, whether you market online or off, because being able to answer it means knowing exactly what your business is about, at it’s very core …

If you could ONLY run ONE ad and ONE keyword and ONE adgroup to keep your business going, which one would it be?

You need to define your PPC marketing center.

I’ve got a lot more to say about your search marketing center … stay tuned!

copywriting for adwords

Everyone talks about swipe files, tracking your competitors, etc. as fodder for your Adwords copywriting. All good advice.

Here’s something MUCH better …

Use a text box on your opt in page which asks about their needs and reasons for searching today, and make sure you’re recording the keyword group they came from. (Your programmer should do this, don’t ask which keyword they typed because they just don’t remember … I’ve tried!)

Examine the language, concerns, desires, and objections you see coming through that little box, and USE it in your ppc copywriting because there’s a fortune in increased CTR and conversion in this simple little technique.

Your prospects and customers can write your adwords copy for you!

Watch for an extremely powerful build on this method in a few days … a scoring sheet which helps you find on the most responsive buyers and focus on THEIR copy!

the peel and stick MYTH in adwords

When you’ve got a keyword with low CTR in an adgroup, you should probably either delete it, or “peel and stick” it to a NEW group right?

But did you know 99% of Adwords users don’t really know HOW to peel and stick? In fact, 99% of pay per click advertisers don’t even know how to properly DELETE poorly performing keywords from Adwords!

That’s because you’ve got to take the word you deleted (or “peeled and stuck” into another group) and ADD IT AS A NEGATIVE KEYWORD to the group it originated from.

Here’s why.

Take the following keywords in a simple group for my RabbitSecrets.com page (ad has headline “All About Pet Rabbits”)

rabbit –> CTR 1.7%
rabbit care –> 1.9%
rabbit recipes –> 0.27%
rabbit hutch –> 1.0%

I guess there aren’t too many rabbit recipe searchers out there we need to delete the keyword. (Note: don’t eat bunny rabbits … it’s just wrong!)

Also, the rabbit hutch searchers will respond better to a headline about rabbit hutches, right? So I should “peel and stick” rabbit hutch to another ad group, right?

Well, here’s what most people would do.

First they’d delete the rabbit recipe keyword:

rabbit –> CTR 1.7%
rabbit care –> 1.9%
rabbit hutch –> 1.0%
rabbit recipes –> 0.27% DELETED

But would this really suppress all the impressions on rabbit recipes and improveme Click Through Rates?

I contend NO! … especially not by today’s Adwords rules.

The rabbit keyword by itself is a broad match. That means Google can expand it to include rabbit recipes whenever it thinks it might be relevant. And if you run a Search Query Report (you DO run them regularly, right?) … you might be surprised to see how wide Google casts it’s net.

ALWAYS ADD KEYWORDS YOU HAVE DELETED FROM AN ADGROUP AS A NEGATIVE … otherwise you didn’t really suppress impressions on the keyword you intended to delete!

This is also important when your goal is enhanced CTR and CONVERSION via the peel and stick method.

In the example above, if we peel and stick rabbit hutch we want ALL the rabbit hutch traffic go through the NEW group right? But Google can STILL send rabbit hutch keywords through the old adgroup on the broad or phrase match for the keyword rabbit unless you add rabbit hutch as a NEGATIVE.

One might think Google will eventually see the enhanced click through rate in the new rabbit hutch group and funnel rabbit hutch traffic there regardless of how the original group was set up … this is about 85% true in my experience.

But there are situations where it just doesn’t work like this… and if your goal is to take control of the new adgroup traffic, then take control. It’s easier to test, optimize, and figure out what’s really going on with CLEAR BOUNDARIES between adwords groups.

When you delete a keyword from your adgroups, add it back as a NEGATIVE KEYWORD to the same group.

pay per click ping pong

Most people think of the prospects in their ppc market as a whole bunch of white ping pong balls streaming by … they hope to flag them with their Adwords ad and suck them into their sales vacuum tube automated website.

But the truth is, most markets aren’t just filled with white ping pong balls … there are greens, yellows, pinks, and blues. In other words, markets have segments of people with very different needs and buying habits.

Moreover, you can LINK people’s needs to the ppc keywords they’re typing in … right down to the specific conversation they’re having in their mind when they search AND the level of responsiveness inherent in those search phrases.

Here’s a 90 minute  presentation I filmed at my home in New England which I guarante will change your pay per click paradigm (and how you think of market intelligence).

I call it “Pay per click ping pong”

PS – I shot this one when I was FAT … I hate how that gets immortalized.  (I weigh only about 200 now, even though I still eat Cheese Doodles)

keyword intelligence vs. market intelligence

If I haven’t said it before there’s a HUGE difference between pay per click keyword intelligence and ppc market intelligence.

Keyword intelligence is what your fifth grade daughter can figure out using standard keyword database, or the Google Keyword Tool.

Market Intelligence is the conversation people have in their head behind every keyword search … it’s the sum total of their wants, needs, and desires, expressed in the exact language of the emotions which motivate purchase in the category.

Stop obsessing about keyword intelligence and start looking for market intelligence.

For what it’s worth.

pay per click domain testing

It seems Google has now disallowed pay per click domain testing within a single adwords adgroup.   Apparently they feel it is confusing the ppc search customer … see this article http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/019276.html

Perry Marshall originally pointed out the Adwords Display URL was the second most powerful part of the entire ad (after the headline).   Rotating domains and leaving all else equal in an ad test often produced gains of 100% or more in click thru (and sometimes also conversion).

Unfortunately, this now requires multiple ad groups.

However, there is a work-a-round which is also more powerful.  I’ve been teaching this for approximately a year not because of Google’s rules (which have only recently changed), but because it’s faster, easier, and less expensive.

The short story is … test headlines until you come up with a great one, then make your headline into a domain.

For a full explanation with an illustrated example, please download the PDF Adwords Display URL Testing Hyperdrive