Posted by: Daniel Levis
June 4, 2008
Issue #432

10 Quick and Easy Ways to Beef Up Your
AdWords ROI – Starting Today …

Dear Web Business Builder,

When it comes to increasing the return you get from your traffic generation investments, targeting is every bit as important as conversion.

There’s no point aiming killer sales copy at people who are ill qualified, uninterested, or otherwise unlikely to respond.

Of course, you never really know what’s going to work unless you try it.

That’s why I love working with Google AdWords. Its low minimum commitments and real time controls make it extremely flexible. Yes, there is a reason this company rakes in billions in profits each year.

There’s nothing like being able to sink just $50 or $100 (or even less) into a new traffic source today, and know by tomorrow whether it’s going to be viable or not.

It’s easy to do with the FREE tools Google gives you. You can track your cost per lead and your cost per sale in real time, and laser target your ads to increase your return on investment.

Here are three different ways to use Google AdWords to attract visitors to your site … and a whole bunch of secrets for targeting your ads more effectively.

Keyword Triggered Ads: These are the ads that appear on the right-hand side of the search results on Google’s homepage. They also appear on Google’s partner sites, such as Netscape Netcenter, AOL, and Ask.com. If you are bidding on a keyword that somebody types into a search engine (either on Google, or one of Google’s partner search engines), your ad will appear.

The position of your ad on the page(s) of results that are displayed depends on your bid, and the relevancy (clickthrough rate) of your ad. Exactly what the algorithm is, I don’t know.

What I do know is you can increase your relevancy and return on investment dramatically by targeting your keyword triggered ads more tightly. Here are seven ways …

Geographic Targeting: With Google keyword search, you can target your ads to appear only in certain geographic areas. If you only want customers in New York State, then you target your ads to show only in New York State.

Or if the world is your oyster, but you don’t want your ads shown in countries where purchasing power falls below a certain level, you can exclude those countries. This feature is accessible by clicking on the “edit campaign settings” link in the Ad Groups view.

Keyword Matching: Another way to sharpen your targeting is by working with the matching of your keywords.

Broad Match: This is the default setting. For keywords in your keyword list that are broad matched, Google will display your ad when those keywords are searched in any order, and possibly along with other terms.

If you bid on the keyword USB microphone, for example, Google will display your ad for any search phrase that contains both USB and microphone, such as buy microphone with USB connector or repair microphone with USB connector.

Phrase Match: If you enter your keyword in quotation marks, as in "USB microphone," your ad will appear when a user searches on the phrase USB microphone, in that order, and possibly with other terms in the query.

In this case, the search can also contain other terms as long as it includes the exact phrase you’ve specified. For example, your ad may appear for the queries buy USB microphone and USB microphone information but not repair microphone with USB connector.

Bidding on USB microphone using phrase match makes your ad more relevant to people searching this phrase.

Exact Match: If you surround your keywords in brackets, such as [USB microphone], your ads will appear when users search for the specific phrase USB microphone, in this order, and without any other terms in the query.

In this case, your ad won’t show for the query USP microphone repair. Exact match is likely to result in very high clickthrough rates, because it means someone is searching for exactly what you offer.

Negative Keyword: You can weed out irrelevant searches by placing a minus sign before certain keywords. If one of your keywords is USB microphone (broad or phrase matched) and you add the negative keyword -cheap, your ad won’t appear when a user searches for cheap USB microphone.

Clustering: When assembling your keyword lists, you can increase your targeting by clustering your keywords around several anchor words or phrases. For example, around USB microphone, you would cluster terms like USB desktop microphone, USB condenser microphone, USB headset microphone, and so on.

Then you might have another cluster built around, I don’t know, USB mic just for the sake of example. And for each cluster, you would have a separate ad. With keyword triggered ads, the key is relevancy. So you typically want your anchor phrase in your headline.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion: To make your headlines super relevant, you can actually display the exact phrase each individual user searches on. Their search phrase literally becomes your headline.

So if someone searches for USB mic for desktop, your ad appears with the headline USB mic for desktop. If the next person searches desktop mic with USB, your headline says desktop mic with USB.  You can’t get much more relevant than that.

To perform this magic trick, simply wrap your headline like this {Keyword: USB Microphones} when you set up your ad variation. If the query is longer than 25 characters, Google reverts to displaying your standard headline, in this particular example, USB Microphones. Pretty cool, huh?

Context Triggered Ads: These ads do not appear on search engine sites. They are displayed on external sites on Googles “Content Network.” These may include news sites, personal web pages, and even html e-mails distributed by publishers who participate in Google’s ad serving network.

Google analyzes the content on participating sites and serves up ads it believes will be relevant to users on those sites. Your ad spend is shared with the publishers of those sites. These contextual ads offer the least convenience and flexibility in terms of targeting. To my knowledge, there is only one way to customize the targeting of these ads.

Site and Category Exclusion: With this new feature, it finally appears possible to filter out under-performing sites where your ads are being displayed on Google’s content network.

First, you have to generate a placement performance report (click on the “reports” tab at the top of your AdWords console) to get a listing of the sites that are displaying your contextual ads. Listed along with each site will be the conversion metrics for each site (provided your account is set up correctly).

Next, manually exclude any sites that are under-performing using the “site and category exclusion tool” (found in “tools” under the “campaign management” tab).

Note: Geographic targeting listed above also works with contextual ads, so you don’t have to worry about manually excluding content network sites because they have a high percentage of visitors from areas you do not wish to target.

Placement Triggered Ads: With placement ads, you are manually selecting sites from within Google’s network of publisher properties for your ads to be displayed.

With this approach, your ads are simply displayed on the sites you select, provided your bid is high enough to get into the slots the publisher has allotted. This gives you a high degree of flexibility and allows you to target your ads very effectively.

I select sites based on traditional target marketing criteria such as site relevancy, traffic volume, demographic profile of visitors (if available), and where my ad will be shown on the page. Naturally you want your ad to appear prominently, above the fold if possible.

One of the best ways to increase your clickthrough rate with placement triggered ads is to use a headline that’s unusual and emotionally evocative. The vast majority of ads you are competing with are contextually triggered ads. And since most advertisers lump their contextual traffic in the same ad group with their keyword triggered ads, the headlines tend to be quite literal and unimaginative. USP Microphones for example.

With a placement triggered ad a headline like Record like a rock star might attract a lot of attention where it probably wouldn’t do so well if it were keyword triggered.

The Bottom Line:

Contrary to popular opinion, you don’t have to risk a lot of money to find laser targeted traffic for your website.

With Google AdWords, you’re in total control of your spend. Take just a little money and test. Kill the losers. Run the winners. Slow and steady wins the race.

Know any cool tricks? Share them here.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE™

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6 Comments »

1. Comment by Sheridan Randolph — June 4, 2008 @ 10:58 am

   I hate getting comments like "great stuff", but this really is very helpful.  Especially as I move online.  Thanks.

2. Comment by Stephen Anderson — June 4, 2008 @ 11:59 am

   Hi Daniel,

   Being new to the business I can not postulate the time and money, not as if time wasn’t also money, you have saved me by the information contained in this article.

   I have read so much about Google AdWords and have been dreading the process made so much easier thanks to you. 
   You could have been a University Professor with your teaching skills, but I don’t think it pays quite so well.
   Two quick points: One to be a pain in the ass…."the headlines tend to be quite literal and unimaginative. USP Microphones for example." Did you mean USB?

   Second point: Living in Vermont close to the Canadian border I have always been a hockey fan.  A pet peeve of my fellow arrogant American sports announcers has always been, the Bruins are not from Boston, United States.  Hence, you and the Maple Leafs are from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

   Regards,

   Stephen Anderson
   Waterbury, Vermont

3. Comment by John C. A. Manley | Healthy-Conversions.com — June 4, 2008 @ 4:21 pm

   Thanks! I didn’t know that trick with the headline (making it display the search phrase). I’ve often just done individual ads for each keyword, always starting with the search phrase and then split-testing against something more imaginative. Sadly, often the less creative one wins with search results. It’s hard to beat what they typed in specifically.

   As far as tricks… I often see people paying close attention to click-thru rates, but not ROI. If you set up the analytics properly you can see exactly what return you are getting on any particularly keyword. I don’t really care if an ad has a great click-thru rate or low cost per click. It could be costing me 5 cents a click, but take 2000 clicks for someone to buy a $47 product. Despite the low click-thru, you are losing money. I have keywords for one project that cost $1 a click, but they have a 10% conversion rate to sale. So $10 in $47 out. We are upping the click cost to $1.50 (we just wanted to break even, I swear!)

   Knowing the ROI on any keyword is really what’s allowed me to generate lots of traffic for my clients, without risking a loss. Simply looking at click-thrus makes no sense to me. Too technical.  

4. Comment by Daniel Levis — June 4, 2008 @ 10:08 pm

   That’s exactly right John, all that really matters is ROI. Culling, or reducing bids on keywords and placements with low ROI, and increasing bids on those with high ROI is the name of the targeting game.

5. Comment by Fred Black — June 5, 2008 @ 1:57 pm

   Daniel… thanks for a really helpful article.  There’s more info in this article than in some paid courses!  One question: Do you mix image ads with text ads in the same group if they’re targeting the same keywords, or do you make 2 ad groups?  Just curious. 

6. Comment by Daniel Levis — June 5, 2008 @ 7:31 pm

   Hi Fred,
   I don’t use image ads in my keyword triggered campaigns. I do use them on the placement network. There, I don’t seperate image ads and text ads into seperate campaigns. 

   Image ads are a great feature. The clickthrough rates are awesome. But what I find is that not many publishers are set up to display them. At least not in the niches I’m playing.

   Cheers!