As I’ve moved from being a marketing consultant who quietly manages Google AdWords campaigns for clients, to entering the national spotlight as an authority on the subject, I’ve had the opportunity to work in many new industries – not just the familiar world of manufacturing, software and e-books, but now health care, real estate, education and nutrition. Recently now, even a project involving funeral parlors!
I’ve also had the opportunity to do much more tracking and testing. Some things I’ve seen:
- Google is becoming extremely popular. There’s a huge rush of bidders coming in, especially in certain industries, and in some cases the bidding is brutally competitive. I’ve done a number of projects where there are 30 to 40 bidders on a single keyword.
- It’s not possible to know for certain, but Google appears to have surpassed Overture as the #1 pay per click search engine. Their system is certainly vastly superior for the smart marketer, their people are easier to deal with, and the instant results can’t be beat.
- Google has a new program called AdSense. They run Google AdWords ads on your site and you get a good portion of the revenue that comes from the clicks – they don’t commit to a number but from what I understand it’s a bit more than half. Should you use this? It depends. If you’re a true niche marketer, probably not – if you know what you’re doing, you can usually make more money keeping people on your site than selling them to a different site. If you work with other companies who have affiliate programs, you can probably make more money with those affiliate programs than with AdSense. AdSense is most ideal for broad-content sites like newspapers and magazines who have a lot of content and need to make a few cents on each visitor.
- When Pay Per Click was new, and most of your competitors didn’t know about it or understand it, it was good enough just to be in the game. However it’s increasingly the case that if you don’t track each campaign, group and ad to sales or sales leads, you’re wasting a LOT of money on traffic that doesn’t convert. More about this in a minute.
If you don’t already have my AdWords Toolkit, I strongly encourage you to get it – go to www.perrymarshall.com/google. It offers a great deal of insight into what works, what doesn’t, and how you can squeeze every penny out of this competitive new medium.
Here’s a tidy summary of the approaches you can use when you’re up against stiff competition:
Keywords:
- It’s not enough to bid on 10-20 keywords. If you do, you’ll only be bidding on the most obvious, most expensive ones. As a rule of thumb, you should try for at least 200, and use 3rd party keyword tools like Keyword Blizzard, WordTracker and Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool to generate them. That’s how you pick up the 5 cent clicks.
- Phrase matching is extremely powerful. Using “quotes for phrases” or [exact match for phrases] will usually get you into some nooks and crannies that shave your bid prices.
- In any market, there are highly specific, high priced words, that everyone is bidding on – and there are low priced, general words that most people can’t get to work. For example, “golf clubs” is expensive but “golf” is cheap. You can get a lot of cheap traffic on “golf” – IF you use an opt-in and information marketing strategy to cultivate a relationship with the visitors. However, throwing golf clubs and an order button in front of those people is not going to work well.
Ad Copy:
- Every single word in your ad matters, and makes a measurable difference. Even the capitalization of each word makes a difference. Split test and find out what works.
Bidding Strategy
- Don’t aim for the top position. That usually gets you to a point of diminishing returns. 2-4 is usually best, and if bid prices are sky high, then 6-8 is good.
Your Sales Process:
- Ultimately the whole game comes down to the quality of the sales process on your website. When people land on your web page they need to get an attention-getting message and a well-thought out, compelling sequence of events and a definitive call to action.
- As the PPC market matures, it’s going to be more and more important to focus on the opt-in – getting permission to communicate with people, then developing a relationship with them – than just getting a quick sale. When there are a lot of bidders, the people who develop ongoing relationships and accomplish more than just the first sale, will be the only ones who can survive.
