Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

Imagine you’ve walked into a department store and said to a member of staff near the door that you want to buy a duvet cover. Instead of giving you directions to the second floor where the bedding department is, they send you off to the fourth floor where the electrical goods are. That would be quite irritating and would reduce the chances of you buying the bed linen that you came into the shop for.

And what has this got to do with AdWords?

Well, if you are sending potential customers to your website you need to make life as easy as possible for them. You need to help them find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. You certainly don’t want to end up annoying them by sending them to the wrong “department” on your site.

In other words, once you have convinced someone to click on your AdWords ad, you have to make sure you send them to the most appropriate landing page on your website. That way, they’ll immediately find what they are looking for and that increases the chances that they will buy from you or contact you instead of clicking the dreaded Back button and going to one of your competitors instead.

Most of the time, sending people to the correct landing page is not hard to do. The potential customer has usually given you a very good idea of what they are looking for by virtue of the search phrase they entered into Google in the first place. So all you then need to do is set the destination URL for your AdWords ad so as it sends people to the most relevant page of your website based on what they searched for on Google.

Doing this will mean you get more sales or enquiries and will also reduce your costs because the relevance of your landing page is one of the things that helps increase your AdWords Quality Score.

Related articles

• Google Quality Score Update (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)

If you’re using broad keyword matching in Google AdWords (which is the default setting that applies to all your keywords unless you specify otherwise), then your ads will almost certainly be getting shown to a lot of people who are not really part of your target audience.

For example, if you are run a printing business and you are bidding on the keyword “business card printing” in its default broad match state, you’ll almost certainly end up with your ad appearing when people search on Google for “free business card printing”. These people aren’t the kind of visitors you want to attract to your website because they are unlikely to want to pay to get you print their business cards. But some of them will probably still click on your AdWords ad and end up costing you money.

Luckily, there is a solution within AdWords to limit this problem. It’s called negative keywords. By adding negative keywords to your campaign or ad group, you can instruct Google that if a searcher includes one of those negative keywords in the search terms that they enter into Google, you do not want your ad to appear. In this way, you can filter out the kind of visitors that are of no interest to you and avoid wasting money driving them to your website.

When you first create an AdWords campaign they will probably be some obvious negative keywords for your business that you can think of quite easily. For most businesses, these might be words like free, discount, cheap, etc. But there’ll still be lots of other inappropriate words that people are using in their searches which you won’t think of until you see them appearing in your search query report.

Monitoring the search query report is an important task that we cover in detail on our AdWords training courses. It’s also something that should be included in the AdWords management service if you decide to outsource the maintenance of your pay-per-click campaigns to an expert.

Whether you do it yourself or get a professional AdWords consultant to help you, implementing negative keywords correctly and regularly reviewing your AdWords account to see if additional negative keywords are required could easily save you hundreds of pounds a month in wasted click costs.

Got a question about negative keywords? Have you saved money by using negative keywords effectively? We’d love to hear from you. Just use the box below to leave a comment or ask us a question.

Related articles

• AdWords Tip: Use Win-Win Keywords (divadani.com)
• Negative Keywords in Google AdWords – 4 Tips For Improving Your Targeting This Holiday Season (searchenginepeople.com)

If you want to avoid having your fingers burnt and running up a huge advertising bill on Google AdWords in a very short space of time, you need to make sure you don’t bid on keywords that are too broad or too competitive (for example – toner cartridges).

When you use Google AdWords you are taking part in what is basically an auction and, as with any auction, the more bidders there are chasing after top positions for a particular keyword the higher this will push the average cost per click that you have to pay.

That’s one reason why you need to shy away from broad keywords and focus instead on more specific niche terms that your competitors won’t necessarily have thought of using in their AdWords campaigns.

Another good reason to look for less obvious search terms to bid on is because, generally speaking, the more precise someone is when they search for something on Google the more likely it is that they are close to the point of being ready to make a purchase.

So, sticking with the toner cartridges example, someone who searches on Google for “Brother HL-1850 toner cartridge” is probably going to be a warmer potential prospect for you than someone who searches for “toner cartridges”.

By putting some thought into which keywords you bid on, you’ll find you spend less per click and also get a better quality of visitor coming to your website. It’s a win-win!

 

It’s all very well writing new blog posts regularly, but once you’ve posted something how can you tell as many people about it as possible without too much effort? In particular, how can you easily tell all those followers that you’ve built up on Twitter?

Well, if you’re using WordPress for your blog then a simple solution is to configure your blog so as every time you post something new a tweet is automatically sent out for all your followers to see. This tweet will tell everyone the title of your latest blog entry and will include a link they can click to come and read it.

So how is this done?

Step one is to install the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress. To do this, just download the ZIP file containing the plugin and then in your WordPress dashboard go to Plugins –> Add New. Click the Upload option near the top of the page and then browse to the location where you downloaded the ZIP file to. Click Install Now and then once it is uploaded to the server, simply click to activate the plugin.

Having installed the Twitter Tools plugin, you now need to configure it to work with your Twitter account. This involves getting hold of some technical sounding things like consumer keys and access tokens, but it’s pretty simple to do. Here are the steps you’ll need to take:

1. In the WordPress dashboard, click on Settings –> Twitter Tools.
2. Click the link for registering Twitter Tools as an application with Twitter.
3. When the page on the Twitter site opens up, log in with your usual Twitter login details.
4. You should now be on a page for registering a new application. If not, then the address to go to is: https://dev.twitter.com/apps/new.
5. Enter an application name. This is the name that will show up publicly on each tweet as the application that your tweet was sent from, so you’ll probably want to use something like “John’s blog” as the application name.
6. Enter a description such as “Twitter Tools for WordPress”.
7. Enter the URL of your blog in the Application Website box.
8. Enter your organisation or company name in the appropriate field if applicable.
9. Make sure Application Type is set to Browser.
10. Put the address of your blog in the Callback URL box.
11. Change the Default Access Type to Read & Write.
12. Enter the CAPTCHA code and then click Register Application.
13. On the next screen you will see your Twitter Consumer Key and Twitter Consumer Secret. Copy and paste these two strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
14. Then, on the Twitter web page, click the button on the right of the screen called My Access Token.
15. Copy and paste the Access Token and Access Token Secret strings into the appropriate boxes on your WordPress Twitter Tools Settings page.
16. On the WordPress settings page click Connect to Twitter.
17. If the connection is successful, next make sure that the option “Enable option to create a tweet when you post in your blog?” is set to Yes.
18. Then set your chosen prefix for the automatic tweets – something like “New blog post”.
19. Make sure that “Set this on by default?” is set to Yes.
20. Ignore the remaining options and save your settings.

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I was introduced to a great website last week. It’s called Which Test Won and it really makes clear the importance of split testing.

What is split testing? Well, for every piece of marketing you do – whether it’s writing an advert or a direct sales letter, designing a website, running an AdWords campaign, or anything else – there will always be more than one way of wording or presenting your message. And without testing, you won’t know for sure which way is best.

With split testing you come up with two versions of your website landing page, sales letter, advert or whatever it is you are using, and then you put version A in front of one group of potential customers and version B in front of the other group and you see which generates the best response in terms of sales, enquiries, etc.

The beauty of online marketing is that it is actually pretty simple to carry out split testing and to measure what results you get. So even if you have a website which you think is working well, or an AdWords campaign that is generating you a healthy return on investment, it is still worth experimenting to see if some subtle changes could bring you even better results. Sometimes, for example, just changing the colour of a Buy Now button can have a dramatic impact on your number of online sales.

If you don’t believe me, you should definitely check out Which Test Won. It has loads of real life examples of split tests that have been carried out. You can play along by trying to guess which of the two different versions of each item of marketing material was most successful and then find out what way other people voted and which version was actually the winner in real life testing.

How much split testing are you doing in your business? Has carrying out this kind of regular experimenting and testing made a difference to how much business you get from the web? We’d love to hear your stories – just use the comments box below to tell us.