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.

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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.

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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.

Image by thms.nl via Flickr

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.

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Google has announced that over the coming weeks they will be changing the way they handle phone numbers that appear in Google AdWords text ads.

At the moment, if you choose to include your phone number in an AdWords ad, it is just another bit of text. If someone is viewing your ad on their mobile phone browser they can’t click on the number to call you directly. If you want people to be able to click your number to call you then you have to set this up using an AdWords feature called Call Extensions.

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But with this latest change that Google has just announced, all phone numbers that are included in AdWords ads will now automatically be converted to be click-to-call links when viewed on a mobile phone. Of course, this means that if someone clicks on your phone number you will incur a click charge from Google, whereas previously advertisers who included phone numbers in their ads might have received some manually dialled calls without it costing them anything in click charges.

Here’s the full text of the announcement we received from Google earlier today about this:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

If you currently have a phone number in your ad text or have plans to start adding your phone number in an ad, this is an important notice that in the coming weeks, we will be launching a new enhancement to AdWords ads that will impact charges on clicks to these numbers.

To help our mobile users connect more easily with advertisers, all non-clickable phone numbers displayed in AdWords ad text will be automatically converted into a Click-to-call number.  Currently when advertisers enter a phone number directly into their ad text instead of using Call Extensions, the phone number is not clickable and will not generate a call. This can be a frustrating experience for mobile users who attempt to initiate a call to this phone number.

The new Click-to-call enhancement ensures that all phone numbers shown in AdWords ads are clickable and allows users to easily place calls from their mobile device. If your ad text includes a phone number, you will begin to receive clicks and calls on this number once the enhancement is enabled in your account. As with phone calls placed via a Call Extension, you will be charged for clicks on your phone number that result in a call.

Please note that AdWords policy does not allow for phone numbers to be inserted into ad headlines. As with all Click-to-call ads, advertisers will be charged when a user either clicks on the headline or the phone number listed in the ad. Please see below for additional information regarding this change.

Which phone number shows?

If you are currently using both Call Extensions and a phone number in your ad creative, only the newly clickable phone number in your ad creative will show. This is designed to help reduce user confusion from seeing two potentially different numbers.  If you would like your Call Extension number to display, simply delete all phone numbers from your existing ad text by following these steps. You’ll also receive an additional line of ad text displaying your phone number if the Call Extension is used.

Measuring results

You’ll be able to review how many calls you receive on the clickable phone number listed in your ad text for each campaign, ad group, keyword and ad on the ‘Campaigns’ tab in your AdWords account. Just select the ‘Click-type’ option under the ‘Segment’ drop down and view your report.  Please note that since these are not calls generated from a Call Extension, they will not be reported in the Extensions tab reports.

Recommendations for featuring a phone number

You can simply leave your phone number in your ad text and benefit from this change which will automatically make your phone numbers clickable and enable users to call you. However, to get the most value from click-to-call, we recommend that you remove your phone number from your ad creative and create a Call Extension with your phone number directly.  This has several benefits. With a manually created Call Extension your number will appear as an additional line of ad text which frees up space in your ad creative for other promotion. In addition, when you create a Call Extension, your phone number appears on a separate line in the ad, and you’re able to take advantage of other powerful enhancements such as Vanity Numbers, Call-only and Call Metrics reporting.

We are committed to providing our users with the best mobile web experience and encourage you to learn more about Call Extensions by visiting our Help Center.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

Are you including phone numbers in your ads at the moment? If so, do you approve of this change on the grounds that it’ll help make life easier for mobile users? Or do you think it is simply a ploy by Google to increase the amount of money you end up spending with them?

Leave us a comment below. We’d love to hear what you think of this latest enhancement to the AdWords system.

In partnership with Business Training Made Simple we launched another brand new online marketing training course last week in the form of a one day workshop on using Google Analytics to increase profits from your website.

The trainer for the day was David Miles from Divadani, ably assisted by Matthew Williams from The Made Simple Group.

We had a good mix of delegates, some of whom were attending a BTMS course for the first time and others who has previously attended one of the other courses on Google AdWords or social media.

A huge amount of material was covered on the day, including:

• why every website owner should be using Analytics
• how to interpret the vast amount of data available in Analytics
• how Analytics and AdWords work together to make a winning team
• how to make your website less like a trampoline and more like fly paper
• ways to reduce abandonment (that’s what the video below is about)
• setting website goals and measuring KPIs
• working with funnels (including multi-channel ones)
• the five ways to increase the profits from your website

We kept the course very lively and interactive and all the delegates got the chance to have aspects of their websites or their Analytics accounts analysed throughout the day.

Everyone gave the course a score of 9/10 or 10/10 with one person commenting afterwards on LinkedIn that:

“David ran a fantastic course on Google analytics which I attended – this man knows what he is talking about – a prince in a sea of charlatans and snake oil salesmen. Listen and learn!”

The great feedback we received means we’re going to be running this course again early in the New Year and making it a regular feature on the BTMS schedule of online marketing workshops.

If you want to find out more or book onto the course, visit the BTMS website.

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!

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Last week we ran a full day practical Twitter training course at Business Training Made Simple. This was a hands-on course led by David Miles and aimed at Twitter novices who had either never used Twitter before or who had created an account but then done nothing much with it.

The delegates were encouraged to bring their laptops with them so as we could make sure they left at the end of the day with their Twitter accounts correctly set up. It also meant that during the day they could do practical exercises such as sending tweets,  finding people to follow, learning how to use Twitter search, and getting to grips with third party Twitter tools such as Tweetdeck, Bufferapp, and Hootsuite.

As well as dealing with the basics of how to use Twitter, the course also covered some aspects of Twitter strategy – what to tweet, when to tweet, what not to tweet, etc.

The following day, Michelle Carvill built on this with a day long course at BTMS about how to develop a good Twitter strategy and how to use Twitter effectively to raise the profile of your business and gain new customers. For delegates who wanted to do both courses back to back, there was a special discounted package price available.

This was the first time we’d run these two courses at BTMS and we were delighted with the feedback we received. For example, one delegate from the practical course wrote:

“I came away from the course with a much greater understanding of social media; a fascinating experience which was enhanced by David’s excellent presentational and interpersonal skills.”

Having proved that we have got a course that works and that people find informative, fun, and good value for money, we’re looking forward to announcing some 2012 dates for this course very soon.

If you would like to be told once these dates are published, just leave us a comment below.

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Yesterday evening I had a great time at the second Brentwood Tweetup, where I was asked to give a short talk on the power of Twitter and how this had led to us writing Fusion.

As part of my presentation, I shared eight tips on how to harness the power of Twitter:

There were over 30 people at the tweetup: some who I’d met before, some who I knew only from Twitter, and some who I was meeting for the first time. It was really good to put faces to some of the @names I’ve been following for the past couple of years and fantastic to see social media being used to bring members of the local community together.

Even those who couldn’t make it, like @MrsJaneMiles and @LDKatz71, were not left out, thanks to the live tweet stream that was showing on their tweets on the big screen throughout the second half of the evening.

A big thank you and well done to the organisers: @nevwilson, @laurie_edmonds, and @scotthornsby10!

We had a full house for our AdWords training course at Business Training Made Simple last week, with a mix of AdWords newbies and more experienced AdWords users attending to learn how to improve their return on investment from Google AdWords.

It was great to see some familiar faces in the room, such as Alice from Coco Fashion, Jonathan from Wild Stoves, Andrew from Midas Corporate Consulting and Adele from Naked Divorce. And it was particularly nice to finally meet our client Jo Parker who has been getting great results from the AdWords campaign that we set up for her last year.

Throughout the day we covered everything from what AdWords is all about, through to how to select the right keywords, how to write better ads, what Quality Score is and why it is so important, and how to structure an AdWords account.

We also found time to cover some more advanced topics like Ad Extensions and Remarketing, and we had some fun critiquing each others websites as part of a discussion about landing page optimisation.

We’re running this course again on 10 August and there are still a few places left if you want to book a place. If you’re not sure whether you’ll find it beneficial, just check out this video testimonial from one of the people who attended last week’s course.

If you don’t want to pay someone else to manage your AdWords campaigns for you, another option is to get yourself or a small group of your staff trained in how to setup and manage an AdWords account effectively so as it delivers the maximum level of online sales or enquiries for the lowest possible cost.

At Divadani, that’s just the type of training that we love to help with.

Last week we delivered what we’re rather grandly referring to as our first overseas training course, when I traveled to the Isle of Man to train staff from the Sefton Group on how to use Google AdWords.

The Sefton Group has three hotels on the Isle of Man. The two day training course took place at the Palace Hotel (formerly the Isle of Man Hilton) which has its own casino, health club and even a cinema. There’s also the 4 star Sefton Hotel which has a fantastic (I know because I tried it!) fine dining restaurant, and an airport hotel called the Sefton Express.

During the first day of their AdWords training course, the five delegates (who had varying levels of experience of using AdWords in the past) learnt all the basics of AdWords such as how to choose the right keywords for a successful AdWords campaign, how to write attention grabbing ads, how to structure an AdWords account, and how to improve Quality Score.

On the second day, we covered some of the more advanced techniques that can be used to improve an AdWords account, such as ad extensions, sitelinks, and remarketing. We also covered the importance of having a website that will convert as many visitors as possible into customers. After all, what’s the point in paying to drive traffic to your website if people are going to get confused by it and leave straightaway? That’s like pouring water into a bucket that’s full of holes.

The course was very practical and hands-on and (as you can see in the photo above) the group spent plenty of time working on their AdWords account to identify problems and make the necessary changes to improve the return on investment from AdWords.

And most importantly, as you can see from this video, the delegates all learnt a lot and enjoyed themselves in the process.

Got a question about how AdWords training could benefit your business? Give us a call on 0845 890 5323 or leave us a comment below.

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There’s only a couple of days left to qualify for the early bird discount on the next course that we’re running.

The course is all about how to improve your website so as it brings you more enquiries, more sales, and more profits.

Delivered by David Miles from Divadani and Anuschka Fritz from Moustique Design, this one day course will teach you:

• How to decide what approach to take with the website
• How to attract your target audience
• The seven things you must consider when designing a website
• How to write killer copy that will increase enquiries from your website
• How to put together an effective brief for a web designer
• What to consider when selecting a web designer and how to avoid getting ripped off
• What functionality you will need to enhance your business website
• Ten ways to market the website once it is complete.

This is an interactive course, and if you already have a website you’ll get the chance to have it assessed and critiqued. You’ll leave with a clear action plan of simple steps you can take to ensure your new or existing website gets results.

The course is taking place on 21 June in Central London and costs only £79.99 + VAT – and that includes lunch and other refreshments throughout the day.

Find out more about the course and book online today for your early bird discount.

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