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What Should Starbucks Do

Posted on September 1, 2006 by in advertising, marketing, support

I spotted this on Seth Godin’s blog.  Starbucks had an incredibly ill-conceived promotion where they mailed some fraction of their employees with an email coupon for a free iced drink, then told them to mail friends and family members.  Oh boy, a chain letter, no possible way that could get out of hand, right?  Well, it did, and as a result Starbucks canceled the promotion.

Seth opines that, were it his call, he would have notched the driver’s license of anyone who used the promotion and given them the free drink.  The business problem this solves is that it prevents someone from going to the 46 Starbucks within walking distance from, say, the Sears Tower and getting 46 free ice lattes or whatever it is Starbucks sells.  His rule #3 (“We never accept online promotions.  However, if you were scammed by one, have *a free premium which the company can give out almost at will*.”) is, in my opinion, a brilliant solution to this problem for a chain which doesn’t have it yet.  But it doesn’t help Starbucks since they can’t force the cat back into the bag.

Here’s my solution: for every customer who comes in asking for their free iced fraparamadingdong, tell them “We’re very sorry, that promotion has been abused so we have to ask you this: what’s your first name and the last four digits of your telephone number?”  Then make a show of writing it down, and give them the product.  The only purpose of this system is to keep honest men honest and to remind folks that there is no presumptive right to free Starbucks, the way that many college students have come to believe that there is a presumptive right to free music.  The information collected can’t be enough to make a person hesitate for fear of their privacy, but that plus the fact that it is recorded is just enough to make them remember “Oh, thats right, I’m being watched”.

Here’s the rationale: the impact of one scammer who realizes he can beat the system (and, if you think of it, there is no system to beat here) is one ice drink per store.  The stores are franchises so you basically evaluate the damage to their profits on an individual level, where 1 or a 100 ice drinks is pocket change (here’s the secret to Starbucks: no matter how much they charge you, making the drink didn’t cost more than 10 cents!).  The damage to the brand from having to put that sign up everywhere, on the other hand, is at literally many orders of magnitude above the individual store.

How much content does your website have?

Posted on August 31, 2006 by in advertising, SEO

Sometimes I visit uISV websites which are very minimalist: they have about 5 pages total.  One page about the product, one for ordering, one for support, one about the company, etc.  My website isn’t exactly a monster (probably on the order of 25 pages at the moment), but I have significantly more content than websites organized like this.  And it makes me probably $50 a week, which is not a bad return for writing a few extra pages about elementary school bingo variants.

Why do these free articles and free resources make me $50 a month?  Because they bring in traffic and, more importantly, they bring in my niche on generic search engine terms.  I currently do obscenely well on MSN and Google in terms of organic search traffic, and the overwhelming majority of it is for Long Tail queries which you just won’t get if you don’t have the content to justify it.

For example, I wrote about 200 words on one of my pages about icebreaker bingo.  That content was picked up by 12 searchers in the last seven days and generated 4 downloads.  Four downloads is worth in excess of a dollar to me (at my current CPC prices, about $1.20 actually), and that content keeps paying me a dollar week after week.  (Yeah, minor niggle: if folks never buy, then its not really worth a dollar.  But they do.  I got two sales this week from customers who came in from organic search traffic.)  However, without the search engine being told a couple of times that icebreaker bingo is a use case for Bingo Card Creator, it won’t infer it on its own.  Which is why programs which trounce me on the search engine rankings for generic queries like “Bingo Card Creator” (grr, Google, how long until I can be the #1 result for the name of my company?!) show up exactly nowhere.

Another thing content does is that it performs SEO for keywords you haven’t thought of yet.  In the last 7 days, I got approximately 400 hits and 80 downloads from organic Google and MSN.  The most common search term there was Bingo Card Creator, with approximately 5% of the total queries.  The rest were, in general, a veritable deluge of once-in-a-lifetime queries… the kind that natural English snaps up like hotcakes and all the SEO in the world won’t get you.  You know, queries like “free download word bingo literacy” (sidenote: she evidentally cared a lot more about “word bingo literacy” than “free”) or “dolch preprimer home cards”.  (Quick comparison: I also spent approximately $20 for 260 hits and 50 downloads from AdWords.  Which has not generated a sale yet this week, I think.  D’oh.)
Content also has a nice property called linkability.  Very few people are going to say “Wow, check out this trial demo download” (if they do about your software, mazeltov, you are going to be rich like a king).  However, if you put up, say, a page about how to use bingo to assess reading difficulties, teachers will swap it via email, link it on their blogs, and chat about it around the water cooler.   Which brings in more eyeballs, more PageRank, and more downloads.  Yay, a positive cycle.  Plus you’re providing a service of use to people and thats always a good thing, even if they don’t end up buying from you.

A suggestion, though, since you do want to encourage people to eventually buy from you: aside from the obvious Download Free Trial link that you should have on every page of your website, have the text of your content plug your product wherever it is natural to do so.  If its not natural to do so, maybe you should be writing different content.  I like plugging Bingo Card Creator once early in the text (“If you don’t have a set of bingo cards, you can generate one in seconds with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator”) and then once after the end (“Looking to do something else with sight word bingo?  Why don’t you make yourself some cards with the free trial of Bingo Card Creator”).

So, if you’ve got a website which looks spartan at the moment, consider sprucing it up with some content of use to your target user.  More of them will come visit your page, and hopefully some of them will stick around to see what you have to offer.  (And remember, serving pages is essentially free at the margin.  For the 80% of folks who visit my Dolch sight word lists and leave without viewing another page on my website I pay, well, absolutely nothing.)

Update on Ad Experiments

Posted on August 11, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Uncategorized

So you might remember that about a week ago I tried to have some fun with two AdWords ads.  We’ll call them “white space” and “poetry” for short.
Dolch Sight Word Lists
Free lists.
No kidding.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Dolch Sight Word Bingo
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Bingo makes students love you.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 
White space is an experiment in two ways: it sends people to a landing page which does not flog bingo, but rather just provides a resource to teachers (Dolch sight word lists) and then asks if they’d like to get started playing bingo with the lists they just grabbed.  It also, obviously, sticks out against six other ads which use every one of the characters they are alloted.

Poetry was an experiment to see if AdWords rewards being clever.  So many of the ads are, well, blah.  Here’s my product, here’s 5 words of description, here’s my call to action.  Blah blah blah.  Marketing should be more fun than that.  So I went with some intentionally campy poetry.  And, hey, if it didn’t work I can always kill it in a week and not lose more than a cup of cocoa.

I’m not going to kill either of these ads, because the are actually pretty solid for being so new.

For comparison, here’s a fairly typical ad I have using the same keywords.  Its been through a solid month of optimization of everything: the landing page, the title, the text.  I was happy with this ad and wanted to make more of my ads like it:

Sight Words Bingo
Don’t prep for an hour. Be ready
in minutes with our software.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Lets call that control.  Control has about a 1.1% CTR for the same keywords as the other ads.  It has a 22% conversion rate, for a CPA of about 32 cents.  All in all, this ad is doing pretty well.  (Note: all of these ads are in the same AdGroup and use the same keywords).

Lets compare that to poetry.  Poetry uses the same landing page and the same keywords.   It has 2.13% CTR, and 19% conversion, for a CPA of about 31 cents.  So, essentially, it performs just as well as the control ad in terms of cost performance, but brings in twice the amount of clicks in the same time period.  This is great news for me, as it lets me get up to my target $3 a day advertising spend without shooting myself in the foot by investing money in non-performing keywords for the sake of investing money.

But I’m really pleasantly suprised with white space.  I expected white space’s conversion to be thirty-one flavors of terrible.  The hook in the ad isn’t bingo cards, its a free resource which is vastly more popular than using bingo to teach with.  And the landing page was an afterthought I cooked up in about 10 minutes one day to generate backlinks — surely it isn’t going to convert people that well?  Well, it does… 14%, which is neither fantastic nor terrible.  This leads to a CPA of 43 cents, which is well below my campaign average at the moment (although still above my target of 30 cents).

But whats the real nice pleasant suprise for white space?  The click through rate.  Something about the combination of “free stuff you can use” with the eyecatching nature of the ad draws in teachers like moths to the flame.  The CTR is about 5.8%, which is just jawdropping for an ad averaging in the 3rd position.  My best ad ever, which pitches my software to people who are searching for software with exactly my feature set, only has an 8% CTR.

And how much money did finding out these insights cost me?  At last count, $4.61.

Oh yeah, how much money did these ads make me over the week?  A little digging in Google analytics says… a hair under $48.

The next step is… improve the ads and experiment some more!  Ah, I love being a small businessman.  This is so much fun.

When Ruthlessness Is Required

Posted on August 11, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords

I’m not in favor of ruthlessness when it comes to customers, employees, or competitors.  Business is business, but a little bit of humanity goes a long way.  However, investments, on the other hand, have neither feelings nor moral standing.

Over the last two weeks I have watched my CPA (cost per action = what I pay to generate one additional trial download) go from $.40 to $.60+.  And, not being that involved with AdWords for a variety of reasons (“other affairs in other planes”, as we would have said in my RPG days), I didn’t see the culprit.  Until yesterday.

The culprit was one single keyword which I had added two weeks ago on a lark and forgotten about.   (printable BC, where BC are the first two letters of my program).  This keyword is pricey relative to a lot of my keywords, at $.12.  But I make good money off of a lot of $.12 keywords, such as, *cough*.  The difference was that this keyword was converting at about 9%, and getting clicked a lot.  I had a very effective ad for it, and the very effective ad was very effective at getting people to click to my site, and then most clicked right out again.  Averaging those abyssmal results with another ~50 keywords all performing as well as ever increased my advertising costs to the tune of 50%.

So I had two choices… make a better landing page or get out of that market.  I decided against the landing page, figuring that most people were looking for cards to print and just didn’t want to get invested in software to print cards.  And they were probably looking for traditional numeric cards, a gambling tool which my software rather deliberately does not support.  So I killed the ads.

In other news, folks have been asking recently on JoS “Does anyone get their money’s worth out of AdWords?”  I’m actually not sure I am yet.  I get enough sales from all sources to cover my costs, but I have not traced any of my completed sales directly to AdWords as of yet.  I think there might be a wee misconfiguration somewhere, because AdWords also doesn’t get nearly as much credit for conversion #3 (clicking the update button within the program, which verifies for me that the program was installed successfully) as it theoretically should be.  I’m wondering if it happening in different sessions is nuking the results?  But it should be cookied…

Bah, I’ll have to look into that later.  As it is, I took two days off this week and have some “real” work to take care of.

Seasons Change, Ads Get Borked

Posted on August 4, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Yahoo, YSM

(If this is your first time reading a search post from me: DSW are a very business-related keyword which unfortunately this blog manages to rank higher than my business on.  Apologies for the obfuscation: D01ch S1ght W0rds.  In queries and ad text its always spelled out normally.)

Well, the upcoming return of teachers to school has apparently massively shifted the number (waaaaaaaaay up) and the behavior of people searching for my search terms, and my previously decently performing ads have sunk to about 10% CR (Yahoo has also sunk, although the magnitude was a lot less).  I’m trying a couple of things to get them back up:

1)  My most common search term is a variation on “DSW list”.  I always hit that person with DSW bingo instead, which gets about a 1.5%ish CTR and formerly had a pretty decent conversion.  I decided to test actually giving them the lists, since I have them on my website and the page they are on tries to “upsell” people to the free demo about every other word.  The only problem is that for any of these search queries the #1 organic result is just as good as my site (although slightly less navigable).  So I decided to make my add stand out in the crowd:

DSW Lists
Free lists.
No kidding.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Given that almost everybody is using the full character allotment in every line, the white space immediately catches the eye.  That plus the fact that this very closely matches their query has caused the CTR rate on the ad to jump to about 6%ish (triple to quadruple my best previous performer for this ad group), and (this was the major shocker) the conversion rate is higher, too!  Its a shade below 20% after two days (umm, boo) but given that the rest of my ads have been at 5-15% for a week I’m considering keeping it (this means my CPA has shot past 60 cents — egads!  Call the medics!).

Also, I noticed that every single ad on Google AdWords is the same: “We sell X.  Come get it!”.  Boo for lack of creativity.  I know the character limit is a little constraining but surely there is a way to get meaningful copy in four lines — the Japanese have been writing sub-17 letter poems from what is effectively a 200 word vocabulary for 500 years and they haven’t gotten bored of them yet.   (This is even more impressive if you understand how they are constrained in subjects — autumn, for example, “leaves” you with radiant colors, dragonflies, and thats about it.)

So anyhow, with poetry as my inspiration and an appreciation for the corny-goofballness that a lot of elementary school teachers appreciate:

DSW Bingo
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Bingo makes students love you.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

The early results suggest that I am a better programmer than a poet.

I Hate Typos + PAD Files Work

Posted on August 1, 2006 by in advertising, Analytics

After my surge in sales today I was wondering “Hey, why didn’t Google pick up any of these?”  Turns out I had marked my conversion page as http::/foo instead of http://foo .   Haha, regular expression FAILURE.  D’oh.  As those of you who use Analytics probably know, Google won’t go back and rerun data after you fix filters like that, so the information is lost forever… but given the microscopic number of conversions I have its pretty easy to get manually.

Incidentally, one of my customers found me through a PR5 shareware site which automagically lists anyone who submits a PAD file to the ASP.  Considering that file took all of two minutes to generate using their free tool and that PR5 site ranks higher than me for some keywords thanks to the advertising copy I included in the PAD file, thats not a bad idea for people bootstrapping up a mISV.

Re-evaluating My Opinion of YSM

Posted on July 27, 2006 by in advertising

(YSM = Yahoo Search Marketing, aka Overture)

I may have been too hasty in my dismissal of YSM.   Yes, their interface is terrible.  Yes, their three day delay between me putting in a new ad and it showing up makes constant refinement impossible.  Yes, their integration into Analytics sucks (I still can’t make it work right — all of my Yahoo searches are detected as organic regardless of what I do).

But, well, numbers do not lie.   My second round of Yahoo ads (I optimized the text a bit, not nearly as obsessive as I am about AdWords since the process is SO much worse) has been performing well.  How well?

Well, for comparison, in the last 7 days on Google I’ve been averaging about 50 cents CPA (cost per action = how much I pay Google for every trial download they drive to me) and a 20% CR.  Those are a little lower than I expected, but some days I’m spiking to 30 cents/35%, which is much closer to where I want to be.  Some of that is just random jittering when working with very small numbers, some of that is me constantly tweaking stuff on Google.

So, comparing by comparison, a week’s worth of my barely-optimized Yahoo ads: 29 cents.  40% conversion.  Good God.  Apparently the teachers are all over Yahoo.  Accordingly, despite the fact that I truly *hate* logging into their service to change things (whereas Google is more fun than some games I’ve paid money for… cheaper, too, come to think of it), I’ve given them a reprieve and authorization to charge me another $30 for August.  I’m still going to give Google $90 over the same period, at least if I can manage it :)

(Incidentally, this will likely end up pushing me temporarily above my $60 budget, since I currently have about $15 in net expenditures.  Counting ad expenses is a mess, though, one of those things they much teach you in business school: do you expense the ad when the click comes in?  Or when you mentally commit yourself to spending X over a certain period?  Or when your credit card is actually charged?  I’m on-budget if you consider numbers 1 and 3 and over-budget if you use #2.)

From "Minimize CPC" to "Maximize Conversions"

Posted on July 27, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords

I just upped my spending limit to $3 a few days ago and expected triple the traffic vs $1.  Instead, I got roughly $1.25 worth of traffic a day.  Heh, whoops.  It turns out that I was so successful at minimizing my CPC I am now able to pay for all the clicks my ads would generate in a day, with money left over.  Time to see if I can’t increase the CTR a bit without increasing my cost per conversion that much…

Here’s my rolling weekly average:

Ad Group #1 (pitching BCC to someone searching for ways to make bingo cards): 600 impressions, 8% CTR, 23% conversion, .52 CPA

Ad Group #2 (pitching Dolch bingo cards, my killer app, to people searching for Dolch word lists): 2100 impressions, 1.5% CTR,  17% conversion (a bad week), .46 CPA
As a stopgap measure I’ve turned off the position preference, which should see my ads return to the #1 spot as well…  We’ll see if that helps conversions or not.

That reminds me, I should start advertising in Australia/Great Britain soon.

'Tis An Ill Wind Indeed…

Posted on July 21, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords

… that blows no one good.

If you’ve been following the recent AdWords controversy regarding Quality Score you know that a lot of sites have seen their minimum keyword bids skyrocket after the update. This is bad news for them (and I feel for genuine business owners who got pinched in the middle: scrapper sites, MFA, and affiliate marketers on the other hand I have rather little sympathy for), but really good news for me. The reason is that I had previously had competition for all of my keywords, and now… I have a lot less. For example, there were some folks advertising “Best Dolch Word Sites” (which lead to a page of ads, hoping for ad arbitrage) or trying for generic gambling-related bingo sites on the “how do I make a bingo card” keyword. As of today, these competitors no longer exist. Putting two and two together, I’m assuming this is because they’re now seeing $5 minimum bids for their keywords, where they had previously been paying $.15.

This actually has posed a problem for me, since I got vaulted roughly two positions ahead of where I’d been. This has increased my CTR by an order of magnitude (25% CTRs, somebody save me!), which I just can’t absorb on $1 a day. So I’ve reduced by bids in an effort to get back down to my previous, thank-you-sir-I-still-deplete-my-budget-daily ad position. So the upshot is that this should decrease my CPA (Cost Per Action = how much money I need to pay per every additional trial download).

Making AdWords Work For You

Posted on July 19, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, popular

There don’t seem to be any good crystalizations of the reams of data on the Internet, and the one thats do exist are on crazily SEO’d sites and I always feel a little dirty visiting them, so I thought I’d write this up.

The most important thing for succeeding with AdWords is that you need to install analytics software. Let me repeat that: you will have no clue whether your (potentially very expensive) AdWords campaign is actually making money unless you install analytics software. I really love Google Analytics because of its tight integration with AdWords, but if you want to use somebody else, hey, whatever floats your boat. And you need to enable conversion tracking for at least your trial downloads and ideally for your completed purchases.

The easiest way to do this is scatter your site with download links that all go to a central page (mine is thanks_for_downloading.htm) which has the tracking Javascript on it and a meta-refresh to the executable, plus a “if you don’t see your download starting within 5 seconds click here”. One thing I do is make sure all my links use text like “You should download our free trial to …” so that everyone who clicks on the link knows that they are committing to a download. The reason behind this is that if they click on a link saying “Free Trial” or something, see the download begin, and immediately hit cancel you’ll never know and you’ll think that person was a successful conversion.

OK, got your Analytics set up? Alright, here we go:

1) Eyes on the prize. The prize is conversions, to your trial and eventually to being satisfied customers who have paid you money. You’ll be buried in numbers — click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), number of clicks, number of impressions, conversion rate (CR), cost per conversion (aka cost per action, CPA), blah blah yackety smackety, and you can slice this data a million ways. There are only two numbers you care about: CR and CPA. Everything else is noise — potentially meaningful noise when you’re optimizing your ad, but otherwise its just noise. The only thing that will get you money is to get people to download your trial and decide to take the plunge. If it costs you $30 per trial download and you sell a $24.95 product, congratulations, you should a) get serious about optimizing your ads or b) cancel AdWords today.

2) Opt out of the Google Content Network. You can find this option in campaign settings. There is one simple reason for this: these sites fail to deliver customers who convert, which hurts CR and ups CPA. Or, in plain English, you pay them money and get nothing in return, so don’t pay them money! If you mistakenly leave them on for a week, like I did, you’ll very quickly figure out why: the vast majority of clicks are from “Made for AdSense” (MFA) pages, which are generally scrapes of content which exists elsewhere on the Internet, and more than a little bit shady. I assume that most of these folks are either site owners, bots, or users who are clueless enough that they land on a MFA page and take it to be valuable information (when they almost never are). None of these folks convert.

3) Segment, segment, segment. You can make multiple ad groups within a single campaign. Make use of this feature. An Ad Group should be thematically coherent: for example, one of my Ad Groups is based around the theme “You’re searching for something to make bingo cards, I provide something to make bingo cards”. Another is “You’re searching for information about Dolch sight words, I provide a resource to teach Dolch sight words”. If you’re smart your software solves one or several pains — pitch your ads on a per-pain basis. Why do this when you could save time by throwing everything in a single ad group? Because if you segment, your CTRs and CRs will be higher, since you’re showing the most relevant ad text to the searcher.

3) Watch that CTR, but not toooo closely. The best guess is that the average CTR is about 2%. If you’re at 1%, you’re still OK. If you’re at significantly above 2%, you’re *probably* OK (but see below). But if you’re below 1%, you’re going to start costing yourself money soon. The reason is you have a Quality Score, which is essentially a witches brew of factors that Google uses to determine whether they display your ad or not at a particular price. If your QS is low, Google will keep bumping up your minimum bid to be displayed. That costs you money, so you want to keep your QS nice and high, and one easy and transparent way to do so is keeping your CTR healthy.

4) Writing ad copy. God darn it Jim I’m an engineer, not a marketer. Here’s everything I know: include a call to action (“Download our free trial today.” works decently for me), make sure you use keywords from the search in the ad copy if possible, and speak directly to the pain. You can try out many ads at once — Google will automagically pick the one with the highest CTR for you. Thats Good For Google, since high CTRs mean they make money, but its not necessarily Good For You. You want ads with a high CR, because those are the ones that make *you* money. This means you should periodically check how your CR is doing and pull ads that aren’t making you money.
5) The importance of landing pages. You’ve got five seconds to overwhelm someone’s inborn defenses against spending time/money on your product. Make the use of them. Don’t be the silly advertiser who just directs everyone to the main page — have an optimized landing page for each ad group (or segment even beyond that — for each keyword, for each ad variation, whatever you can afford on your time budget). This means pages which speak to the pains which you solve. You want an example? Compare www.bingocardcreator.com, which is a generic pitch of my software to my main niche (teachers), to my landing page for sight words. Anyone landing on that page was looking for resources to teach sight words and clicked on an advertisement promising some variation of “I will save you time and money playing sight words bingo”. I greet them in a personal manner, immediately tell them download the free trial (something like 30% of the clickers do so immediately), and then go about pitching the activity (talking about the pain, basically) and providing them lots of reasons to believe that I’m the best possible solution to the pain.

6) You probably don’t want to let Google budget for you. Well, in one sense you do — you’ll establish a maximum you want to pay per month and Google will cap your expenditures at or near that maximum. This is good. What you don’t want is for Google to “spend up” to your maximum, which is what they will do by default if you let them budget for you. Lets pretend I have a budget of $30 for 30 days (I do). See, what happens under that setting is that they will adjust your bid timed to reach exactly $30 in 30 days… But if you only spend $5 in your first 10 days, then they’ll adjust your budget to hit the $25 target in 20 days… and they do this by bidding up your maximum cost per click. Supposing your click volume is not yet high enough, they’ll raise it again and again and again. You’re almost guaranteed to make your monthly limit. Great for Google, but there is a point at which you’re not making money (where your CPA * your conversion for demos to purchases exceeds your net profit per sale). You’re better off manually limiting your expenditure.

7) There is likely more traffic than you can afford to service. For a small advertiser, you are probably not able to absorb a click from everyone who wants to click on an ad in that day. So, reduce your maximum bid. It doesn’t matter if you’re in 1st position, 2nd position, 3rd position, or 17th position if you’re still maxing out your budget every day — I haven’t seen any difference in conversion rates based on where the ad is on the page (there is obviously a difference in CTR but, oh well, CTR only makes Google money).

8) You only want qualified buyers to click your ads. Here’s an issue for my business: I sell a program to make bingo cards which is targetted at teachers. I’ll accept orders from people who are not teachers, but I know if you’re not a teacher or a parent you’re highly unlikely to want to buy my product. So if you’re looking for something to print bingo cards for the game on Tuesday night I’m happy to show you my website for free (organic search) but not happy to pay a nickle to pitch my site to you. Yet I routinely end up paying $.15 to pitch to this person, because one of my campaigns is overly broad. You don’t want overly broad campaigns. There are three ways to target your niche more precisely:

  • Exclusion words. I pay for someone searching “make custom bingo cards”, with broad matching (it will hit “make custom reading bingo cards”, for example). However, I can specify exclusion words, which means if they search for foo they don’t get one of my ads regardless of how many of my keywords they hit. Consider carefully whether you really want to pay for anyone searching for “free keyword keyword keyword”. Currently, my conversion from people searching for free stuff is pretty nice (its actually higher than folks who didn’t specify if they were searching for free stuff or not). Similarly, if your keywords are ambiguous, exclude words which would resolve the ambiguity against you. For example, if you’re selling gardening software to people searching for “potter” (I don’t know why you would do this, but play along), you’d want to exclude Harry Hermione Ron magic Hogwarts etc etc. Note that excluding words does not appear to decrease the amount of money you have to pay (I’m not totally positive about this), so you’re probably better off not paying for Potter in any event.
  • Speaking your customers language. In general, especially if other software exists in your niche, the two to three word description of what your software does will be expensive. On the other hand, natural variations such as “How do I <solve my pain>” are likely to be very, very cheap. Listing off a couple dozen variations of that natural search query gets you lots of very qualified traffic for very cheap.
  • Make your ad text clear as to what they get for clicking. Suppose you could come up with some ad text with an obscenely high CTR by slightly stretching the truth as to what was behind the link. This is NOT a good idea. Remember, CTR is money for Google, not for you. Ideally, you’d want ad text that turned off 100% of people who would not convert while still capturing 100% of people who would. You’ll not likely be able to do that, but you can audition various ad texts to see what gets the lower CPA. Here’s three ads from my “you’re looking for software to print bingo cards” ad group:

Print Custom Bingo Cards

Your own text or use our lessons.
Download our free trial now!
www.BingoCardCreator.com

Bingo Cards for Teaching
Print custom cards on your own PC.
Download our free trial.
www.BingoCardCreator.com

Lessons Ready In Minutes
Make your budget go farther and

save prep time. Try for free!
www.BingoCardCreator.com

  • Here’s the results: variation #1 has a high CTR (6%) and a high CR (20%ish), but the CPA is poor compared to targetting teachers specifically (roughly quadruple what I pay elsewhere). The reason is that I pay a lot of money to pitch to folks who weren’t interested in teaching. Variation #2, on the other hand, has a lower CTR (4.5%) but a higher CR (unstable since I’ve only had it up for two days, but I’m estimating it will settle in the 40% region). Doing the math, thats roughly 50% extra downloads for the same amount of money (or, equivalently, 1/3rd off my CPA). Variation #3 just sucks as an ad (sub-1% CTR, no significant conversions) and it will be killed right after I get done with this post. You can see why it sucks, too: its not pitching anything at the pain people are searching for.
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