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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.

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).

Yay for iterative improvements

Posted on July 19, 2006 by in AdWords, SEO

Last week I was paying roughly $1 per trial download.  Now I’m paying $.50.  I hope by next week to be paying about $.30.

The secrets, such that they are, are mostly in the post right below: dropping non-performing ads, optimizing for CR instead of CTR, and tuning my landing pages.  Incidentally, I found another no-brainer: underlining hyperlinks, which is probably partially responsible for the a 10% increase in people successfully finding the trial.  (This is on top of the 100% increase I got from making that trial a button, but apparently some folks actually read the text I spent so much time writing…)

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.

Optimized Landing Page #1

Posted on July 4, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Uncategorized

So I’ve got that one Ad Group which is selling to people looking for Dolch words, and while its not precisely targetted at what they’re looking for (I give them something to teach with which happens to include the lists, rather than just the lists themselves) they’re not being mislead by my ad text. So at least some portion of them want some bingo activity. I spent a bit of time making basically a sales presentation to a person in the mood for Dolch Sight Word Bingo. You can take a gander over at the best place on the Internet to get fun classroom activities using Dolch sight word lists

Side note: I am starting to think like an SEO person. “Hmm, must use descriptive anchor text and get high quality inbound links in addition to targetting adwords campaign”. This is beginning to freak me out.

Yahoo Advertising vs. Google Advertising

Posted on July 2, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Yahoo, YSM

Yahoo is running a promotion where, if you pay a $5 deposit (which unlike Google’s is counted against your clicks) they’ll give you a $25 advertising credit. That is a real no brainer, so I signed up for it. And it was pretty immediately apparent why Google is kicking Yahoo’s hindquarters:

  • Google has much, much, much better web-based tools to quickly get in variations for your keywords. For example, “second grade sight word list” plugged into Yahoo’s tool gets only variations on the plurals. Google picks up second graders, etc, and also some words which are syntactically connected but are *not* variations of the words in the query. Which is great because those words are cheaper than anything as nobody is targetting obscure teaching terminology… except me.
  • Yahoo will always display your full URL people get taken to (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/info.html?source_tracking=yahoo). Google displays whatever you want it to display (http://www.yoursite.com). One of these is obviously a lot more comfortable for the customer.
  • Google makes new ads easy. If you’ve already got one ad in a keyword group, throw in another and Google will rotate them for you trying to find the one that gets clicked on most. Yahoo, not so much. You have to go through the whole setup process again.
  • Google will have you up in minutes *if* your ad text doesn’t trigger any of their filters (e.g. no guns, no gambling, etc). My original text did (bingo is apparently a gambling word) but I got the exemption I requested within 24 hours. Yahoo will have you up and running in 72 hours.
  • Google AdWords comes with Google Analytics, which is a) worth keeping an AdWords account running for even if nobody ever converts from it, because it beats whatever web stats software you are currently using hands down b) is the perfect tool for an information junkie and c) lets you know whether all that money you’re spending on the ad campaign is actually making you money. Yahoo… no such tool, but we play well with Google Analytics, if you go through hoops with tagging URLs which we actually display?
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