Here are Google’s 6 Tactics for Tough Times with my interpretation/comments:

1. Focus your ads on low prices and savings
Price is more important than ever. Make sure your proposition and Ad copy focus on low prices and value for money. That is what people are looking for, now more than ever before.

2. Use value-related keywords
Keywords are what people are looking for, so if people are looking for bargains then make sure your keywords reflect this. Research and test value-related keywords such as “cheap carpet”, “discount carpet”, “carpet offers”, etc.

3. Ensure your Ad Groups are targeted and relevant
This is not particularly a recession tactic, it is always important but it’s perhaps even more important in difficult times because you have to have everything right. Even small mistakes might now mean the difference between profit and loss. So rather than having big vague Ad Groups that target a broad area, split them into smaller more tightly-focused ones. For example, rather than have a big Ad Group about Training Shoes, split it into smaller groups covering Running Shoes, Squash Shoes, Gym Shoes etc. so that your Ads can specifically address what people are looking for. People looking for running shoes are more likely to click on an Ad about running shoes than they are on one about trainers in general.

4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
Use negative keywords to filter out people who are looking for something different but which uses the same words. For example if you’re selling Butter you don’t want people who are looking for Peanut Butter clicking on your Ad (and believe me they will!) so add Peanut Butter and Peanut as negative keywords.

5. Make it easy for people to buy
Make sure the destination URL takes them straight to the order page – don’t make them hunt for it!

6. Focus your money on your high-performers
Spend your budget where it has the most effect. Always monitor the profitability of your campaigns and spend your money where it generates the most profit. Simple, but you’d be amazed how often it isn’t done!

So there is nothing earth-shatteringly new here, but it wouldn’t hurt to spend 5 minutes reviewing your AdWords activity against this list just to make sure you’re doing the best you can in this difficult climate. I pretty much guarantee that there will be something you can improve. All in all, a very helpful article from Google.

Key No. 1 – Safety: Establish your break-even point and work within it

Losing money is a bad thing. You want to avoid it if at all possible. If you don’t do your sums you can lose it quite quickly with AdWords, but if you do you can make sure you never lose money with AdWords. As soon as you have got some data to go on, work out your break-even point – the maximum amount you can pay for each click before you lose money. If your conversion rate (clicks to orders) is say 3% then on average you will have to pay for 33 clicks to get one order. If you make £45 on each order, then your break-even point is £45 divided by 33 which is £1.36 per click. If your clicks cost less than this you will make a profit, if they cost more then you will lose money. So straight away you know, when you’re looking at your keywords and CPC bids you’ve got to stay within this figure if you want to make money. Ideally you want a healthy margin between your actual cost per click and your theoretical breakeven, both to allow for any variation in the conversion rate and to make a significant profit – there’s no point in doing all this work just to break-even. Now that you’ve established your safe zone, you can go ahead and experiment and optimise to your heart’s content, secure in the knowledge that whatever else happens you’re not losing any money. Do constantly watch your figures though as conversion rates will vary.

Key No. 2 – Make AdWords your last priority

If you’re a very task-orientated, go-getting type it’s very easy to jump straight into AdWords and start writing copy and testing keywords. Stop! Before you do anything with AdWords, anything at all, make sure your offering (the product or service you are selling) is right. If the product is no good, or it’s wrongly priced, or your offer isn’t enticing, then AdWords won’t be able to sell it any more than any other method can. You’ve got to start with a good offering in the first place. AdWords is just a means of reaching people. It’s a very good means of reaching people, but if you haven’t got anything good to offer them then there’s no point in reaching them. Spend time reviewing your offering, comparing it with the competition, checking pricing, your USP – everything in fact until you’re sure your offering is as good as it can possibly be.

Key No. 3 – The landing is the most important part of the flight

As any airline passenger will tell you, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the flight was if the plane crashes on landing. AdWords gives you a great way of reaching people with your offer, right at the time they are looking for it. They see your ad, it’s exactly what they want, they click on it… and then what – where does your advert take them? The landing page (where they go when they click on your ad) is absolutely vital. You can run a brilliant campaign that is perfect in every way and then lose it all on the landing page. Too often people just dump viewers onto their home page which usually bears no relation to the specific area of interest they clicked on. Make sure your landing pages specifically address the advert they clicked on, that they reinforce your sales message and that they contain a clear call to action (order now, call this number, contact). The sole function of AdWords is to bring people to your landing pages – that’s all it does. Your landing pages are the be all and end all so make them good. And yes, I did say pages – you should ideally have a separate specific landing page for every advert if you are to get the best results.

Key No. 4 – Write everything down

AdWords optimisation is a lengthy process of testing new ideas, letting them run for a while, evaluating the results, keeping the winners and discarding the losers. You’ll try different ad copy, different keywords, different matching methods and different bids. As well as that, you’ll try different landing pages and you may even vary your product or service offering as well. All of these will affect your results (how much profit you make) and these changes occur over a period of time. The chances are then that unless you have superhuman powers of memory and total recall, by the time you’re 3 months into it you’ll have completely forgotten what you tried in week 2 and what the results were, so you’ll probably find yourself repeating the same things you’ve already done! Write everything down so you can see what you’ve already done and, most importantly, what the results were. In this way you can build upon what you learn and continually improve rather than going round in circles which is so easy to do with AdWords. It’s very simple. All I do is keep a diary and each day I write down what I’ve done – added some new keywords, changed some copy, whatever. Each day when I go to look at my AdWords campaigns I review the diary entries for the last few days to see what I did and I can then see whether it worked. I also make a note of significant stats at that point so that I can refer back to them in the future. Did that new ad copy that I wrote last month work? Well I can see that before I wrote the new ad I was getting around 120 clicks per day and I’m now getting 150 so yes it did. The chances of keeping all this in your head are slim but if you write it down in your diary it’s easy. A £2.99 purchase from WH Smiths could be the best performing marketing investment you ever make!

Key No. 5 – Start small and be patient

If your goal is to make £1,000 per week with AdWords then don’t start by trying to do this! It’s very tempting to quickly bash out some ads, use every keyword research tool you can find to come up with a list of 10,000 keywords, whack up the maximum bids so you get some traffic and then switch it and hope. You can even convince yourself that you have a good rationale – start by trying everything under the sun and then you can get rid of what doesn’t work later. Sound sensible? Well maybe, but it doesn’t work. The reason is relevance. Relevance is important both to your viewers (and they are always the most important thing) and to Google. 10,000 keywords cannot possibly be relevant and you almost certainly haven’t got enough adverts to be relevant to those keywords. The result will be millions of impressions, low click-through rates, increased costs and no profits! The AdWords system rewards relevance by giving your keywords and ads a Quality Score which affects (significantly) how much you have to pay per click, and even whether or not your ads show at all. Just like a reputation, good quality scores take a while to build and bad ones take a long time to overcome. So don’t blow it in a desperate attempt to shoot for the stars in the first attempt. Start with a small campaign with a small number of very carefully chosen keywords – maybe just 4 or 5. Write 3 or 4 different ads that are specifically targeted to those keywords. Make everything as targeted and relevant as you can. Let this run for a while, you should get good results and build up some good quality scores but you probably won’t be generating much traffic. That’s OK, you understand that this is a slow process of improvement and you’re more concerned with quality and getting everything right, than you are with quantity. Once that’s working well then create another one, again with a small number of keywords and carefully crafted ads. And then another, and another, and so on until you reach your eventual goal. The key principle is to do everything correctly and then build upon it. The “shoot for the stars” on the first attempt, death or glory method usually results in death rather than glory.

Hope this helps, it certainly does for me. Let me know how you get on.

In any downturn, most people’s thoughts quite rightly turn firstly to cutting costs as a means of ensuring the security of their business. However, there is probably a limit to how far you can go with this unless you were previously wasting heaps of money on unnecessary expenditure. One of the first areas to come under scrutiny for cuts is marketing and particularly advertising. Should you continue to advertise in the current recession?

Somebody wise (I forget who) once said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half”. This uncertainty about the effectiveness of some advertising makes it a worthy candidate for consideration at least, when it comes to getting the red pen out. If it isn’t making you money then you should cut it. The trouble is how can you tell if it will make you money or just cost you money until you’ve done it? And then it’s too late…

Limit your exposure

Not necessarily. Sure if you blow several thousand pounds on a print advert and it doesn’t work, that money is down the drain for good and there’s no way of testing it first. However with AdWords you can test it. You can run your advert for just one day, a week, or just a few hours – however long (or short) a time you need to find out whether it works or not. You’re already halfway home and dry because you only pay when somebody clicks on your advert so it’s pretty much payment by results anyway.

The only issue with AdWords is whether the amount you have to pay per click, multiplied by your conversion ratio is sufficiently low for it to be profitable. This is something you can only establish by trying it but the good news is because AdWords is so controllable (i.e. you can turn it on or off at a moment’s notice and you can set a limit on your spend) you can test your advert for very little money. The chances are that it will be profitable because the amount you pay for each click is determined by the market (other people advertising on the same keywords) and the market, like all markets finds it’s own level.

Lets work through a simple example of how to establish the profitability of an AdWords campaign:

That’s a very simple example but it’s also a very typical one. You’re unlikely to strike it rich overnight and make an instant fortune with AdWords but you are likely to be able to generate more business profitably and gain a better understanding of what your customers are looking for on the web. And that’s the name of the game, not just in a recession but at any time.

The basic principle of pay-per-click (PPC) is that you create a short advert for the product or service that you want to promote and you choose a list of keywords that you want to associate with that advert. When people go to the search engines and search for things containing your keywords, your advert is displayed alongside the search results, usually on the right hand side of the natural listings.

A key benefit of pay-per-click  is that by definition your advert is hitting people at the point when they are actually looking for your product or service.

Your advert appears free of charge – you only pay when somebody clicks on it. The amount you pay depends upon several factors but is typically somewhere between 5p and 50p per click. Your advert doesn’t appear on it’s own (unless you are very lucky!) but amongst others who have also selected the same or similar keywords to trigger their adverts. The position of your advert amongst these other competing ads is determined by a number of factors, but the most prominent one is the amount you pay (or bid) each time somebody clicks on your ad. The more you pay, the higher up the list you will be. If you bid high enough you will be number one – it’s as simple as that! Usually you’re better off being in position 3 or 4 as this is usually much cheaper and therefore more profitable. The amount you have to pay is determined by how much everybody else is prepared to pay and how competitive the market is and the market finds it’s own level.

You can set a daily budget and can start and stop your adverts at will so you have total control over your expenditure. You can test different adverts and different keywords and see the results online.

To test the effectiveness of PPC advertising for your business, you could start with as little as £20. At 5p per click, that represents 400 visitors to your site – all of whom are interested in your offering. Where else can you run a campaign to bring in 400 qualified prospects for only £20? Of course that’s not really a sensible budget if you’re serious about your business but you get the point. A sensible starting point for many businesses would be a few hundred or so but your mileage may vary. We always work on establishing the profitability of any PPC click campaign first, so however much you spend it should always make you more than it costs once the initial parameters have been set.

Although the entry cost is very low and the return on investment can be huge, like everything else, in reality it takes a great deal of skill and expertise to run a successful pay-per-click campaign. This is where we come in as we can devise, setup and run the campaign for you and teach you how to do it yourself so that you can operate it yourself in future. Not only does this save you money in doing it yourself, but you will gain a huge amount of ongoing information about what your customers are looking for and what they respond to that will be of enormous value to you.

Typically we will spend half a day or so setting up your initial campaign and training you to then carry on yourself. Alternatively we can run the whole thing for you all the time as we do for several big clients. At the moment we are discounting our AdWords initial setup package to just £199 which is a great deal to get you started. Contact us or call me for a chat on (01372) 371041 and we can discuss how you can use pay-per-click advertising profitably in your business.

For more information about pay-per-click advertising and Google AdWords campaign management, please contact Tim Felmingham on 01372 371041 or contact us through this website.

You may have seen ads running on the iPhone and G1 already. That’s because Google Search on these devices used to show desktop results pages modified for these phones. Recently, the Google mobile team launched  formatted specifically for the iPhone. Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

More information from AdWords Help Center.

The difference with Google’s search-based Keyword Tool is that this one looks at your landing page and cross-references it with their vast amounts of search data to find out what keywords people are using to find your products and services. It looks at your landing page and any additional keywords that you enter and finds relevant user searches that have occurred on Google over the last year. It will then give an indication of search volume and the bid price for a top-three position.

On paper it seems similar to the existing (and notoriously unreliable) keyword tool in AdWords but it works differently and seemingly much better. It appears to base it’s results on general search data rather than just AdWords data and it gives more information that is extremely useful if it proves to be accurate. It will find keyword suggestions that are not currently in your AdWords campaigns and give you the option to add them.

Another very useful aspect of the tool is the related keywords that it generates which can be a great source of ideas for your negative keywords. [This is a very important aspect of optimising your campaigns by reducing the number of irrelevant impressions - new article on this subject coming soon]. Because these lists are derived from actual search data and are weighted by the number of queries you can often find some very high-volume but completely irrelevant terms that may be triggering your ads wrognly and dragging down your CTR without you realising it.

Early days yet to see how good this tool really is but it’s certainly worth trying. I’m going to be using for a while at least – I’ll let you know how get on with it. If you’ve used it, please share your experiences in the comments below.

If you have a question or want some specific advice, don’t hesitate to send it in. Although I am a professional consultant and generally charge for my work, if a question only takes a couple of minutes to answer or contributes to the community then I’m happy to offer my advice for free.