[admagic]

There is a world of difference between how businesses use adwords and how real professionals do.

And the idea of spattering 300 keywords at your regular sales page is wrong - not least
because neither your ad nor your landing page can be specific and match the mindset of the
customer who typed , so your vital CTR will suffer!

Here is what you should do.


RULE 1 Use mindset to capture them cheap and long before your competition does

This is a massive subject - I can only scratch the surface
But the secret get into the heads of your customers and think outside the box!!- what are they
really thinking and doing in the days weeks before they make a purchase? - take mortgages for example. That is a hell of an expensive keyword whose price is fuelled by idiots in big companies who dont know how to use adwords properly

Chances are in your market..the price is being pushed up by fortune 500 junior employees!!

So think out of the box.. many people who are about to move want to
decorate or paint the house first. So target them long before your competition by getting them before and cheaper than your competition. Give them great information, (and offers if you like!!) and then say...Oh by the way.. are you thinking of moving??? Heres the cheapest mortgages etc.

One really successful campaign I ran in a very hot market, targetted the name of a popular newspaper in that niche!!! I was paying less than a quarter - I would have done for the clicks by targetting the subject.

You can make money - and I have - out of putting up sites that arbitrage like that on to expensive keywords.

Most people wanting a mortgage will type the name of big companies

Did you know you are also allowed to bid on the word "abbey national" and
because of an error in the design of explorer "www.abbeynational.com" gets lots of traffic too! -Target these for cheap traffic - but make sure you understand the rules to avoid breaching trade names

The lesson is - think out outside the box - dont just use the obvious

RULE 2
Research is key.

Watch your market before you act. Get screenshots of adwords for at least 2 months for all your prime keywords

The ads still there at the end of that period are working. They are your true competition Find out why they work and write better ads!!

RULE 3

ADWORDS is a street fight. Never forget your competition will do there best to knock you out and you must do the same.

There are lots of things you can do to out fox them.eg

Find out where your competiotion is Geo target your ads..so that your competition HQ cant even SEE you!!!

Did you know, that a campaign which geotargets the whole country a place at a time is CHEAPER and less competitive than a whole country campaign!

Google allows place targetting of ads.
So if your competition prefers 3rd spot - target a SEPARATE high price campaign on another account to that spot He either has to out bid you , or drop - chances are he will outbid, and start losing money and then go.

So go in hard with all guns blazing - you can outlast most adwords consultants and companies by taking a 4-6 week view and accepting you will lose money for a while.

Do these things and soon they will be gone.

RULE 4

Click thru ratio is everything.

You must do all you can to nurture it, and then all you can to keep it
Because google are only interested in you if you make money for them.

To establish initial CTR -- START AT NIGHT!!! When your competition is NOT looking.

Put up separate keywords for Exact match, Phrase match and broad match
Kill any that dont convert!!

Go in hard with a high bid...get your CTR and only then reduce bids
You must get high up to get Click thru ...and that will cost you until you get clicks.

But DONT go for first spot. You always get timewasters and kids clicking
...my experience is 3rd spot is best for CTR and conversion.

RULE 5 Keep the CTR you have

Dont risk the CTR you have - keep experiments in a separate account.
separate your money earners from your try out keywords in a separate campaign

And when you are running well put up multiple copies of a working ad...so any new version is switched in
only 20% of the time not half..dont risk that CTR

RULE 6 - The copy of your ad is vital

Study headlines!!!
The copy MUST target the mindset of those that type the keywords -
another reason for not spattering keywords but thenhit them hard.
Use specific benefits, and a big promise!

"A simple change to your golf swing
that will reduce your score in 48 hours
golfsecrets.yourdomain.com"

By the way...did you know that google does not check subdomains?
So if you are targetting "discount mortgages" use display url

discount-mortgages. yourdomain.com
That highlighting ofkeywords alone will up your conversion by at least 1-2&

ALWAYS TEST MULTIPLE ADS

RULE 7 The landing page quality
Google cares where you land...and wants to see content not sales.

Make sure your landing page is ABOUT your keyword
Use specific landing pages targetted to your keywords
- ie a lot of modified pages- for that reason alone, DONT Splatter keywords - all they do is dilute your CTR

Also An "articles" page containing great content - is a must - full of the keywords. That is how to get google to give you a quality score which reduces your bids

RULE 8 Landing page conversion

Look the other side of the click

YOur sole goal is SIGN UPS, not sales. Once you have them, you canmarket

So offer them something great for free!! to sign up
That way, the benefit of your campaign is accumulative
The page on which they land should be a simple yes/no decision to an offer. And please study copy...great headlines - a USP - prove value, credibility, irressistible offer

RULE 9
The hidden Gem of adwords

Want to hide from your compeitition....easy!!! find the sites
that rank high in google, who carry google advertising
Then use a SITE TARGETTED campaign on CPM - you get a great big ad far cheaper
This works!!! try it.

MOST of my own campaigns are done this way. I only use search when I cant find a good site to target

Site targetting is cheaper and less competitive.

RULE10

Test conversion and not just click thru
Just because they click, does not mean they will buy
Test conversion as well as click thru

So Just spattering hundreds of keywords at an existing sales page is wrong

Not least it will reduce your CTR and push up your costs.

I get CTRs of even 15-20% by doing things the RIGHT way.

[RayB]

Absolutely first class post - I'll stickie it right now

[Indizine]

He he Admagic, glad you could join us!! That is, as usual from you, great advice.

[SteveGibson]

Personally, I think those 10 rules have a lot of relevance for information marketing, but I'd not agree with them for simple ecommerce businesses.

For example:

YOur sole goal is SIGN UPS, not sales.

When someone is ready to buy, they're in buying mode - something that can come and go - and, if you try to drive people towards a sign up, you can be getting in the way of instant gratification...

... Which can lead to them not buying or buying from a competitor that's willing to take their money right now.

Steve

[Calibre Designs]

Great post admagic!

Nice to have your input too Steve. Nice to have you on-board.

Kay

[Alvin]

Great post Admagic but for the sign up part I would have an issue with but maybe thats just the types of business I am involved in.

I believe in as little as possible to hinder people on there way to the till.

And if you sell a good quality product at the right price there is no problem about them coming back to you.Which is what we have found over a number of years.

Alvin

[admagic]

Originally Posted by SteveGibson

Personally, I think those 10 rules have a lot of relevance for information marketing, but I'd not agree with them for simple ecommerce businesses.

For example:


When someone is ready to buy, they're in buying mode - something that can come and go - and, if you try to drive people towards a sign up, you can be getting in the way of instant gratification...

... Which can lead to them not buying or buying from a competitor that's willing to take their money right now.

Steve

Clearly all generalisations have exceptions - and with everything there is a tradeoff -

But in my view - the only markets in which signups should not be a goal are those in the "one off problem solve it now or never" type with only low possibility of repeat custom.

And with any sign up there should be an immediate One time offer upsell
so you can not only get the signup, you can get more sales too , because of the psychology of the OTO.

Chances are only a few percent buy on the first time in....so aiming a site at converting the 97% is likely to be a better long term view.

And There are a very few markets in which there are no information product opportunities.

Take golf. You can offer a list of golfers an enormous range of physical products... if you build a relationship that list is worth FAR more than the initial sale you might capture.

And you can grab golfers with great information. It is a long term asset building view of the business.

So if losing a sale of 12 golf balls, to one customer , allowed me to capture the names of 4 more more, I would do that every time - because the life time value of the sign ups is massively more than the sale.

If you dont know who your visitors are ...how can you ever build a relationship - or tempt them back

I think for 90% of the businesses on the web, the failure to build a list is the biggest mistake they are making.

The fact that some online businesses succeed despite not building a list....does not prove that they would have done better if they had built a list.


Take for example someone searching for a NIKON D12..in buying mode...
Most are still probably in 2 minds and need convincing

if they were offered an immediate free video user guide to getting the most out of the D12.. Ill bet a lot of them would take it.
..and then a OTO upsell to the product..itself. The best of both worlds.

And by the way.... a listbuilding offer doesnt just have to be information , it can be a cracking good deal for something small of value...


So provided the offer for name capture is relevant, I doubt if it puts many off.






But like all generalisations, there are exceptions too!

[admagic]

Come on marketing egg heads, lets have somefun

Lets pick some so called "straight e commerce business" which it is better to go straight for the sale...and see how creative we can get.

.................................................. ............................

For one thing, the idea of an ecommerce shop is not a given in many markets you think.

I got talking to someone on another forum, about his ecommerce shop...
in which he (and all his competitors) including high street names have a huge array of products. I started suggesting conversion ideas - and urged him to look at gettingsign ups....I felt sure this was the way to go

I dont know if anyone else knows the guys at IMC (thats derek gehls outfit)....I got talking to them in london about that site....and one of the IMC guys showed me his own site in that same niche ( a niche which has several high street big brand name shops)

It was a long sales letter for a SINGLE product that acted as a lead generator for a back end marketing system - he was feeding traffic to that site via ebay , adwords and other means.

And heres the thing.

The IMC conversion was about 20 times higher to traffic than the conversion of the persons site who I was discussing on that forum - and get this - the IMC guys sales from that one product, were five times bigger than the entire ecommerce shop of the one here... and his back end sales were ten times bigger still and growing because of the effect of the LIST building.

Yet this was the very kind of product everyone would tell you "had to be sold from an ecommerce shop" theres no other way.., and you will lose sales if you dont

There is always another way.

[SteveGibson]

Originally Posted by admagic

Take golf. You can offer a list of golfers an enormous range of physical products... if you build a relationship that list is worth FAR more than the initial sale you might capture.

And you can grab golfers with great information. It is a long term asset building view of the business.

So if losing a sale of 12 golf balls, to one customer , allowed me to capture the names of 4 more more, I would do that every time - because the life time value of the sign ups is massively more than the sale.

Golf is a market with a strong information element.

That's why there are golf magazines, golf improvement books and DVDs ... and why golfers pay for lessons with pros.

So, a golfer is information hungry and will continue to be information hungry about the subject for many years to come.

That means a lot of future purchases and, if you're in front of him regularly and telling him about the newest products, there's money to be made.

So, dangling info in front of that buyer can make sense.

But, that's down to the nature of that market.

If someone is buying a washing machine, for example, apart from product reviews, do they really want to learn anything about it?

You want it, you want it now (because the last one is probably knacked) and you want a good deal from people you think you can trust. That's the long and short of it.

So, I believe most people in buying mode should be taken to the till asap.

Steve

PS BTW, you can often offer 2 different conversions - a sale and a signup - on a site, which allows you to serve both "buyers" and "thinkers".

This stuff about "having only one purpose" is something that's only true some of the time.

[Alvin]

I think both Steve and admagic make valid points.

comes down to what product and maket you are hitting.

"horses for courses" as always.


Alvin