It’s Called an Ad Group and Not a Keyword Group for a Reason
Your ad copy is the only part of your account a searcher will ever see.
A searcher does not know if you are using geographic targeting, ad scheduling, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.
A searcher only sees your ad copy.
Your ad is the bridge between someone’s thought process (the keyword query) and your website.
You should start with the ad and work backwards.
An exercise I stress that everyone should go through is based upon this organization.
First, write a very targeted ad. An ad that seems like you do exactly one thing (you sell one product, you provide one exact service) and put it in front of you.
This ad cannot say ‘John’s plumbing’ – a plumber does many things. The ad must say ‘John’s Kitchen Remodeling Service’ or ‘John’s Emergency Pipe Repair Service’.
Once that ad is written, now look at the keywords in that ad group.
Does the ad describe every keyword in the ad group?
If yes, leave the keyword where it is.
If no, move that keyword to a new ad group.
When you are done, write an ad for the next ad group and repeat.
This process is not necessarily fast, but it will:
- Increase your CTR
- The ad and keyword are related
- Increase your Quality Score
- The CTR went up, and the relevancy should as well
- Increase your conversion rates
- The searcher will have the proper expectations when clicking on your ad
This can be time consuming. If you aren’t sure where to start – start with the ad groups that spend a lot of money and have low quality scores – that is your best area of improvement.
Note for Certified Knowledge members: The quality score tool will give you a good starting place.
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- There is Not a Magic Number for How Many Keywords Should be in an Ad Group I often hear that you should not have more than...
- What determines the ‘Ad Group Quality Score’ for AdWords? The Ad Group Quality score is used to determine your...
The high-touch shift for growing sales in 2010-2011
The phrase “high-tech, high-touch” has been with us for 20 years but until recently it hasn’t really meant much of anything.
For the first 10 years of the Internet, the name of the game was “high tech NO touch”. Circa 1997-2007, it was perfectly acceptable to literally hide behind your website and be anonymous.
Well in my opinion the *real* meaning of Social Media is that the Internet is now a place where real humans connect with each other, rather than a place where cold impersonal transactions take place. You simply cannot get away with being nameless and faceless anymore. Google doesn’t like it. People don’t like it. It’s contrary to the spirit of the age.
Case in point: Laura and I are huge Amazon customers and just the other day one of their staff members actually mailed us an actual hand-written thank-you note (!)
And unless you sell cheap commodity items on a purely transactional basis, the fastest way to boost your sales is to be available via phone and web chat to answer questions. To communicate, “Yes, someone is really home!”
If people feel as though you think of them as ATM machines with “gullible” stamped on their foreheads, your credibility erodes real fast.
If you can sell in a way that builds trust and rapport – if you can “get to the truth not the sale” - then every connection you make builds equity, both in the present and the future.
You are ALWAYS either drawing customers to you, or driving them away.
In this new economy, you need to have a trust-based sales approach that feels good to YOU and your customer.
–> What if I told you you could increase your sales conversion on the phone by NOT focusing on the sale? Yes, that’s a paradox. I love paradoxes. That’s why in November I am sending my own sales staff to Ari Galper’s Sales Breakthrough Seminar in Los Angeles.
Ari has grown from student to peer and is a mentor to thousands of sales people. His approach is coherent and consistent with the spirit of the age – it’s truly high tech *and* high touch.
I invite you to explore Ari’s page and consider the wealth that you can unlock by cultivating human touch with all the people you do business with:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/salesbreakthrough/
Perry Marshall
3 Techniques Your Competitors Are Too Spineless To Try
Last week one of my Roundtable Members, John Timur, said, “I hope the economy stays e-x-a-c-t-l-y the way it is right now. So my competitors stay glued to CNN believing all the negativity. Cuz MY business is up 37% this year!”
90% of your competitors are mediocre too. And here’s 3 things you’ll never see ‘em do:
1. Send your prospects a bag of popcorn with a sales letter stuffed inside. They’re guaranteed to open the bag. They’re guaranteed to eat the popcorn. They’re guaranteed to *like* you for sending the popcorn. And they’re pretty likely to read your sales letter.
2. Mail your customers your next promo in a bank bag. You know, one of those vinyl things with a zipper across the top. People associate bank bags with money. I bet you can think of a good money-argument for them doing business with you right away.
3. Exploit some oddball holiday as an excuse to have a sale or send a gift. Celebrate National Pistachio Day (February 26) or Queen Elizabeth’s Official Swan Counting Day (July 20). Upcoming oddball holidays: October 1 is Homemade Cookie Day. October 9 is Moldy Cheese Day. October 13th is Margaret Thatcher’s Birthday. October 15 is National Grouch Day.
Speaking of holidays, today, September 29, is the birthday of Sesame Street character Telly Monster. In honor of Telly Monster, I have a very special offer for you: A free copy of the book where I stole these 3 techniques that your competitors are too spineless or lazy to try.
The book I speak of was is loaded with brilliant ideas. All you have to pay for is $4.95 shipping. Get it here:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/billsbook/
Happy Birthday, Telly Monster!
Perry
Secret Underground Techniques Busted – 27.65% CTR Available with Just Testing
I keep seeing ads for ‘magical ad writing’ systems where the screenshot includes a few keywords with 12-14% CTRs.
Sounds great?
Until you see the keywords only have 8-15 clicks, and none of the screenshots on the entire sales page have over 20 clicks.
Let’s put those ultra-secret-underground systems in comparison with an actual campaign that went through just good ad copy testing techniques.
There was nothing magical about our techniques; anyone can do it.
Below is a screenshot of one of our campaigns (not even the account, just a single campaign) that has 209,052 clicks with a 10.54% CTR (and yes, conversion rates matter, but we’re just talking CTR right now).
When I created this campaign’s screenshot, I filtered out a lot of keywords – every one that didn’t have at least 1000 clicks.
Our highest CTR keyword is 100%, but our highest CTR keyword with at least 1000 clicks is 27.65% and it has 5,531 clicks.
We have another keyword with 27,657 clicks and a 17.63% CTR. None of these keywords are brand terms. They are all generic searches.
Those are just some keywords. What about the ad CTRs?
Here’s a screenshot of just one ad group’s ad copy:
As you can see, the ad CTRs are pretty decent. However, we also have deleted ads that have another 526 clicks (and average of 11.91% CTR).
They are deleted because those ads failed in our tests. Not every ad we write is a winner; hence why testing is so important.
You will never write the winning ad for every ad group on the first try.
Never.
There are so many psychological factors going through the searcher’s mind that make them click or not click that you can never know exactly what will be the best CTR (or best conversion rate) ad copy if you only write one ad.
Next Time You See Unbelievable Promises….
Next time you see some mystical, one-page-wonder, ad copy writing system just do me one favor: When you look at the screenshots – examine how many clicks are included.
Then look at this screenshot.
If their numbers aren’t higher – don’t use it. It doesn’t take some ultra-underground-no-one-knows-magical-amazing-secret-unknown-never-revealed-until-now-technique-that-only-the-experts-use to write good ads that have high CTRs and high conversion rates.
All it takes to get fantastic CTRs is solid testing methodology and good ad writing techniques.
If you want to learn how to do this yourself, just head over to Certified Knowledge, we’ll show you all of our ad copy writing tips.
| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
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Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
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Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory.
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How to Sell Books on Amazon.com
Well, today’s post is a little different.
Turns out one of my favorite authors (Susan Schenck – author of The Live Food Factor) was self published.
And she sold 15,000+ books on Amazon.com using a few very simple techniques.
I had originally asked to do this interview mostly because I was so interested in the topic of her book (it’s about Live Foods) that I wanted to help her spread the word, and I thought it would be valuable for my followers to hear more about the process of researching and writing a book.
And I had thought “Oh, I’m such a great marketer, and she’s probably one of those authors who doesn’t know what she’s doing, let me lend a hand”
Little did I know it was ME who would get the education.
Because we got into a pretty interesting marketing discussion, and I learned she actually lives off her book profits (not something you hear too often… of course she does live in Ecuador)
The audio connection was funky on this one. We managed to edit out most of the skips, but apparently Skype in Ecuador is another thing entirely. You’ll still be able to make out everything she said if you listen closely though…
And if you’re interested in selling thousands of copies of YOUR book on Amazon, I’d highly recommend you do 
Enjoy!
Dr. G
PS – The other thing about this interview which is VERY interesting, is that after publishing and promoting 15,000+ copies of her book, her further scientific research caused her to reverse her position about a key piece of advice within it. Gotta respect someone so devoted to finding and sharing the truth that they’re willing to admit when they were wrong. Kind of wish the internet gurus would do that, don’t you?
Clearing the Air: Google Does Not Turn on Auto Bidding
There was a blog post that circulated around this week about the default bids for the content network changing and Google not letting anyone know about it.
It’s not true. Nothing has changed.
While I don’t think the author meant to imply that Google turned on auto-bidding, that was the interpretation of the 40+ requests for clarification I received about the post.
If you use conversion optimizer or auto-bidding as your campaign bidding strategies, then Google sets bids based around those targets.
If you use enhanced CPC or default bidding then Google uses a hierarchy for choosing the starting bid (and then bid modifiers such as enhanced CPC, demographic, ad scheduling, etc are applied after the default is chosen).
Google looks for the most specific bid, and uses that one if possible, if it doesn’t exist – then they move down the chain:
- Placements
- Audience
- Ad group placement bid (only older accts might see this)
- Campaign placement bid (only older accts might see this)
- Ad group display network bid
- Campaign content bid (only older accts might see this)
- Auto
- Default bid
The ‘Auto’ that’s used is not auto-bidding. Google does an average of all the keyword CPCs in that ad group.
If you don’t have keyword level bids, then they use the default bid for the ad group.
So the ‘auto’ is an old naming convention that Google used for this scenario well before auto-bidding was even a feature.
Just to make sure this wasn’t new; I looked at my first AdWords Seminar for Success presentation from October of 2006, and the notes from the presentation are the same as today (except audiences didn’t exist then).
You cannot have keyword level bids on the content network. As the content network is based around themes – not keywords – there’s no bid at that level.
The real takeaway: Set bids at the most granular level. Placements or audiences if you have them; and then always place a display network bid at the ad group level.
As a side note: I reinstalled some software yesterday, and the software published a ‘thank you page’ as a blog post so it went out in the RSS feed. Don’t worry – you will not receive any notifications about the seminars unless you opt-in to receiving them.
| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
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Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
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Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory.
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Related posts:
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| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
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Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
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Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory.
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- eWhisper.net becomes bg Theory.com – And the Big News – Brad Launches a new company to provide Marketing Education to Businesses There have been many changes over the past few months,...
Introducing Certified Knowledge: PPC Tools, Training, & Community
Over the past couple of months, I’ve made very few blog posts and few speaking appearances – but my time has not been idle. I’ve been completely consumed by a new project we’ve just officially launched to everyone called Certified Knowledge.
Certified Knowledge is an on-demand, unlimited access PPC toolset & learning environment.
Over the past 11 years of working with PPC products, I’ve developed efficient ways of working with PPC; and my own Excel sheets, pivot tables, macros, and workflows to make my work go faster while ensuring the accounts still lead to traffic and conversions.
Certified Knowledge is the cumulation of what I’ve learned over the years that has been translated to an on-demand, use at your own leisure, web based system.
I’ve created more than 70 training modules that take up more than 760MB of server space that will help you learn more about AdWords, take advantage of its features, and show how I’ve used AdWords to maximize results over the years.
My dev team has also built a great toolset that should speed up anyone’s workflow.
Over the past six months, I’ve only been using our toolset, AdWords Editor, Microsoft adCenter Desktop, and freely available tools to manage accounts. By forcing myself to use our own tools, they have gotten to the point that most of your day-to-day activities can be accomplished via the tools. We are currently tweaking them and adding new features to our existing tools, and new tools to the system.
Currently, the most popular tools is the Quality Score Tool. By uploading a simple ad group report, we run the data through some algorithms and report back to you exactly where you should start working on your quality scores with some other bits of information. Of course, there are also videos instructing you exactly how to work with quality score.
Right now we have eight tools (although the Report Analyzer is so flexible, it could easily be described as being more than a dozen tools) in the system, and plan to continue expanding the set.
There is also a forum system where users can share information, ask questions, and network.
I find that those who spend anywhere from $500 to $50,000 or even up to $75,00 per month are a forgotten group of advertisers. They can’t afford the high end bid management systems. They often don’t have an AdWords rep; and often don’t have a great place to turn for choosing a toolset or learning more about AdWords. It’s this inequity we’re trying to address.
We do have high spenders using high end bid management systems who are members just watching the videos. We have others who are agencies that are just using the tools. The benefits will differ based upon your situation, but I think the mid-tier of advertisers have been left behind by everyone; and I want to fix that while supporting these other groups. This mid-tier spending groups also makes up the majority of our AdWords Seminar (officially Google supported events) attendees – so we have a lot of experience working with and supporting this group of advertisers.
Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows that I’m not salesy nor boisterous. I prefer to present information and then let the smart readers make up their own mind about a product. So I won’t make superficial claims about the product; instead I have built a very transparent site that shows you exactly what you can find inside.
If you are wondering if this product is worth your time or energy, I encourage you to start by reading the FAQ page.
Here’s where you can learn more about the product:
If you’d like a sneak peak of some videos, you can see that as well:
- Identifying quality score problems (a good watch if you don’t want to use our QS tool. Our tool does most of this for you)
- Long tail keyword strategies
- Creating local ads
I hope to see you inside Certified Knowledge.
| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
|
Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
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Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory.
|
Related posts:
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“When will Congress fix the economy?”
In London last week, I was talking to a hotel events manager. He said, “Normally August and September are a tad slow around here. But we’ve been booked solid for almost 2 months now, and I don’t know why!”
Our own sales here at Perry & company started picking up noticeably in mid-August. The US Commerce Department reported that home construction jumped 10.5% in August. My take: things are in fact headed in an upward direction.
Meanwhile with mid-term elections happening in Congress, all the politicians are trying to convince Americans that, if elected, they will solve our problems. The polls indicate that very few people believe them.
NOR SHOULD THEY.
Governments can make everybody on the playground play nice, but they’re never going to fix the economy. Why? Because governments don’t create anything. They can only give to you what they’ve taken from someone else.
–> My personal take on the recession and the economy and blah blah blah:
The #1 thing that’s going to pull us out of this is, quite frankly, the Internet. Not the thing itself, but the fact that you can find any kind of expertise or solution you can think of 24/7/365. What’s going to dig us out of the recession is the fact that it harnesses the creativity and resources of a billion people.
Case in point: If you need a piece of software written, you can get it done in Bulgaria or the Philippines in 1 week and it’ll only cost you $500.
The digital economy is so fluid, so resilient, with so many opportunities for modern alchemists, that whatever the big banks and politicians do is pretty insignificant. The Internet has no borders. It is bigger and more pervasive than any government or any policy.
But you can’t enjoy of this unless you have a sales engine in place. One that transports customers from casual interest to purchase – and does a BETTER job of selling them than almost everyone else in your space.
When you have a sales machine, all the opportunities in the world magically open up to you.
When you lack a sales machine, go to the back of the line and wait for your government check.
I am heart attack serious about equipping my students with this most important of all things – a killer sales engine. I can help you own one of those.
Next Tuesday at 2pm – 1 week from now – it’s “Gentlemen, start your engines.” If you have a functional online business, we’re going to fix it, change it around, look at every detail of your marketing plan & sales funnel. By mid-December you’ll be rolling out a glistening new, brushed up, totally brainstormed, kick-ass sales machine.
By application only. Register at http://www.bobsledrun.com/
Perry Marshall
Do visitors think your site is secure? Quick guide to testing SSLs
SSL errors are fairly common to see on the web; however, many site owners don’t catch their errors because they generally see their site in only a single browser.
Even large companies sometimes have SSL issues:
The reason it is so important to test your SSL is not just security (which is important) but also website conversions.
If you see an error message like the above, or worse yet – one of the errors that actually stops you from loading the page (like below); you will lose a lot of traffic and conversions very quickly.
The difficult part of testing your SSLs is that Chrome, IE, and Firefox have different ways they check SSLs and determine if they should show the ‘lock’ icon in or an unlocked icon in the browser decide to interrupt the browsing process with a huge error warning that doesn’t let you get to the page.
It is possible for one browser to stop you and ask you if you even want to go forward and another browser show the page as completely secure.
Testing your SSL in each browser
The easiest browser to start testing in is Internet Explorer. IE is much more consistent than the other browsers in how it renders the lock icon. Rarely in IE will you see a site secure one moment and insecure the next. Usually if your site is ‘locked’ in IE; unless something happens – it will stay that way.
The reason IE is so much easier to check is that IE is a bit more forgiving (or maybe just much better at checking) for intermediate SSLs and identify verification.
Firefox is the least forgiving of SSL installations. Firefox checks intermediate certificates, verification of ownership, etc – and if something isn’t right – then Firefox may show a big error to the searcher. However, once you get your SSL working correctly in Firefox, Firefox is as consistent as IE in rendering lock icons. Therefore, Firefox is the second browser I check items in.
Chrome is the most annoying browser to check. Your site can be secure one minute in Chrome, not the next, and secure again after that. If you are a GMail user – pay attention to the lock icon in GMail. You will notice that even if you access GMail (or G Apps) via https that the icon will fluctuate between sessions from secure to insecure to the new skull and crossbones. Chrome is also the most likely browser to suddenly decide a page is insecure. This might happen in the middle of a browsing session when you are on a page one minute, click around a site, come back to a page and suddenly Chrome displays a huge warning site that the site is insecure or (or some other message such as malware), even when there isn’t anything wrong. Because of how maddening Chrome can be; this is the last browser I generally check for compatibility.
How do you check a site for insecure items?
If you see issues with your site, there are a few steps to take:
View the source code. Look for images, CSS files, or scripts that are being called by http instead of https. This is the number one reason why pages are not secure. Change the source to https.
If you are using sharing icons on the page, those icons must be called from a secure location as well. You might have pages you need to remove these icons from (and your shopping cart pages or secure forms don’t really need tweet buttons on them anyway – put them on the thank you page).
If you can’t find anything wrong, use a plug-in like HTTPFox. This Firefox plug-in will show you all of the HTTP requests being made by a page. Look for the HTTP ones as those are causing the errors.
Another easy tool to use is the ‘inspect element’ one in Chrome. In Chrome, right click on a page and choose ‘inspect element’. This will bring up a lot of stats and features to examine a site.
The new chrome warning in a browser is a skull and crossbones. This type of warning is more visible than a simple unlocked icon. Consumers are increasingly becoming aware of security issues (everyone has a friend who has had their Twitter or Facebook account hacked); ensuing your SSLs work, and all of the browsers display locked icons will be a necessity to maintaining and increasing conversion rates.
| Read Brad's Newest Book: Advanced Google AdWords | |
|
Advanced Google AdWords will provide deep insight into AdWords functionality and advanced features, explaining how they work and providing tips, tactics, and hands-on tutorials that readers can immediately use on their own PPC campaigns. |
| Certified Knowledge: Online AdWords Training, Tools, and Community | |
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Certified Knowledge is an online tools, training, and community site brought to you by Brad Geddes & bg Theory.
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Related posts:
- What Does the Browser Say About Your Site? You should always be aware of what your sites look...
- AdWords Retiring Google Mobile Business Pages – Quick Mobile Site Creation Guide Search Engine Land recently reported that Google was removing their...
- Fixing Chrome’s SSL / HTTPS Errors Google’s Chrome browser has issues when accessing HTTPS (SSL) sites...
