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Callum
Bridgeford is director at online health and wellness business Energise
For Life. Typical of many online retailers, Google AdWords has become
the cornerstone of the business' advertising initiative. With a
professional background in consultancy and keenly honed online marketing
skills, Callum was better prepared than most when the Google AdWords
phenomena hit the web earlier this decade. Now, four years on and with
conversion rates via AdWords more than double the national average,
Callum is ready to turn responsibility over to a third party Pay Per
Click consultancy.
"Google
AdWords can be dangerous in its simplicity," says Callum. "While setting
up a campaign may take less than half an hour, even the most
conservative budget can be wasted if these campaigns are not
consistently monitored and revised. Typically these days, we have
hundreds of campaigns running at the same time and all of them demand
constant care and attention. It's an activity that has grown with our
business and we need to be confident that it continues to receive
adequate care and attention as we upscale and develop." Mindful of
AdWords' role in building the Energise business into one of the UK's
most successful health retailers, Callum is now outsourcing Pay Per
Click requirement as part of the business' next phase of development.
The
Energise For Life example is typical: SME's are adopting the tactic
early in-house then outsourcing once it's helped them generate market
share and establish their business. Routinely, the switch comes as
understanding of AdWords (and the hidden complexities within) deepens.
Driving quality prospects to a site requires much more intensive
management than building quantity: As AdWords become more expensive
and the tools that support the campaigns become more difficult to
administer, outsourcing starts to look like the natural next step for
many AdWords advocates.
One of
the main concerns for businesses as they seek to outsourse campaigns is
charging. Clearly classic commission based fee structures can never work
within the AdWords principle of quality rather than quantity.
Consequenly most management services these days have adopted very simple
and transparent billing. When shopping around, it's not uncommon to find
consultancy and management fees set at between £500- £1000 per month
with additional click through costs passed on directly to the client.
And while the tech complexities of the pay-per-click business look more
bamboozling every day the propositions from the pay-per-click specilists
are actually looking more simple. Essentially, if you're in the habit of
spending anything from £1000 per month on AdWords any qualified PPC
consultant should be able to review your activity, pinpoint weak spots
quickly and implement lead generation boosting campaign improvements
within days.
Think your business should
be considering the Pay Per Click options available?
Click here
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Getting started with AdWords |
The key to success with
AdWords is to select highly specified key words for campaigns that direct
people to equally specific product or service areas of your web site. Start by
making some common sense decisions about the key words you are going to use to
drive people to your offers, then make sure that click throughs point prospects
directly to specific product pages. Common errors at this stage are to think
too generically about the keywords you pick. As a major player in the health
and wellbeing market, Callum at Energise knows that choosing a key word like "detox"
will drive hundreds of new visits to his site, but these visits are more likely
to come from random surfers than customers with real buying intent. Conversely,
many AdWords users take great care to construct highly granular campaigns only
to find they fall flat because interested prospects are pointed simply to the
home pages of a website rather then carefully selected product or "landing"
pages" specific to the campaign."
Typically, AdWord users
should be working towards achieving click through rates of about five percent (ie:
For every 100 people presented with the opportunity to click through to your
site, five of them do). But getting your offer in front of the right people is
only half the story. The real challenge is to make sure the information you
present them with motivates them to purchase.
Constantly researching effectiveness and modifying campaigns is what takes time
and effort. Typically Callum's Energise for Life business will launch up to 100
campaigns at one time and expect about 20 percent of them to really work well.
By carefully tracking traffic and identifying the campaigns that are working
quickly, funds can be speedily redeployed to support the best campaigns that
are delivering the most traffic. One good idea is to carry out split testing,
where you run two campaigns for the same product at once, watching closely to
see which set of vocabulary is working best to drive surfers to the product you
want them to buy.
Callum estimates that a good
AdWords campaign should cost approximately five percent of a product's selling
price (ie: if a product costs £80 then an expenditure of about £4 per product
should be anticipated when constructing the campaign). Moreover the system acts
as an effective barometer for interest in the products and services you have on
offer. In many cases when conversion rates remain low after a number of
campaigns, a business may even choose to stop stocking the product altogether.
But what about the other
search engines? Yahoo is currently revamping its keyword advertising model and
MSN Search is aggressively pushing new advertising options out to the market.
So shouldn't we be touting our keyword business about all the major players for
the the best deal? Not according to the Pay Per Click experts: With no sign of
Google's mighty 85% stranglehold on the UK search market loosening, researching
the options and offers with the search marketing wannabees isn't likely to be a
viable option for many of us anytime soon.
Think your business should
be considering the Pay Per Click options available?
Click here
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Thinking of taking your first steps in search marketing?
Most AdWords novices make three fundamental errors when
they map out their first campaigns. Here are the big
pitfalls to avoid.
 Keyword
selection: Keywords chosen are frequently too broad.
This can generate huge amounts of traffic that deliver
disappointing conversion rates at high cost.
Google
Search vs. Google Content Network: amateur enthusiasts
rarely understand the difference between Google Search and
the Google Content Network: Google Search is the classic
search engine that most us use every day. Google Content
Network is the name for the third party content that Google
supplies to other companies (like the Telegraph newspaper,
for instance). Since the AdWords account management interface is defaulted to
ensure your campaigns appear on both, many people end up
wasting hard earned marketing budget by generating click
throughs via third party online vehicles that are unlikely to
deliver quality prospects.
Matching
techniques: Google's set up tools offer three options
for matching your keywords with search content: broad,
phrase and exact. Most campaigns are set up with broad
match. This gives Google licence to show the ad when they
think your keyword matches the search criteria entered by
a surfer. For instance, an ad by a travel company offering
holidays on a cruise ship may be considered an appropriate
match to a
search criteria like "Tom Cruise". It's only by
understanding the nuances between matching options and being
able to inject refinements like "negative keywords", that AdWords campaigns can successfully filter out these
errors.
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