Adwords-Help!!

[Charli]

The grand opening of my online empire :D is imminent LOL
I am currently sitting here with my husband, and I just read the post below from the 'is online marketing enough?' thread here on UKBF.
OK, We're REALLY worried now! I just quoted the post to my husband, and he said 'um, you'd better ask what this is all about!'
We're planning on using adwords, but neither of us have any idea that we'd need analytics software, please can someone help us out here?!!

Here's the quote:

'If you're planning on advertising with AdWords then make sure you have an expert install analytics software on your website, track conversions, and use your conversion data to optimise your advertising.

You can get all the traffic you want, but only the traffic that actually generates conversions (sales / enquiries / downloads etc.) is of any value to you.

If you don't do this then you can blow tens of thousands of pounds with very little reward.

We provides these services at adstorm.co.uk'

Thank you
Charli :|

[John_Mac]

Its true that you need to track which keywords are converting, but the part about getting an expert to install software on your website to do this is just a sales pitch.

Google AdWords provides its own conversion tracking tools. Click on the 'Conversion Tracking' link in your AdWords account interface and follow the links. You will need to insert a code snippet on one page of your site (the 'conversion' page, usually your 'Thank You' page after a user has purchased). If you are unable to do this yourselves you will need to ask your web designer to do it for you, but its not rocket surgery.

[Online Trader]

Charli.

All of this can be done for FREE if you go to your Adwords account and read all of the information there regarding analytics and conversion tracking, it is simple to install on your site and will take only a few minutes, adstorm are just trying to sell a service.

[Wiggy]

As you are probably getting from the previous posts, good conversion tracking software is essential. I pay for mine but I started using it at a time when I had a 4-figure weekly bill from Google and the cost of the software was negligible.
IMHO, the Google Analytics package is OK but there are better available. If you are starting small, I would recommend using it until you get to a point where saving 5-10% of your advertising costs is money worth working for. At that point, shop around for something better. For what it's worth, I also think no "Adwords professional" will manage a campaign as well as you will with good tools. . .

Good Luck!

[Charli]

Ahhhh phew! Thank you all for your replies, now that's why I joined this forum
Charli :)

[Chris Ashdown]

With Adwords you need to have a fixed budget and stay with it

The easiest way is to start with a fixed Pay Per Click rate of say £0.15 per click and a daily total of say £10, this gives you a monthly spend of 31x £10

If this is to big then half he daily total

The aim is to get on the middle of page 1 of the results for your keyword, the top spot will be paying much more PPC than your £0.10 and getting man more hits but you will still get good hits at a good return. You need to adjust the PPC to get to this position, adwords halp shows where you are

Once you have done a couple of weeks you can adjust both rates either way

Keywords need to specific to make it pay, if for instance you were a wool shop selling to knitters, then you could use the keyword "WOOL" but youe PPC would be getting hits from people looking for wool jumpers, wool fleece, wool insulation, wool gloves you get the message

Your keywords would probably be better naming just the wool manufacturers names

[Cleveregg]

Hi,

We started out with no advertising and got some work through contacts.

We then decided that we 'throw' some money into Google Adwords and see what happened. Since then 70% of our work comes from companies that have found us via Adwords.
It is something we monitor very closely and we need some professional help with it, but even without this professional help we're getting business.

Best of luck

Cleveregg

[Wiggy]

With Adwords you need to have a fixed budget and stay with it


I have a very different take on this. If you track your conversions then you can tell exactly how much each new customer is worth. If you sell Porsches, you can probably pay £5000 for each new [buying] customer. If you sell one-off items then you need a cost/new customer that is less than the markup on an average order. If you sell consumables like me, the math is slightly more complicated as you don't need to make any profit on the first order if you are sure that your product and service will bring them back again and again. . .I run my campaigns open-ended with no spend limits but I prune out any keywords that do not convert and only pay for the ones that turn into orders. This means that the ratio of paid for clicks to business generated is profitable and the more the merrier. So in other words, don't limit your spend [unless you can't handle the extra business] instead keep your campaign lean, use only exact and phrase match, avoid content sites, use hundreds of negative keywords [example below] and kill off any expensive keywords that do not turn into sales.


Keywords need to specific to make it pay, if for instance you were a wool shop selling to knitters, then you could use the keyword "WOOL" but youe PPC would be getting hits from people looking for wool jumpers, wool fleece, wool insulation, wool gloves you get the message

Your keywords would probably be better naming just the wool manufacturers names

Like Chris says here exact is good, think; "wool for knitting uk" as a phrase match keyword, it won't get many clicks [won't cost much] but many of the clickers will be looking to buy.
Here is also where you could make good use of negative keywords. If you use the keyword "wool" you can use the negative keywords, "steel", "jumper", "insulation" etc. Then people searching for "steel wool" will not even see your adverts. This has two big plusses for you. The obvious one is that they can't accidentally click on your ad, costing you. The less obvious one is that they can not add to your impression count. Keeping this low raises your CTR and gives you better position.

Good grief, I'm gabby. . .sorry.

Summary,
1. Get conversion tracking
2. Ditch expensive non-converting keywords
3. Don't use broad match or content sites
4. Use negative keywords

Enough to get started. . .

[SteveGibson]

As others have said, install google analytics and use its conversion tracking.

Adwords is the best way to test an e-commerce website. It'll give you highly targetted traffic and, with the tracking, you can measure your ROI.

That'll give you a baseline for where you are and, assuming you've done a good job of setting up the campaign, you'll know one of two things:

(1) Your site is doing a good job of converting the traffic and you can can then work on improving the site via

(a) split-testing of web pages

And

(b) improving your PPC with split testing and keyword/bid refining

And

(c) finding other sources of traffic

(2) Your site isn't converting traffic well and you have to go back to the drawing board.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[deviltronics]

Wiggy, good advice. Will get all my adwords sorted out like you said.

Currently spending more than I want with adwords, most of the keywords point towards the actual products, such as Racing Grannies, sales are very very poor.

Once I have some data I can look into, should be able to sort out the keywords.

There must be something wrong with the site. All prices are very competitive. Customers coming in looking at the product and hitting the back link. Not sure what is going wrong!

[Wiggy]

I know exactly what you mean about folks looking and not buying. But then that's why we pay pence/click not pounds. . .Sometimes it is obvious why they don't buy; I identified lots of clicks being made by people looking for salons instead of suppliers, so no good to me. . .Sometimes it is less obvious, I had to kill some keywords that generated huge numbers of visitors that never bought anything. I can only guess they were students doing projects. . .
I am also able to identify people who don't buy on their 1st click but come back later by bookmark or by typing the URL directly. This allows me to still assign that sale to the correct keyword. . .Negative keywords should help get rid of a lot of dross. Adding "buy" or "online" to keyword phrases can help improve quality as well. If people searching for "racing grannies" are not buying, try "buy racing grannies online" as a phrase match. You won't get many clicks but at least they will be the right sort.

[Mark-UK]

Call to action phrases, buy, store, purchase, sale, cheap, stockist etc etc.

[deviltronics]

Thanks for that.

Currently using online, buy, cheap in keywords.

For each keyword I am also using broad, phrase and exact.

I think I need to let the adwords run for a little while and then start picking out keywords that are useless and adding negative keywords.

[Mark-UK]

Dynamic keyword insertion tool can be useful.

[deviltronics]

whats that?

Currently using Keyword Discovery, don't find it very clever!

[Wiggy]

Dynamic keyword insertion tool can be useful.
Good shout. We haven't really touched on the quality of the ad.
Google maintain that ads that have the keyword in the title and text of your ad work better. [often true but not always]

So, racing grannies= keyword

Ad that reads;
Buy Racing Grannies
Cheap Racing Grannies online
Next Day Del Great Customer Care
www.yoururl.com (http://www.yoururl.com)

Is a crude example of such an ad.

You use the keyword insertion tool thusly to achieve this;

Buy {KeyWord:gadget}
Cheap {KeyWord:gadget} online
Next Day Del Great Customer Care
www.yoururl.com (http://www.yoururl.com)

Make 3 different ads for each adgroup and monitor to see which one does best [sales not clicks] keep the best one.

[deviltronics]

Yes following that rule, but not using the tool. Currently reads:

Racing Grannies - £6.99
Racing Grannies - Speeding Madness
Same day dispatch - Fast Delivery!
www.Deviltronics.com/Racing_Grans (http://www.Deviltronics.com/Racing_Grans)

All follow the same suit.

Although this one doesn't have three ads, some of the others do. I'll add your example Wiggy to see how it gets on.

Basically I have followed these rules:

http://forums.seochat.com/google-adwords-more-39/32-useful-adwords-tips-for-intermediate-to-experienced-users-135029.html

[Words of Magic]

Google analytics is a very effective tool to use because it gives you xray vision into what customers are really doing on your website, i.e what those clicks are really buying you and what clicks turn into cash.

Correct use of google analytics can easily slash your click costs and reveal low hanging fruit your currently missing on your website.

Google analytics has a new interface, master that and you'll beable to improve your ROI.

Doing your maths and working out your value per visitor and then your maximum cost per click when buying relevant phases related to your business.


Your new campaign should have adgroups that focuses on different keyphrases that are highly targetted to the products you provide. The first thing you need to do is implement the google adwords free conversion tracking tool properly, so that your able to track sales conversions down to the individual keywords and keyphrases. The reason why this is important is because keywords and keyphrases which dont convert, we can delete them immediately save some where between 40% - 80% of costs.

Makesure all the adgroups in your new campaign will have tightly grouped related keywords that will allow you to have more pull on your ads, higher CTR, better control of our spending and more accurate tracking results. Each adgroup will have two ads rotating simultaneously, this is called split testing. The reason for this is, it easy to measure the performance with 2 ads, and ongoing testing helps to increase your CTR (clickthrough rate) over a period of time. If your CTR increases the lower your CPC (cost per click) of the keyphrases that have been brought.

When setting up the new campaign, I will keep all the keywords grouped together in tightly related groups and write specific ads for each of those keyword groupings.Not only does this help us to stay organized and better understand the flow of the campaigns, but its easy to visibly measure what is working and whats not.

Wishing you all the success in the world,