At 1% CTR you’re not even getting an invite!

Let’s compare the three;

• a High-Performing account that dominates every valuable keyword in the market- average 8-10% CTR on Search with 8-10% Conversion Rates.
• a pretty good account that has the basic optimisation techniques applied - average 3% CTR in Search with 3-4% Conversion Rates on average
• the typical campaign that Google will build for you if you don’t know any better. (And we see all too often merrily wasting clients’ money) - average 1% CTR on Search with no Conversion Tracking.

For the same keyword, here’s what happens:

The high performer is in ad position 1 almost every time. Not necessarily because it bids more per click, but because Google knows it’s the most relevant ad and gets the highest CTR. This has been proven over months of consistent performance.

It gets a higher CTR still because it’s the first ad AND is more likely to convert in to a sale because the site, product and price set the benchmark for clicks on subsequent ads.

Psychologically, Google told this searcher that you’re the authority for the keyword, which also increases conversion rates.

In addition, this advertiser uses the Display Network to position their brand during the research phase. The searcher is already aware of the brand, consciously or subconsciously and may have even previously visited the site via a Display ad.

Furthermore, because this campaign shows ads in top positions for every keyword in the market, searchers are likely to see ads multiple times before clicking, also dramatically increasing authority in the brand, CTR and conversion rates.

The optimised campaign achieves third ad position, the ad is relevant and compelling enough. CTR is still strong, which Google respects, but you’re a way off from catching the top spot without some hard work.

Though conversions are still good and profitable, many of these clicks are ‘validation’ clicks. The ad in number one spot is currently favourite and your site has to offer something compelling (better design, better site, better price, more familiar brand) to steal the sale.

You might also be surprised to learn that clicks here are not necessarily cheaper. In fact, because the CTR is lower, there’s a reasonable chance that they’ll cost more. Yes, more than position 1!

This brand is less familiar to the searcher as it is present for a smaller set of keywords. Visibility and frequency during the Search Funnel are lower, compromising authority and trust in the brand and ultimately conversion rates.

The basic campaign typically bids on far too many broad match keywords and has poor structure, often showing less relevant ads than competitors. This results in a low CTR, typically around 1% on Search, showing ads and wasting money on clicks that are completely irrelevant to the business or product or at best, failing to land the visitor on a relevant page, resulting in high bounce rates.

The low CTR demonstrates to Google that what you’re advertising isn’t relevant to the searchers – their customer, remember.

Google wants the most relevant results and you’re not providing them. So Google slowly drops your ad position or will charge you more for the click. If things don’t improve, you’ll find your ads showing less frequently and in increasingly lower positions.

The campaign also targets the Display Network, though unintentionally, failing to have a coherent Display strategy or make use of much more powerful banner ads. This typically delivers little or no value and often wastes budget.

The worst sin of all can usually be discovered lurking in this account – no conversion tracking. You’ve no idea what’s driving sales and enquiries or what’s wasting your budget, making optimisation and increasing ROI much more difficult.

Win, Just take part, or Waste Your Money?

The top campaign will keep on winning the business, the optimised campaign will continue to leave sales and enquiries on the table and the poor cousin is left out in the rain, no doubt deciding that this particular party was a waste of time and effort and won’t bother next time.

More cake for the rest of us!

Targeting Local Customers

If you’re a local business, a plumber, for example, searchers type; plumber birmingham or emergency plumber birmingham. They also type; emergency plumber or sometimes just plumber.

To target traffic effectively, create two AdWords campaigns;

• one for keywords that include place names (plumber birmingham etc), targeting a large area (searches with place names in qualify the traffic as relevant) and;
• the other using Exact match terms without a place (plumber, emergency plumber) – use location targeting for this campaign to target only the area you can service.

Each campaign will have a different CTR and conversion rate, but you’ll target a greater volume of traffic and generate more enquiries.

Targeting Multiple Countries

First build a campaign with great structure, keywords and ad copy and prove that it works well, delivering a strong CTR and conversion rates. Using the offline editor (much quicker) copy that campaign, target additional countries as necessary separately from the main campaign.

You may wish to target multiple countries with that second campaign initially, later fragmenting in to country-specific campaigns to improve the measurement of ROI from each location and what messages that audience responds to.

Take care with this method though, success will depend on your market, search volume and budget – don’t slice it too thin or you risk compromising quality score and missing out on opportunities.

Segmenting Customers by Location

Split-testing regions is an advanced technique and is often difficult to justify. However, in principle, you could have duplicate campaigns targeting different areas within a country; does your campaign and message perform better in the North or the South? How do the conversion rates, ad copy and landing pages compare?

High traffic volumes are required to justify such a strategy, but could reveal valuable insight in to your audience and reward you with a competitive advantage you may not have expected.

Maximising a Smaller Budget with Location Targeting

Minimise geography to maximise your budget.

We know that impression share and search funnels are critical for conversion rates for many campaigns.

With a limited budget, it is generally far better to have a 100% impression share in a smaller geographic area than a 50% impression share across the whole country. You can optimise as usual with all relevant keywords and ad copy, proving conversion rates.

Once proven, increasing geography and budget takes minutes and it’s usual to expect ROI to scale perfectly with this strategy, provided the budget accommodates the increase in search volume.

Getting Geeky with AdWords Location Targeting

Most advertisers don’t realise that targeting the UK on Google Search targets both users with a UK-specific IP address AND users globally searching using the Google.co.uk domain. That’s right – anyone outside of the UK will see your ads if the use Google.co.uk and you’ll pay for those clicks too, of course.

It is possible to use negative locations too. For example, targeting the UK and excluding England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales etc, will leave a target audience of overseas users searching using Google.co.uk.

Remember, using the AdWords offline editor, this campaign could be duplicated from another campaign in your account with different targeting, allowing you to effectively measure CPCs, CTRs, ad copy and ROI for this audience segment.

Again, depending on traffic volumes, you could segment the rest of the world in to smaller chunks if you need to measure the ROI from European or US-based Google.co.uk users, or even country by country if there’s enough search volume.

Divide and conquer!

So what is AdWords Quality score and what can you do to improve it?

Your keywords‘ quality score is equally as important as the maximum cost per click (CPC) when deciding where your ad will be ranked. Google decides your ad position using this multiplier – Quality Score x Max CPC.

5 Things you should know about the AdWords Quality Score

1. When you first upload a keyword, it will be given an average quality score for that keyword over Google’s networks
2. The single largest factor in the Quality Score Statistic is the historic Click Through Rate (CTR). This affects the Quality Score at all levels in an account (keyword, ad group, campaign and account). Therefore, a keyword’s individual quality score can be affected if the rest of your account is performing poorly (or well, of course).
3. The relevance of the Ad Text and Landing Page content to the keyword will improve Quality Score.
4. Landing page load time will affect Quality Score too – time to sort out that web host and remove those huge images that take ages to load!
5. If your keyword does not have enough traffic to reach a threshold (unhelpfully, Google doesn’t define this threshold), this can reduce the Quality Score.

5 Ways to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score

1. Use dynamic keyword insertion in your ads to make them as relevant as possible. Dynamic keyword insertion only works if your keyword has a quality score of greater than 3.
2. Group highly relevant keywords together to keep the traffic high for each Ad Group.
3. Where possible, make highly specific landing pages for your keywords.
4. Delete or pause poorly performing keywords, or move them to more relevant ad groups with more relevant ads, landing on more relevant landing pages.
5. Try adding phrase and / or broad match variations of exact match keywords you are bidding on to increase traffic volume.

Essentially, in the horizontal ad positions at the top of the search results, Google is now showing selected ads with a double-length headline, using Headline and Description Line 1. There’s a reasonable chance that this will work merely by adding a full-stop at the end of Description Line 1.

The first question we asked is this: “is this going to increase CTR“. Short answer, yes.

Some points to consider though:

1. It won’t work every time. And there’s no specific data that will show you how many times your ad showed in this format or didn’t. Kind of annoying.
2. Split-test the two versions of your ad, one with the full-stop and one without to see what the results are.
3. This only works in the top positions – it will make little difference to ads on the right hand side.
4. The CTR is better because the ads stand out as they’re different from those around them – it will be interesting to see how the CTR changes when everyone takes up this method. Maybe the standard ad will then get a higher CTR?
5. What’s this all about? We suspect that Google may well move to this model permanently in time – this format could be used to display 4 ads across the top rather than 3, which almost certainly means more revenue for Google and more clicks for advertisers.

The results from our short test:

Original ad without the full stop: 600 impressions, 12 clicks, 2.00% CTR.
Identical ad copy, just adding the full stop: 640 impressions, 24 clicks, 3.75%.

A win for the full-stop!

Summary

There seems little point in ignoring the opportunity, but test it against your best ad copy so far.

Understanding the Different Keyword Match Types

There are 3 main types of keywords that you can use in your Google AdWords campaign(s); Broad, phrase and exact matches.

Starting with the simplest, Exact matches only match Searches for that keyword EXACTLY. i.e. the exact match keyword, [blue jacket] will only show your ad if someone types in that precise search term in that order with no additional words. The ad won’t show for plurals, (blue jackets); longer searches, (cheap blue jacket); misspellings (blue jaket); or other Searches containing those words (jacket blue, mans blue jacket).

The safest of the match types, but also significantly restrict coverage of the search market.

Phrase matches will show ads where the Search contains the phrase in that order. The phrase can be preceded or succeeded by additional terms. e.g. the phrase match keyword “blue jacket” would match Searches for cheap blue jacket, mens blue jacket, blue jacket hire, london blue jacket hire.

However, as with Exact Matches, the phrase would NOT match plurals, misspellings or Searches using a different structure; blue formal jacket, blue leather jacket, jacket blue – to show ads for those terms, all of the variations would have to be included separately.

Broad matches will match any Search containing the words in the keyword; blue jacket, jacket blue, mens blue jacket, blue jacket hire.

Broad matches will also expand to match plurals and misspellings; blue jackets, blue jakets, blue jacets. With search frequency so low, obscure searches like these examples are unlikely to match Exact keywords even if you were to bid on them – Google only includes keywords in its index with a reasonable search volume.

Most dangerously, Broad keywords use a contextual matching algorithm, potentially expanding blue to navy or jacket to coat. Potentially then, your Broad match keywords matches Searches for blue overcoat, coat of blue paint, navy mens jackets, mens navy blue parker coats and even ladies jackets.

Care should be taken when using Broad match keywords. However, implemented correctly, Broad match keywords do represent a significant volume of traffic otherwise unavailable with Phrase and Exact matches alone.

Ad Split-Testing

CTR (Click Through Rate – the percentage of clicks on your ad versus the number of times it is displayed) is an important consideration in both traffic volume, Quality Score and ad positions.

One of the ways to achieve a good CTR (upwards of 3%), is to “Split-Test” ad copy.

Ad split-testing is a great way of finding out what your target audience is motivated by. For example, eCommerce stores might test; “Great value blue jackets”, “Wide range of blue jackets” and “Great quality blue jackets” to see which achieves the best CTR.

Ad split-testing never stops. After testing the first set of benefits, it is common to test different headlines or action calls in ad copy. What works best?

In stock now, free delivery OR Free next day delivery
Call now for free advice OR Call now for expert advice OR Call now for a friendly chat
Finest Blue Jackets OR Blue Jackets OR Blue Jacket Sale Now On

(And here’s a tip – you might think you know, but you’ll be surprised at the results).

Once you know which achieve the best CTR and what best motivates your audience, you can reinforce this selling point throughout your marketing strategy.

Conversion Tracking

CTR is an important statistic for both quality score and traffic volume, but the real value to an advertiser is Conversions. A Conversion might be a sale, an enquiry, a registration or a download – whatever is the objective of your campaign.

The tracking code is available in your AdWords account and can be implemented easily with little knowledge of HTML code.

The code is placed on a “goal page”; the page after the event you’re tracking occurs, commonly called a “thank you page”. This might be the page that says, “thanks for sending us a message”, “thanks for registering” or “thanks for your order”, but in all cases, you should only be able to reach this page by completing the Conversion action, or your stats will be completely unreliable.

Why do it? For a successful campaign, it is essential to know the Conversion Rate and most importantly the Cost Per Conversion for every keyword you bid on or every site on the Display Network that drives traffic to your site and for every landing page you might be using.

Armed with Conversion Rates for every keyword, it is far easier to measure the ROI for each of them and to increase spend, optimise or remove them entirely depending on their individual performance.

Without Conversion Tracking, you’re merely paying for traffic with little knowledge of which keywords Convert, and which just waste your budget.

Managing Bids

The maximum CPC (Cost Per Click) bid is a significant factor in the positions that your ads appear in the search results on Search Engines. Ideally, your ads should appear in the top half of the results on the first page (positions one to five).

Managing how much to bid involves analysis of the performance data in your account; what ad position did it achieve, how many Conversions and the Cost Per Conversion are important stats to consider.

You should also pay close attention to conversion rates achieved by ads in higher or lower positions. As a general rule (not ALWAYS true, be careful), ads in the top position convert better than ads lower down. Even though the CPC might be higher, the Conversion Rate is also higher, generally meaning that the overall Cost Per Conversion is lower in top positions than in those in lower positions.

Be especially careful with Broad match bids. The higher you bid, the harder Google will work to show your ad – and also how aggressively it will contextually match your keyword. If you’re not cautious with this, you could end up with some weird and wonderful Searches showing your ads that you really didn’t want to pay for!

It’s more common than you might expect. Luckily, tools in the AdWords account help to understand, measure and resolve the problem; budget.

Example A:

There are 5 keywords that get 1,000 searches a day, a 5% CTR at £1.00 per click (let’s keep the maths simple). This uses all of the £50 per day budget.

Also, for these keywords, we’re getting 90% impression share (ads are showing almost every time for the keyword set).

We want to increase traffic and generate more sales but we’re buying all the clicks we can, so what do we do?

Usual optimisation steps; split test ads to increase CTR, find more relevant keyword variations, increase bids to improve ad positions and CTRs.

The result? More traffic. Excellent.

But wait, conversion rates went DOWN! What happened?

Example B:

As example A, but improved ad copy gets a 10% CTR. Again, keeping the maths simple, the clicks still cost £1.00 and we still have a £50 per day budget. There are still 1,000 searches per day, so we’re using the budget much faster. In fact, we’re now doing so well on CTRs, we could be buying £100 worth of traffic per day.

Here’s what happens (at least sometimes); Search Funnels.

People don’t always buy, enquire or register from the first search or on the first click. Analysing your Search Funnel will reveal how many impressions, how many clicks and how much time it takes from the first ad impression (or first click) to the conversion. Pretty powerful stuff.

Now, let’s say your average conversion needs 3 ad impressions and two clicks to convert and this process takes two days, on average.

Because we increased CTR in Example B, the budget is now too low to show ads for every search. The impression share is now 50% rather than the 90% enjoyed in Example A.

Which means; the customer only has a 50% chance of seeing ad impression #2 and a further 50% chance again of seeing ad #3 to complete the average conversion path. That’s a 25% chance of completing the Search Funnel, in case you’re not paying attention.

Because there’s only 25% completing the impressions and clicks required to convert, the conversions drop.

Now here’s a difficult decision. Conversion costs went up and to fix it needs some guts; increase the budget. It sounds counter-intuitive. It sounds insane. But it’s necessary if you want to convert those clicks in to sales.

An alternative might be to reduce geographic coverage using location targeting for a short time to prove the theory. A higher impression share for a limited audience would also work, gradually increasing the budget and the geography together whilst maintaining high impression share.

The same result occurs if the keyword set is increased, or search volume naturally increases because it’s Christmas or Summer or some other reason.

If keyword increases are the cause, there’s a solution that requires less of a leap of faith; reduce the keyword set a little, gradually increasing the budget and the keyword set to prove it as you go.

Google is More than Google Search

An option in the settings for each campaign, it is important to understand the impact of selecting this option. Left at its default setting, ads will run on three networks,  Google search, Google search partners and the Display Network.

The Display network represents a very different strategy to Search, has different objectives and a significantly different structure and approach to Search. Google contextually matches your ads with content on forums, discussion boards, advice sites, news sites and much more.

Display can and does produce great results, but if you’re new to AdWords, turn it off for now and come back to it later. Otherwise, it should at least be targeted using a separate campaign with its own budget and performance metrics.

Targeting Local Customers

For businesses that target a local area, this function is extremely beneficial. Ideal for plumbers, plasterers, hairdressers and PC repairs, but there are many more. If you’re a plumber in London, this allows you to exclude searches on Google from locations outside of London, for example.

Combined with a separate keyword strategy of bidding only on search terms which include places your business can service, you’ll ensure that clicks are highly relevant and improve performance.

Using Highly Relevant Keywords

When selecting which keywords to use in your campaign, there is one simple rule to follow to ensure your traffic is relevant: only use keywords which are precisely what you provide in terms of products or services featured on your website.

For example, if you sell a range of hand knitted jumpers, there’s little point in bidding on “jumpers” – it represents far too many other products that you don’t sell. Better to qualify this as “hand knitted jumpers”, “knitted jumpers”, “woolly jumpers”, “ladies knitted jumpers”, which would be much more accurate and produce greater ROI.

Keywords which are not exactly what you provide are much less likely to convert into sales, leads or enquiries – you’ll most likely burn your budget with little to show for it.

Relevance is Critical

For best performance, organise your keywords in to tightly themed groups and show highly relevant ads. Google will respect your relevance and so will the audience. You’ll get a much higher CTR, higher ad positions, more clicks and more sales. Grouping terms together like this is the purpose of an Ad Group in your account – use it!

Using the jumpers example, you would create an ad group for all the “knitted jumper” keywords with a knitted jumper ad, a group for  the “woolly jumper” keywords  with woolly jumper ads and “ladies knitted jumpers” in a group with ladies’ knitted jumper ads.

Landing Page Selection

Selecting the most relevant page on your site is a great way of making the search process simpler, quicker and easier. If the search is “ladies knitted  jumper” land them on the ladies knitted  jumpers page. Google rewards your relevance with a better quality score and higher ad positions, your customer has a better experience and is more likely to convert in to an enquiry or a sale.

Read more of the basics at: AdWords Basics Part Two.

If you can’t measure the success of your campaign, how on earth can you make sure it’s effective?

Conversion Tracking is one of the most common points we have to explain to clients that are new to advertising online (and even some that aren’t). Simply implementing conversion tracking will provide invaluable data in your account, but there are more options you can use that you might not be aware of.

The most criminal point – the function comes free with your AdWords account, it just needs to be implemented.

What is a conversion?

If you’re new to advertising, we use the term, “conversion” to describe the objective of a campaign. This might be a phone call, or a sign up to a newsletter, a download of a guide like our one, use of a contact form, or for an eCommerce store and conversion would be a sale.

Why it is important

Once you have conversion tracking implemented correctly, you’ll see some additional columns pop up in your account; Conversions, Conversion Rate and Cost Per Conversion. This data is then available for the whole account, each campaign, each ad group and most importantly every single referring site from the Display Network and every single keyword in a Search Campaign.

You’ll be able to measure the cost of every conversion from every keyword in your account.

If you’re spending any amount of money on clicks or on SEO, this level of detailed analysis is essential.

How it works

Think of it as a simple process with an end goal; Click ad > browse site > conversion (fill in form, buy something or call) > “thank you” page.

The most important point here is that the goal or “thank you” page comes AFTER the conversion.
Only on this goal page, you add the conversion tracking code.

To generate the tracking code from your AdWords account, go to the Reports Tab, click “Conversion Tracking” and follow the prompts. You might need a friendly developer to add it in for you if you’re unsure.

eCommerce Options

If you operate an eCommerce store and you’re a little more technical, you should implement the value tracking too. With this method, not only can you track the number of conversions for every keyword and the average cost per conversion, you’ll also see the total and average value of the transactions. You’ll be able to directly measure the ROI from each and every keyword in your account and each and every referring site on the Display Network and optimise your account performance far more effectively.

You’ll most likely need a developer for this type of functionality. Full instructions are here.

Google adopted the Yahoo!-style predictive search a little while back. What it actually does is to help narrow the search market – less search terms means greater volume on the most popular searches. This also makes those search terms even more competitive, pushing up the CPCs and of course, Google’s revenue.

Showing dynamic results as you type or pick from the predicted searches is a little helpful to a user, but Google’s relevance engine still has to decide which result to rank where whether that’s paid or organic. It doesn’t look like that algorithm will change significantly.

Impact on Search Engine Optimisation

Mike Jones, our resident SEO guru says: “The impact of Google Instant on SEO campaigns has mixed views from the SEO community. Due to the added level of refinement that is offered to the searcher, the potential for any given search to return the same set of results is much lower – particularly as Instant takes into account browsing history.

The Death of the Long Tail

On the one hand it means the volume of “long tail keywords” might decrease because there’s more volume in the popular terms. Advertisers will have to work harder to compete on a smaller number of more popular terms with more traffic – making ad copy and CTR even more important to a successful campaign. On the other hand, searchers needing a more specific result that isn’t satisfied by Google’s prediction type longer search terms. It could be argued that they’re then even more valuable searches. That’s certainly the case right now – we regularly see far greater conversion rates and therefore lower costs with longer tail terms.

Questions Answered

A couple of questions we’ve been asked;

1. How does Google count AdWords impressions with Instant results? Google only counts an impression if an ad is shown for 3 seconds or more, which excludes the vast majority of those that show briefly as you type. You won’t suddenly see a huge increase in impressions in your AdWords account.

2. Where did the Wonder Wheel go? If you disable Instant, you’ll see Wonder Wheel right where it was before.

Having changed the broad match algorithm a number of times in recent years, we’ve always recommended caution when bidding on broad matches, instead preferring phrase and exact match keywords with a smaller number of broads which need careful, regular management to succeed.

Recently, Google rolled out the “broad match modifier” to tighten up the way in which it matches broad keywords.

What is the broad match modifier?

First, you need to understand that a standard broad match also includes “expanded matching”. For example, the word ‘shoe’ in your keyword could also expand to slipper, boot, stiletto, brogue, trainers and the word ‘ladies’ might also match girls, womens, divas. Multiply those variations out and you’ll get a huge range of variations your broad keyword could match – some relevant, some irrelevant.

With that in mind, ideally you should be bidding on all of those relevant variations anyway and hopefully, Google will match the right search with the right keyword (it won’t always).

It is easy to see how the expanded match could cause problems in the accuracy of your targeting. The broad match modifier seems to be an attempt to use the broad match algorithm without expanded match, which is great news.

How to use the broad match modifier

To use it, you’ll just need a ‘+’ in front of each specific word in your keyword. e.g. +ladies + shoes. Google will match typos, plurals and other variations; ladys shoes, ladies shoe, shoes for ladies, shoe lady etc, but will no longer match womens and girls or boots and slippers as it would with the expanded match.

It is also possible, therefore, to modify specific words in your keyword, but not others if you wish; e.g. ladies +shoes uses expandedmatch on ‘ladies’, but not on ‘shoes’.

As ever, try it with care, test it and measure it.

Would we advocate changing all broads to use the broad match modifier? It depends on your market, your product, your budget, your strategy and how advanced your campaign is already. Best to discuss that with one of our analysts.