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!

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.

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.

In recent months, Google has been adding new functions to the Google AdWords system. In particular, in many ads, you might have seen “ad extensions” appearing.

Ad Extensions refers to a number of ways in which you can add more to your AdWords ad. Some of these extensions are available now in your account and others are in beta, being tested by a limited number of advertisers.

The one you might be eligible for already is called “Site Links”.

Google AdWords ad with Site Links

The site links option allows you to show additional deep links in to your site to help the searcher find exactly what they are looking for. For example, you might want to show “special offers” or “clearance stock” or a subset of information or products on your site, for example – but you can show whatever you feel helps the searcher.

Firstly, the searcher gets to go straight to the correct page which improves the visitor experience.

Secondly, your ad will be much more prominent which increases CTR and in time should lower your cost per click.

How to add site links to your Google ads

If your account qualifies for it, the option is available in the campaign settings tab:

1. List up to ten links within your site, starting with the highest priority first.
2. Google will use up to four of the links in your ads in addition to the existing Display URL.

What you should be aware of

1. Site links will only show where your ad provides the “best answer”. A little cryptic, but in our experience, this essentially means you have a MUCH higher CTR than everyone else bidding on that keyword. Typically, this is going work well if you bid on your own brand, for example.
2. Site links will also only be shown in ads in top position with a high quality score.
3. The site links option is set at campaign level, so you can’t set different site links for each ad, or for ads in a particular ad group.
   

There is no data on whether a particular ad displayed site links or not – you’ll have to just check it online. It will therefore be difficult to measure any improvement in performance once you added this function. However, we’d still recommend implementing it – it sure can’t do any harm to your CTR.

Ask a Google AdWords Professional about this

On the one hand, searchers already want to buy from you and might well find you in organic links where the clicks are free, so why pay for the click?

On the other, there may be competitors bidding on your brand and stealing your profit from right under your nose if you don’t.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but there some factors you may want to consider;

Google knows that this is your domain name and/or your brand, so it’s very easy for you to achieve top paid position.

Clicks on your own brand keywords tend to cost pennies – we’ve often seen clicks at £0.05 for position one.

CTR, as critical as ever, is typically awesome – 25-50% CTR, which won’t do your overall campaign CTR any harm at all.

In one of our most advanced campaigns, our client makes over 100 sales every month on one single competitor keyword for less than £0.20 a click.

Whether you like the ethics or not, there’s profit waiting on the table.

Learn more advanced techniques in Google AdWords Masterclasses.

We spotted this neat video which demonstrates the value of CTR and explains in simple terms how Google ranks your ads amongst competitors’ ads.

Learn more about quality score here.

Get one-on-one coaching from an expert.

We’ve had a few clients just recently whose ads stopped showing on Google pretty much overnight, costing hundreds of pounds on lost revenue every single day. Why?

Quality Score has reared its head again. Google is seeking the very best experience for its customer – not only now will Google place your ads in higher positions and charge you less per click for being relevant, but is now also aggressively excluding ads for which landing pages and sites are not relevant enough.

This won’t happen to everyone at once though. You’re waiting for the Google bot to come along to your site, make the analysis and then you’ll discover if you’re a victor, or a victim.

To overcome this, your site must satisfy Google’s quality score criteria. Easier said than done, as Google doesn’t publish the precise method it uses to calculate the quality score. However, there are a few clear areas that you can address to improve this;

• Relevance, relevance, relevance.
• Wherever possible, make sure that the keyword that you’re bidding on is included in the ad(s) in your ad group.
• The quality score includes an element of your historic Click Through Rate (CTR) for each individual keyword, each ad group and each campaign throughout your account.
• More importantly, Google is now even more focused on landing page quality, it’s relevance to the subject matter, how many times the keyword is mentioned, the quantity of text on the page, the quantity of pages and text on the site itself which are relevant to the keywords.
• Another element to consider is that Google really wants UNIQUE content, so there’s not so much value in just copying text from other sites – you need to create your own. It’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise to the customer.

To address this easily, consider increasing the amount of content on your landing pages, adding a blog, FAQ section(s) or a forum to your site.

This won’t be an overnight fix – you’ll still need the Google bot to re-evaluate your site when it finally arrives. And again, unfortunately, there’s no fixed frequency as to when this will happen.

Google is a content monster. And it’s hungry!

Learn more about AdWords Quality Score

Learn More about Content

Get your Google AdWords Campaign Reviewed free

Get the Google AdWords Success Guide

To effectively lower your cost-per-click (CPC), and therefore your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or cost per sale, you need to first appreciate Google’s perspective. If you understand what motivates Google, you’ll understand better how to manipulate the system to your advantage:

1. Obvious, perhaps, but Google is a SEARCH engine. Its job is to make sure that the user finds the most relevant results, first time, every time. Google leads the search market by a very wide margin because it focuses so hard on this principle. If users consistently see results irrelevant to their search, there’s a strong possibility that they’ll switch to another search engine that works better. That’s not what Google wants.

2. Whether results on Google are natural listings or paid ads, this same principle applies. Google wants your ads to be relevant to the keyword on which you are bidding. The ads that are most relevant WILL appear in the higher positions because that’s what motivates Google. Not how much it earns for each click fee, but how relevant your ad is to the keyword.

3. Google measures your ad’s relevance to each keyword in a number of ways; the keyword appearing in your ad, the keyword being mentioned a number of times on your landing page. But most importantly, Google measures the relevance using the most reliable method: users vote with their feet every time they click – generating your click-through-rate (CTR) statistic.

4. When your keywords achieve a high CTR, Google will promote them up the ranking without you needing to increase your bid. More importantly, once you reach those top one or two positions, you can begin to lower your bids and still achieve position 3-4 and continue to retain a good CTR.

5. Maintaining a good CTR in positions 3-4 will again push your ads to positions 1-2, and again you can reduce your bids, repeating this cycle as often as possible whilst still maintaing those important top positions.

To lower your CPC and CPA – you must first satisfy Google’s first rule – RELEVANCE.

Learn more about how to lower your CPC by reading the AdWords Success Guide.

Take the fast track to Success.

That’s fine, to a point – but what if you don’t, or can’t sell to everyone, everywhere?

If you’re selling a book, a CD, a set of golf clubs or some consumer product online, you might want to advertise everywhere. But in one campaign? Perhaps not. And if your service or product is most often supplied in person – let’s say hairdressing, construction, car repairs, plumbing, new or used cars, houses – whatever, you’d be well advised to target people local to you, particularly with a smaller budget.

You should first know how location targeting works:

1. Google predetermines a searcher’s location through their IP address. Most of us have a unique one, assigned by our ISP. And again *most* IP addresses are geographic in nature, meaning that rather like a telephone number, it identifies which country or town you are in. This is true for the majority of IP addresses. However, a minority of users’ IP addresses do not accurately reflect their location. The result is that your ads could be displayed to a user outside of your chosen location(s). In all fairness, this is an IP address issue, not Google’s problem.
2. Google also uses the location you have selected to include the place names as keywords. Let’s say that you’re targeting the Birmingham area, and 50 miles around. Google decides that your bid on the keyword ‘pest control’ is more relevant to someone searching for ‘birmingham pest control’ than a competitor targeting the entire country, as indeed would a search for ‘walsall pest control’, or ‘dudley pest control’.

Just how granular these location-matches are is unclear. For example, it is possible to choose a town to target, but not all towns are available in the list: London, of course, is fine, but what about Guildford? Or Mansfield? Or Marlow? And how about Richmond – that is in the list, but means Yorkshire, not South West London (and they don’t tell you that unless you ask, by the way).

So, for a service provider, you might want to use the option of a radius of your location. Start with a larger radius, monitor your budget usage each day and reduce the radius until your budget lasts the whole day. I know that you might quite happily sell your service to a market beyond this and agree that it seems odd to not advertise to that audience. But unless you’re going to increase your budget to capture all those clicks all day, you’re better off concentrating on clicks that have the best chance of ‘converting‘ to a sale, picking up the phone or actually becoming a customer – and those are the people that are closest to you.

Selling country-wide or internationally, you should still use location targeting. Split your campaign(s) – target each for a chosen location. Perhaps there’s a slightly different message for people in different locations – no point in telling people in Ireland or Canada that there’s “FREE UK NEXT DAY DELIVERY!” – why do they care? Even if that doesn’t put them off clicking your ad, you’re wasting valuable space for a more compelling message.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, splitting your campaigns will mean that you’ll be much more able to measure how the campaigns are performing. Here’s an example.

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Given the cost of the conversion, if we’d spent that £689.89 budget on the UK instead, we’d have made 252 sales – nearly twice those made in Canada, and double the profit.

If a cost of £5.38 per sale is fine (and I’m sure it is for most businesses!), you’re still better off knowing where your budget is working hardest for you and where your successes and failures are coming from. The tools are at your disposal – use them to your advantage.

So, to summarise: with careful keyword selection and location targeting, you can easily create a message that compels each specific audience. The keyword ‘magazine printing’ might get your ad lots of impressions, but targeting 30 miles of Birmingham with the keyword ‘cheap magazine printing’ means that you’ll know a whole lot more about that searcher before they even see your ad, right? In your ad, tell them you’re in Birmingham and tell them your prices are keen, too – they’ll be much more likely to click your ad, and more likely to land you a sale for the cost of a few clicks.

Find out how you can improve your campaign one hour.

Anyone who is a subscriber to the ‘long tail‘ principal will know that generating variations and combinations of keywords is good practice to find lots of niche little terms that will build a strong click through rate, a lower cost per click and help you beat your competitors with a stick.

If you’ve read my free AdWords paper, or taken part in one of my online consultations, you’ll also know that a well-structured account improves your quality score and reduces your cost-per click.

Given these two principals, it’s usual practice therefore to create an ad group for ‘widgets’ and then variations of that ad group for additional qualifying keywords like ‘best widgets’, ‘cheapest widgets’, ‘cheap widgets’, ‘small widgets’, and further still for ‘cheap big widgets’ and so forth. Obviously, this strategy leads to thousands of potential combinations of keywords and ad groups.

So, here we are with our tens of thousands of keywords and hundreds of ad groups – and we’re stuck. An AdWords account can’t take them all. For reference, the advised limits are 3,000 keywords in any one ad group, 100 ad groups per campaign, and 50,000 keywords per account. If you want more than that, you’ll need more than one account.

However, if you want to keep just one account to make it easier to manage, Google suggests that they match broad terms on singular and plural – so there’s no need to bid on ‘widget’ and ‘widgets’. Really? I’m not buying that at all. The whole system is based on relevance, and some plurals invite a whole different kind of traffic, producing better (or worse) click through rates than their singular counterparts.

Following on from that little gem, how about other variations of a word? Does bidding on cheap, also mean that you’re bidding on ‘cheaper’ and ‘cheapest’? Google declined to answer that one.

But know this: if you do bid on the variations, they’ll generate different results. Some better, some worse, but different.

My advice? If you’re near those account limits, bid on singular and plurals of your core keywords and perhaps keep the qualifiers down to singular only and expand on those that generate impressions.

Another little gem popped up in my conversation with Google too – one I’ve not seen officially published anywhere: having lots of keywords that generate no impressions has a negative impact on your campaign. Logical? No. True? Perhaps. But it’s difficult to find out what doesn’t generate impressions or clicks until you try, right?

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