startup hustle

A common adjustment businesses make in a recession, (I’m not saying we are in a recession, although many indications point in that direction), is to cut their advertising budget.

That is often found to be the wrong reaction, as cutting your advertising budget wont lead to more sales. Since cutting the ad budget is still practiced by many, your competitors might join that crowd. Or, you can go crazy and expand your marketing spend during a down turn.

I have noticed a reduction in the number of AdWords advertisers. This decreases spend per click and reduces the options searchers have, which could lead to more sales for you. Even if the general populace is buying less, they still research products which could lead to sales down the road.

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Recently I have received many questions about the Adwords Quality Score. I have wanted to write an article that explains the most important aspects of the quality score and which segments you have the most control over so I can use it as a resource with startups I work with.

First, lets discuss the segments that you control when building an Adwords campaign.

1. Keywords – Like keyword research in SEO, paid search keywords are vital to reaching the correct audience. Competition can also be tough for highly searched words, so a long-tail strategy can also be useful to keep cost down. Regardless if they are high volume keywords or long-tail, they need to be relevant to your offering.
2. Ads – One of the most important tasks in paid search is ad copy. These ads are displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and are the only source of information that searchers have when deciding where to click. As you will read below, Google uses click through rate has a major gauge in the quality of your ads.
3. Landing Page – This is the page that searchers will land on when they click your ad. You (should) build and control this page. Google will look at this page to determine if it is relevant to your keyword and ad.

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Last week I calculated the return on investment (ROI) of a large PPC campaign over multiple engines for a startup I am currently working on. I realized that I dont check the ROI often enough, and none of my colleagues at other startups seem to either. When your startup is profitable and you have been using the same marketing mediums over a course of half a year, you might get a little “lazy” on optimizing your marketing through ROI.

I work on multiple startups and with many internet marketers that handle the daily tasks at these young companies. As I learn new tactics and methods I try to pass them on. Unfortunately, the common tasks that should be completed on more of a monthly or quarterly basis slip through the cracks.

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There are a few tools that claim they can report the cost of a keyword in the search engines. I can tell you with confidence and experience that none of those tools work. This is the case with both Google and Yahoo.

There are sites like spyfu.com (subscription based) that can tell you the cost and words your competitors use, which it does neither well. Google Adwords has a tool called the “Traffic Estimator“. The tool has you input a keyword, the PPC bid and the area which you will target (geo-targeting). The resulting report will show you the estimated clicks per day, estimated position and estimated pay per click. The report was very accurate with the estimated position and estimated clicks per day. One area that the Estimator was not even close was the estimated cost per click…oops. It was actually off $1.00 per click for certain keywords. A buck per click can add up fast, so that tool has been deemed useless.

There is only one true way to figure out the pay per click for keywords. Open an account and bid on the keywords. Take $25.00, pick a few keywords to test and set the bids at $0.50. Try to get on the first page so you can see the number of impressions (searches) for that keyword, and get a rough estimate on the price. The $25 – $100 you spend on testing keywords in the search engine will answer more questions than any of those sites that “report” PPC cost.

The percentage is actually 88.5% but 90% is more intimidating in the headline. You should only be worried if you are selling a product that has poor a pay per click (PPC) record. Then again if you are selling a product that does poorly in PPC you better sell it through a different marketing medium.

When I first read about the high percentage of internet searchers that don’t use PPC I was a little concerned. The majority of startups I work with either use or have tried paid search. Most of the time it works well and I have never entered a market that didn’t receive some activity.

The major assumption from this report is most searchers use the organic listings. Thus putting more emphasis on search engine optimization tactics. Which is much more difficult and takes time.

Here you can find the Search Fact Pack 2007 from Ad Age.

I’m currently working on an international pay per click campaign for a startup. I turn to Google Trends to get an idea of the search volume in different countries. I don’t take these numbers as 100% correct, but I assume they are in the ballpark. Well, its not in the ballpark, its not even on the same planet. Here is the regional breakdown of search volume for “Keyword” per Google Trends. India has about 85% of the search volume of the US and Canada has roughly 50% the volume.

To test the potential conversion of these international campaigns, I ran a short 3 week test. The international campaigns were replicas of the campaign I run that targets the US market. Each of these campaigns are geotargeted to the specific country (and we all know how well geotargeting works).

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While I was in Ohio on business I was searching keywords in Google as I was explaining the purpose of Adwords GeoTargeting. Of course it was the perfect time for GeoTargeting to not target per my geo(graphy).

I had recently launched an Adwords campaign targeting New York (the state) in a rather competitive market, lets call it real estate. I was bidding on a term like “New York Real Estate”, and expected no one outside of the tri-state area (lets be real with the Geo part) to see the ad. I had no intention of seeing my ad come up while in Ohio, boy was I wrong.

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Adwords has provided some great news for startups looking to expand their PPC spend.

Many businesses pick the low hanging fruit in PPC and soon need to find new avenues to expand. I have tested the site-targeted option in Adwords with poor results. A site-targeted campaign (now called Placement-Targeted) is used to place an ad on a website in the adsense box and was based on a CPM model. For those of you who have not used it, CPM is a payment model based on impressions. You would pay $X.XX per 1,000 impressions. If you target sites with large traffic flow, the impressions and cost could add up quickly.

With the new Adwords PPC model for site placement, you only have to pay to get real traffic. I am still running tests to gauge if the pay per clikc is comparable to normal search ads. I will add an updated post with results compared to normal Google search ads.

The Adwords crew missed the Google Webmaster Central Blog post about the new SiteLinks tool in Webmaster Tools.

Or they have a real love for the Mozilla FireFox Start Page.