Winning Results with Google AdWords Second Edition_12 pot

Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10: Measuring Success: A “What’s Changed” Report 273 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 And there are even more nuanced goal setups that may require you to work around problems with your site. For example, if your pages always include dynamic ID strings, you can instruct Analytics to use a match type that disregards the changing strings, so that it recognizes the same basic page as your success page. If you have Ajax presentation in a checkout or multistage form- completion process, your “goal funnel analysis” may not work, so you can’t set goal pages for somewhere in the middle of the process, and you may not be able to correctly assess abandonment rates. I’ll leave it to you, your development team, and a bottle of ibuprofen to figure out. The Substance of Goals in Analytics I discuss this elsewhere as well, but just a quick reminder of what you might do with the information you see. You’re going to be trolling through reports to look at the performance (dollar or conversion rate wise) of particular keywords or segments such as ad groups. You can also do this for ads. One example involved an “arbitrary” goal for a financial site that had deferred revenue and a third-party page that we didn’t have access to. For Analytics to help us assess user behavior day to day, we considered “reached the application page” as a goal. We had the arbitrary goal value as a few dollars, and we decided that any keyword that had a value of over $1.00 was worth further investigation. Those below that were suspect, and those below $0.50 were red flags and might be paused. Two issues arise from this example. First, the arbitrary goal value itself proved highly arbitrary; a poor predictor of real revenues. Users merely reaching the application page helped us with quick assessments of which traffic was at least sentient and reasonably targeted, to be sure. Very low values were associated with confused users misinterpreting ad copy, weakly targeted keywords, and so forth. But many of the high-value words did not ultimately translate into back- end revenues. In some financial areas, many users will show brief interest but ultimately not qualify for the product. Bounce Rates, Time Spent, and Pages Viewed Are Core Metrics in Analytics Bounce rates, by the way, were always strongly negatively correlated with the dollar values of the keywords. A variety of “you done good” metrics tend to show you about the same thing, just expressed in different ways, but this depends on your sales process. The bounce rate for a keyword (or any segment, such as a page, a campaign, a geo-segment, of your site in the aggregate) is the percentage of users who get to your website and do not click even one more time. A bounce is not the same as a “very short visit,” though it usually is that, too. Some users who “bounce” may stay on the site for several minutes, just on the first page, without clicking a link. In some cases, websites with Ajax presentations that do not take interacting users to a new page on a click may be seeing very misleading bounce rates. Time spent and number of pages viewed speak for themselves, and based on the preceding comment, it would seem that even more detailed user tracking might be beneficial to websites that want to go beyond these sometimes uninformative metrics. Check out analytics tools like GetClicky, CrazyEgg, and Robot Replay; they provide visual information about mouse click patterns and even replays of whole user sessions so you can literally get a better picture of what 274 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 is going on. Do people always go for the search box? Do they ever click the links below the fold? Are too many people clicking on an insignificant link? High bounce rates are red flags that your traffic is untargeted or unsatisfied. Unfortunately, on broad terms in paid search, you’re going to see a lot of bounce rates in the 50% range. Don’t panic at this level, although 15–30% should be your comfort level. Above 70%, it’s a bright red flag that something is amiss. Bounce rates are doubly important because they are likely being used in Google’s assessment of website quality for Quality Score, and in predictive quality assessments in the early going. Google might even look at how quickly users hit the Back button to return to Google Search; 3–6 seconds might be a huge red flag for Quality Score (and yes, even organic search algorithms are looking at user clickstream data), whereas just a little bit longer, like 20 seconds, might be treated much more leniently. For the purposes of evaluating you as an advertiser, there is likely no substantial difference between a user time spent on site of 20 seconds and 5 minutes. More may be better for you, but a bit less isn’t getting you in hot water with AdWords. But Don’t Forget to Install Google Conversion Tracker It’s helpful and fun to “troll through” these reports, as I put it above. But Google Conversion Tracker and other numbers right inside AdWords are what really put actionable analysis into high gear. Because Google Analytics is getting so much ink, newer advertisers put a lot of stock in it and actually aren’t aware of how plodding their routine is. The available reporting is comprehensive, but in fact, the paid search specific reports are not always as handy as they could be. To really motor through your routine, you want to be working right inside the AdWords interface. To do this, you’ll need to install Google Conversion Tracker JavaScript code as well. Conversion Tracker, as discussed earlier, allows you to adjust bids on keywords, adopt winning ads from an ROI or goal standpoint, and determine the relative effectiveness of segments such as content targeting. When the numbers look really bad, you’ll need to pause keywords or even re-evaluate entire campaigns, including your targeting and website effectiveness. What’s so handy is that you get to look at these numbers and adjust your bid strategy right there in the AdWords interface. AdWords Conversion Optimizer So how, exactly, do you adjust bids to ensure you’re staying within range of your target ROAS or CPA goals? There’s no universal method, believe it or not. As mentioned in previous chapters, you might want to tweak your bids on individual keywords, but on mid- to lower-volume keywords, you’ll probably need to measure ROI and manage bids for the entire group as a whole; in other words, consider keywords in “buckets.” How convenient that Google designed AdWords’ powerful logic around the ad group level, not solely at the keyword level. Without having the space to prove it here, I’ll assert that some makers of third-party bid management software are working with flawed assumptions or flawed technology. At best, it is fair to say that the primary sweet spot for such solutions is high-volume e-commerce that Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10: Measuring Success: A “What’s Changed” Report 275 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 absolutely requires intraday bid changes to avoid overpaying for product sales with razor-thin margins. Bear in mind, as well, that high-volume, frequent bid changes cost money if they’re done through a third-party application that accesses AdWords through the API. That’s why those solutions cost a lot, or pass costs directly onto you. If you have specific automation needs, you could build your own app and maybe get a break from Google on API token costs, but unless your application is really one-dimensional, you’re talking $40,000 to $200,000 in development costs. Automation that costs 3–5% of your monthly spend leaves very little in your budget for human analysis. That could be a costly budget mistake. A low-tech way to automate some of your bidding—or at least, to guide your bids to slot your ads into a specific range of ad positions on the page—is to enable Position Preferences in Campaign Settings. If you always want your ads to show up in positions 3 through 7, and to not show up if Google’s automation deems it impossible to show up in that range, you can set that range of favored ad positions. I’ve never found this to be particularly advantageous as I have limited proof that I’ll make less money if I occasionally spike up to (say) position 2 or down to 8. This setting may put you where you want to be, but generally speaking, your own bid strategy can do the same, without cutting into volume as the Position Preferences setting typically does. I am still hearing many marketers on a regular basis making assumptions that bid adjustments are needed frequently or that human analysts are inferior to “sophisticated” computers. Certainly, computers are better than us humans at handling rote tasks on high volumes. However, many of those who adopt third-party bid management solutions are wasting money and possibly handing over too much of their process (sometimes requiring more code, privacy intrusions, upsells to expensive services, and so forth) for account work that could be accomplished by (and which, indeed, may require) a qualified human analyst. Many accounts do well with bid adjustments no more frequent than a “round” of bid adjustments weekly. Some bids remain valid for months at a time. In other cases, bid gamesmanship may be warranted, but in the new complex auction, most legacy software is obsolete when it comes to the bid environment. Still, there is a certain attraction to “set and forget.” Similar to the benefit of Google Analytics, Google’s free feature, AdWords Conversion Optimizer, will adjust your bids in an attempt to keep you within a target CPA range that you set. You can set this feature at the campaign level; 100 monthly conversions are required by a campaign to qualify for this feature. My experience is that it works fairly well for certain kinds of accounts, but you may suffer from decreasing volume. The availability of this free, integrated tool (that Google engineers are working to perfect) prompts me to further question the benefit of third-party bid management. It’s notable that Google sets a hard minimum of 100 conversions per campaign to qualify for this intelligent bid automation. To be blunt, those who seem to believe that bid management solutions are going to make an appreciable difference in performance on low-volume campaigns— or worse, on poorly performing campaigns with low conversion rates—either deeply misunderstand the math involved or don’t understand the factors that combine to achieve high e-commerce performance. You should not adjust a bid until performance on a keyword or segment achieves statistical significance, and a “smart” bid does very little to rescue a dismal campaign; in many cases, the smartest bid may be zero, and you shouldn’t need a computer to tell you that. 276 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 I like alert-based bid solutions that assist human analysis by letting you know about the bids that are farthest out of your target range, or identifying keywords that are at zero ROI for a significant period of time. This way, you get the best of both worlds: the advantages of automation with the control and judgment of a human analyst. Two comprehensive campaign management solutions that take this approach are Clickable and Adapt. You might say I’m a fan. 3 Quality-Based Bidding and Instability There are enough variables in the Quality Score formula, and they are sufficiently dynamic (gathering significance and certainty over time), that our ability to “read and react” is affected. Sometimes, our ad positions may rise or fall significantly as we gain or lose favor with the algorithm, but this process is even less predictable than it was in the past. In the past, the system was semitransparent at least: we could see our bids and our CTRs and know that some assessment of these was pretty much the only thing affecting our ad rank. The system is also sophisticated enough that it may be moving you up in ad position and giving you more search volume as a result because you’re more likely to convert to a sale. Don’t take the “because” literally here; conversion rates aren’t included in Quality Score calculations. But many of the signals that give Google a strong indicator of quality are the exact same factors that go into creating strong user experiences and thus higher conversion rates. The takeaway? Don’t be biased against certain ad positions. Keep reevaluating where you stand—be open to more volume, and don’t short-change yourself. Marketers Are Using Analytics to Test Sophisticated Theories I alluded earlier in the chapter to the usefulness of using statistics like bounce rates, pages viewed, and time spent to diagnose problems with your campaign. These are the deeper forms of analysis that take you beyond simply bidding to ROI, into a more thoughtful analysis of targeting and technical issues. There’s plenty more you can do in Analytics. A favorite of mine is the Ad Position report. If your Analytics account is properly linked to AdWords, you can pull up an AdWords ad position report with multiple views that you can toggle. One view just shows you how many clicks you got on any given keyword, by ad position. This is shown visually so you can see exactly how many clicks (over a given date range) occurred in the top premium spots or in the right-side margin spots. From there, if you have Goals enabled, you can go so far as to examine your conversion rates in various ad positions. If conversion rates are not significantly higher, or are in fact lower, on higher ad positions, then you’ll want to consider whether it’s better value to go for lower volume in a less visible ad position. More than anything, this excellent report is a fine way to overcome myths in the industry perpetrated by similar reports that aggregate data across the entire industry. Who cares what someone else’s account did in various ad positions, for keywords unknown to you? This is your conversion behavior, for your account, for the keywords you select. This is extremely powerful information, and Google has seen to it that you get it for free with nearly no customization effort or expense. It’s fool’s gold, of course, if you don’t look at a large enough chunk of data to get statistical significance. Also, if you haven’t experimented with different ad positions (we sometimes call Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10: Measuring Success: A “What’s Changed” Report 277 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 this a “volume test,” when we bid much higher for a week or so to secure an average ad position of 2.5 or higher), you don’t learn as much from the report. You can test dozens of other kinds of theories using Analytics data—you can, for example, assess user sophistication levels and behavior by looking at screen sizes or browser choices. You can inform usability debates, again by looking at typical monitor resolutions. You can look at conversion rates varying by geography, and decide to exclude certain areas in the geo-location settings in AdWords campaign settings. There’s not much you can get on user demographics yet; for this, you might want to check out Microsoft’s rival analytics product, code-named Gatineau. I have no doubt that if you study hard, you’ll gain enough insight to not only become conversant with the metrics shared by presenters at E-Metrics Summit—you could very well be up there on the podium yourself. Marketers Understand That “Analytics” (Relevant Statistics) Live Right Inside AdWords People who frequent the big ol’ Professional Analytics world sometimes seem to have an awfully narrow view of where to get relevant statistics. For particularly unimaginative members of this crew, analytics is something that happens within Google Analytics, or preferably, within WebTrends or Omniture, or some other third-party vendor product that they can get reseller revenue (or subsidized travel to industry powwows) out of. Analytics? How ’bout Ad Positions, CPCs, CTRs, and ROAS? Friends, you can get the majority of the numbers you need right within the AdWords interface. As we reviewed in the first part of this chapter, all of your keyword-specific, group-specific, and ad-specific data are pretty much right there in front of you inside AdWords. And yes, usually that conversion data (CPA, ROAS) is what really rules, though clients and bosses also like to hear peripheral numbers about spend, CPC, and CTR trends. Quality Score Is a Stat Did you consider that Quality Score is actually a statistic? When you see a keyword Quality Score of 3 or 1, as opposed to 9 or 10, that should be speaking volumes about your status as a good/bad guy in Google’s eyes, and as to whether you’ve managed to deal well with Google’s obsession with tight targeting for new accounts, and leniency on looser targeting once strong account history has been established. High minimum bids on mature accounts likely mean that your CTR relative to competitors is still lagging, which means you’ll need to redouble your efforts to test ads. Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation Marketing analysts use generic terminology to discuss segments of the target audience. In our world, the most important segments are keywords and ad groups; in some cases geography is also key. 278 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Over on the content-targeting side, the AdWords interface offers increasingly sophisticated choices. You can choose specific publications you want to show up in, or you can let the system match content around the Web for you. Of particular interest is the excellent reports available in the Reporting tab in AdWords. You can run a report on the performance of ad placements broken down by domain, to identify poor converters. You can respond to these by entering site exclusions at the campaign level (or “negativing out”) those sites. Again, in content targeting, AdWords now breaks out content types, such as parked domains, or tragedy & destruction content. You can opt out of these, or at least see that they are performing up to par, in order to combat industry stereotypes about performance. CPCs Have Increased and Competition Has Intensified Going over the past four or five years, it’s not uncommon that a typical CPA number has tripled or quadrupled for any given company using AdWords. Multiple factors are at play here. First, Google has developed increasingly sophisticated means of monetization to bump up CPCs, including making it harder to bid at the absolute minimum on “long tail” terms. Second, many of the individual “micro-auctions” going on in the overall AdWords marketplace have reached a tipping point. With sufficient advertisers in the race for the top five or so ad positions, bid prices simply go up; sometimes, dramatically. Third, other advertisers are also testing and improving their copy and other aspects of their targeting, so they can afford to bid more. Fourth, other advertisers are improving their conversion rates, improving their offerings, offering discounts or free shipping, and so forth, so again, they achieve relatively attractive offerings at the expense of others’ conversion rates. Fifth, opaquely buried in Quality Score algorithms is a punitive minimum bid regime on clever keywords we used to thrive on, including brand names and people’s names. Google admits that ceteris parabus, “certain” keywords such as large company words that are potential trademark issues, and people’s names, are going to give you Quality Score headaches more often, and cost you a lot more. My experience has been that this essentially cripples the better-performing 5–10% of some accounts. The end result of all these factors? It’s a Darwinian environment, but also one that is tilted to favor the intelligent designer of that environment. If you stood still in the past four years, you probably saw your ROAS fall sharply, or your CPA number quadruple. If you improved steadily, it’s not uncommon that your CPA might have doubled. Everyone else feels the same pain. The big winner in all of this? Look at the annual financial statements! Look at Google’s revenues and profit margins. The winner is Google. The consumer also wins, as advertisers are forced to become more relevant and as Google actually removes ads from users’ field of view while making more money from the remaining ads. How does this affect your reading of trends? It’s tough to say, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and suggest that it’s unfair to expect CPAs to improve in absolute terms over any given four-year period. Prices on targeted clicks in our industry began at rock bottom in 1998–2002, and rose from there. Sound process, relentless testing efforts, and localized improvements need to be given due credit, and businesses need to look hard at strategy. In other words, judging a long-term testing Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10: Measuring Success: A “What’s Changed” Report 279 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 effort solely on the CPA/ROAS statistic is misleading. The environment has deteriorated for all advertisers. So, unfortunately for those who like to think in absolutes, we are left to speculate on “this is how bad our campaign would have looked had we sat still and done nothing.” Remember, many AdWords success stories are that way because a certain company was virtually the only serious one in its industry segment. The frontier is no more; it’s bound to get harder to compete as others climb whatever barriers to entry may exist, and begin going after your customers. What Hasn’t Changed (But There Is Always Hope) Given how specialized the AdWords task is, it’s unsurprising that many myths and clumsy practices still prevail among companies in the first stages of coming to grips with it. Specifically with reference to data and measurement, I’ve only gained secure beliefs and insights after years of double-checking assumptions and watching real-world performance. It’s not hard to see why someone would come to the table with certain off-the-cuff assumptions. But unfortunately many of these assumptions are wrong. Here’s a list of some of the things advertisers (I may broaden the term to call them “marketers” in this section) are still messing up. 4 Marketers Must Set Objectives, but Fail to Do So Some advertisers come forth with a media “buy” mentality only: can we get x number of clicks this month for 20 cents a click? Sure. But then eventually the recriminations about the quality of the traffic, and the ROI on that spend, kick in. Even where such advertisers are just promoting something in general, management needs to engage in some kind of planning process—such as setting arbitrary goal values, placing values on impressions that may be accruing from quasi-arbitrage activities such as ad sales, or supporting existing ad listing clients—in the beginning. Asking the lower-downs in the organization to buy a lot of traffic and then questioning the value of the traffic out of the blue is, unfortunately, commonplace management practice to this day. It takes some time to defend or define ROI contributions on campaigns of this nature. This is ideally done early in the process, not after spending money for two years. Marketers Fail to Appreciate Complex System Math Let’s just take one example. CEOs of e-commerce companies are notorious for making wild claims about the “free” or inexpensive forms of online exposure they can achieve based on their “brand,” or “direct navigation,” at “no cost” or “low cost.” A manager at a major consumer electronics company once told me they get most of their “web traffic” from “direct navigation,” and implied that this was without cost. (That direct navigation, of course, spikes after TV spots and full-page color weekend newspaper ads and flyers.) In other words: in planning online campaigns, many organizations act as if their lavish offline (print, television, and so on) campaigns are done at zero cost, while assigning full cost or more to their web divisions in their efforts to gain direct response online. One organization we worked with cut its web marketing budget abruptly because a production crew for their lavish television ad shoot in Africa exceeded its budget. (Keep in mind, this company sells tents and barbecues back here in North America.) I can only assume that some of this type of behavior is more tied to internal politics and inefficient nest-feathering than to a true bottom-line concern. 280 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 The investment in offline advertising has long been largely a “faith-based initiative.” 5 Online has been moving in the opposite direction. But in a world of complex customer behavior, a little faith is not a bad idea. Pure direct response isn’t feasible at every moment of every campaign. Marketers Fail to Appreciate Randomness As I’ve mentioned previously in deference to Nassim Taleb’s excellent work in the field, not every event can or should be explained or narrated. A brief spike upwards in campaign performance does not constitute a new benchmark for expected performance that you can deposit in the bank. Nor does an unexplained pause in sales flow mean much if patterns are looked at with a zoom lens. The explanation may simply be that randomness and, occasionally, highly improbable events are built-in features of the natural and social worlds. Marketers Only Pay Lip Service to Volume and Statistical Significance Issues but Do Not Understand the Math Try this exercise. Design a multivariate landing page test with 16 page permutations, with 50% of the impressions going to the test pages and 50% going to the control. Jot down your current conversion rate—say, 2%. And project your expected improvement in that rate as a result of a test—say, 25%. Now jot down how many clicks you’ll be getting to that page, per day (let’s say 500). This is a test you could run using Google Website Optimizer. The projection of how long it will take this test to achieve statistical significance is something you can figure out with a projection tool Google provides in their Google Analytics help files (at https://www.google .com/analytics/siteopt/siteopt/help/calculator.html). OK, now it’s time to guess how long the preceding test would need to run to achieve statistical significance. Done? 6 And yet a quick guess might produce a “let’s rock and roll” type of prediction, such as that it would take about a month, or “we should be seeing solid improvements in a couple of weeks.” It simply doesn’t work that way when the math is this complex and your volume is low. There is hope, however. Change the test up a bit. Get to driving 1,000 clicks per day to that page. Send 85% of the traffic to the test and only 15% to the control. Chop the permutations down to 12. And hope to do better: project a conversion rate improvement of 40% over your baseline of 2%. Now you’re down to 87 days. That’s more than 12 weeks, but at least you won’t be racing against your own life expectancy getting to a completed test. This is why I’d recommend an A/B/C test for this particular example. Putting the clicks back down to 500 a day, we can still project the A/B/C test will pick a significant winner within 23 days. Nice. There Are Still Data Discrepancies Analytics experts agree that total accuracy in tracking conversions is impossible. Different tools differ even on the definition of a click. Conversions are “attributed” to the source that caused a conversion, but what does causation mean? Typically, that means the last click before the sale. Sophisticated industry research indicates that prior research may influence final sales, and choices of search terms may be narrowed as users get closer to certainty. With short cookie lengths, latent conversions may not be credited. These nuances are important to take into account, not to nitpick, but to realize that many of our points of analysis are intended to be relative and heuristic, rather than absolute and “true.” We’re Still Poor at Measuring Offline Conversions While it is rare to find a company that has mastered a “silver bullet” solution to attributing offline and phone conversions back to their Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 CHAPTER 10: Measuring Success: A “What’s Changed” Report 281 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 AdWords campaign, one thing anyone could do would be to assign a dedicated 800 number or numbers to landing pages created solely for the AdWords campaign. This and other “broad brush” attempts to give AdWords credit for sales that do not take place online are helpful in assessing the value of the investment. Yet few companies take the trouble. Some business owners prefer to hide high-ticket special order sales from marketing staff, perhaps in an attempt to downplay the website’s contribution, as a motivation for said staff to work harder. Again, the definition of a profitable campaign is up for debate, and a little faith helps lubricate operations for most any growth-oriented company. Marketers Don’t Keep Tasks in Proportion What’s probably more important to the bottom line: a killer ad headline, or many across an account, or adding 20 more negative keywords to each campaign, or 10 more negative keywords to each ad group? I’m thinking the former. Ad positions, conversion improvement, changing business contexts, and a host of other drivers are important to watch and execute on, as well. It’s easy to dwell on seemingly “overlooked” tasks, and it’s pretty tempting to believe that flashy “look busy” marketer or Google staff member is helping your business with the appearance of hustle. Sure, I think it’s important to “look alive out there,” as your Little League coach might have said. But let’s be clear: some account actions nibble at the margins whereas others are fundamental to the bottom line. Marketers Try to Sell People What They Don’t Want Perhaps this is most fundamental. Most of the mistakes in AdWords are made by trying to put your ads in front of people who just aren’t interested. So much so that Google has taken away your ability to do that by setting low initial Quality Scores on advertisers who seem like they’re probably bothering uninterested searchers. Before concluding that there is a problem with a bid, some kind of discrepancy in Analytics, a change in the “trend,” or the need for a “more timely” report, have you asked yourself whether your performance woes may be related to a real lack of demand for a particular product or service, by the people at whom you’ve targeted your ads in an attempt to attract them to your website? If your definition of “analysis” also includes “brutal honesty,” you’re ahead of the pack. Somewhere in between avid consumer interest and a complete lack of demand usually lies a middle ground. You’ll be led to a number of opportunities for additional segmentation and refinement to filter out uninterested prospects. Moving from analytics to action in paid search is often about such careful refinement over time. Endnotes 1. Google’s Matt Cutts, in his generous (and extremely accurate) review of the first edition of this book, wrote: “The cover of this book looks like your typical ‘How to use Adobe Elements/Microsoft Word/3D Studio Max’ book. I normally hate those books. Do I really need a book to walk me through what the File menu does in an application? Do I need a chapter devoted to simple things that anyone could figure out in five minutes just using the software application? No! Personally, I hate that 60% of the bookstore space is filled with books that tell you how to use a software application. Where are the books such as Hackers and Painters or The Mythical Man-Month or Tufte?” Thus exempted by the dude from Google, I’ll continue on with a view to giving you insight into the landscape 282 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 and concepts, rather than explaining how to drill into menus which may have changed by press time. 2. This book’s technical editor suggested several alternative names, such as Urchinoficles, Urchinedes the Great, or Urchinias. Sticking with Urchinator, I must point out that in this chapter as with the rest of the book, responsibility for all errors, omissions, and stubborn refusal to take suggestions, lies solely with the author. 3. Disclosure: I have been an early beta tester and adviser to Clickable. I have no stake in the company. 4. Due to space limitations, I make little effort to defend my assertions in this section. If you’re interested in deeper discussion, I’ll buy you a venti green tea and we can have it out. 5. Thanks to Avinash Kaushik for the turn of phrase. 6. The answer is 952.64 days, or getting on for three years!!! [...]... to create results Isolating the user’s experience with the page she is actually on is always helpful to understanding your task at hand 289 290 Winning Results with Google AdWords Error #2: Overloading the Landing Page with Information One of the most common mistakes site designers make is to try to cram too much information on the landing page The impulse to get everything in front of the potential... at all, but are, rather, butterflies.) 287 288 Winning Results with Google AdWords As an AdWords guy, I can summarize this scent concept in a tiny nutshell In large part, this take on it is shared by the designers of the ad ranking formulas at Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Let’s say you run an ad that shows up whenever a user types bag of hockey pucks into Google Ideally, your ad would reference the availability... an introductory page (see Figure 11-3) that makes them decide, for example, which division of your company they want to deal with. 6 If you 291 292 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 11-2 A fourth contest detail competes with six corporate logos have a carefully targeted AdWords campaign, you should already know who you’re targeting, so you should be able to lead users to exactly the page that... kamikaze visionary with very deep pockets, you’ll probably be looking to build design, copy, and interface elements that “reference” 285 286 Winning Results with Google AdWords or “look like” something an Internet user already knows about Jakob Nielsen once humorously referred to “Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience”; namely: “users spend most of their time on other sites.”1 If you monkey with web standards... very specific kind of search: a paid search click whose messaging and path you have some control over 284 Winning Results with Google AdWords A typical unsung hero in the early going of online conversion science is Marc Stockman, an email marketing consultant who was formerly a marketing VP with TheStreet.com As a publicly traded online content company in the financial field, TheStreet.com was suffering... with no accompanying copy I had absolutely no incentive to fill out the form A better approach would be to offer a few paragraphs of information, followed by the contact form Another example I ran across is in the competitive credit counseling industry Although the landing page (see Figure 11-4) has some info in the form, a few bullets, and looks like it’s been 293 294 Winning Results with Google AdWords. .. Having proper, full-length product descriptions on your website will help you attract more “stumble-in” search engine traffic as well (often at no cost to you) Without words, search engines have nothing to index 295 296 Winning Results with Google AdWords FIGURE 11-6 Inconsistency in adding product copy to each page has a tangible result: poor conversion rates and wasted ad dollars Insights Leading to... adopted across the online marketing professions today Even Google support staff, who once were only versed in the language of clicks and traffic, are keenly aware of user experiences all the way through to goal completion This goes hand in hand with widespread adoption of Google Analytics and Google Conversion Tracker, and the general interest Google has developed in the user experience Conversion Science... course, the quality of search results and the clean interface would be right up there among the key factors that have kept users coming back Certain fanatics have held Google to its original (accidental) principles; one Google supporter is famous for sending in the number of bytes in the weight of Google s home page, as a reminder not to “bloat” that all-important page Google has also set a gold standard... and persuaders for ideologues No matter which terminology you care to use, I’d like to make the counterintuitive point that it’s mostly by getting the website’s “plumbing” right 297 298 Winning Results with Google AdWords that we become persuasive The lowest-hanging fruit—the big mistakes most companies fail to correct—is generally related to making the path to purchase smooth and uncomplicated It’s . what 274 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. that. 276 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /. key. 278 Winning Results with Google AdWords Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords / Goodman / 656-4 / Chapter 10 Win&Mac-Tight / Winning Results with Google AdWords /