Google adwords- a brave new world by andrew goodman
Google AdWords: A Brave New World (A Pocket Guide to the Road Ahead) December, 2008 By Andrew Goodman President & Founder, Page Zero Media www.pagezero.com © 2008, Andrew Goodman and Page Zero Media Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 1 of 44 Welcome: Author’s Note Thanks for stopping by. I drastically shrunk down the size of the plan for a complete rewrite of my original Google AdWords Handbook, for three very simple reasons. First, that effort largely went into my print book, Winning Results with Google AdWords (2 nd ed.), and that book is now in stores (as of December 10, 2008)! Woohoo! It took me about 18 months to put it all together. Second, I’m hard at work on a more focused, nimble ebook that aims to solve tough problems for intermediate-level advertisers. It’s called “21 Mistakes that Kill Paid Search Profits.” This will be out in January, 2009. Stay tuned. The third reason for this little document is that I wanted a quicker and dirtier introduction for people looking to catch up with the latest thinking on AdWords – one that could be distributed widely for free. So here it is. Kind of a “welcome to the big leagues, kid” piece. Welcome. Enjoy. Got a comment? By all means ping me at my personal email address, pagezero@gmail.com. Intro Consider my introductory note little more than a “sticky note,” because I know time’s important to you. Here’s the deal: Taking the plunge to buy ads through Google AdWords no longer needs much justification, now that Google is one of the largest companies in the world. To this day, more than 98% of Google’s enormous annual revenues are derived from advertising. Most of that is those tiny little text boxes you see near Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 2 of 44 search results on Google Search, or around the web. They’re diversifying, of course, and the picture is getting more complicated, but here, I’ll stick mostly to core concepts. How big again? Google’s revenues in the United States alone are around $10 billion. Making the wild assumption that an average cost per click across the whole AdWords system is 50 cents, that’s 20 billion targeted clicks per year. How many ad “impressions” or views does that add up to? Well, trillions. Sounds huge, doesn’t it? But your campaign will be the size it needs to be, and that could be small, medium, or large. Google wants your business, especially if your ads are very targeted. “Averages” are largely irrelevant. In your AdWords account and across the whole system, the range is vast between keywords that are valuable to your business, and those that are nearly worthless. In the old school “cost per thousand impressions” (CPM) math, it’s not uncommon to see some highly commercial keywords selling for effective CPM rates of $500 or more (or $15-20 per click, or more) on AdWords. Just as it is common knowledge that the “junkiest” ad inventory on the web (personal profile pages on MySpace) is changing hands for next to nothing – pennies per thousand impressions. Google’s bias is towards the mid- to higher- priced ads. Their logic is: if ads are particularly annoying and untargeted, then why show them at all? Here’s a factoid to get us in the right frame of mind. Google actually prides itself on leaving white space where ads might appear, if the particular search query isn’t very commercial in nature, or if no advertisers are relevant or high quality enough to qualify to show up. That means that they maintain a “monetization rate” at least 10% lower than their main competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, on search results. That means that if you look at every search done every day, Google will show no ads (all white space) on about 35% of the search results pages. That number for Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 3 of 44 Microsoft and Yahoo is lower, about 20-25%. (The numbers keep shifting, but that’s the Ads Quality principle in action.) Fig. 1 – On search queries that are less commercial in nature, Google often shows no ads, even if some advertisers would like to appear here. The Google Paradox is that they serve users (search engine users) first, not advertisers. And the result is they make more money on the advertising program, not less, because their relentless focus on speed, quality and relevancy have made them the world’s favorite search engine… by far. (In most markets around the world, Google has 65-90% market share of searches.) Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 4 of 44 Section I. Don’t Fail From the Get-Go, Please! Getting the right kind of start with AdWords is essential to success. You’ll lose time and money if you get it wrong. In no particular order, but as comprehensively as possible, here are some key tips. Generations of AdWords AdWords has been revamped and redesigned several times. On one hand, we’ve seen ongoing improvements in much of the functionality of how you slice and dice your ads, bids, and campaigns. But the really fundamental changes have occurred in how the system treats you. Many folks are working on outdated assumptions. I call this version of AdWords “2.5” to distinguish it from prior versions. Page 7 of an article I co-authored with Mona Elesseily, “Search Engine Smackdown,” covers the generations of AdWords in a nutshell. Pages 1 through 6 are useful too. We provide a lightning-quick scorecard summary of how Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing stack up in key areas. http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/14775.asp [Guess what? Google has changed the rules again. We’re now up to approximately AdWords 2.7, so get your copy of Winning Results with Google AdWords and read Chapter 5 to get the latest take on what it’s all about.] New advertisers in the “AdWords 1.0-2.0” era always had a feeling of shock and awe when they set up campaigns and found things going immediately wrong with them. This current generation of AdWords is no different. Some, but not all, new advertisers, will face high minimum bids on their keywords (whoops, they tweaked Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 5 of 44 that minimum bid part, but the concept is roughly unchanged) which is very similar to the old days when keywords that didn’t meet certain qualifications after running for a couple of days (basically, the ads didn’t get clicked often enough by search engine users) were “disabled.” So, the song today is somewhat the same, though the band is wearing newer t-shirts: AdWords is hard at first. Help from Google: Two Sides of the Coin Many of you are aware that you can get technical support from Google, either by emailing them from within the AdWords interface or by ringing the company up at 1-866-2GOOGLE and entering your customer ID# into the phone system. (Your mileage may vary internationally, but Google staff are helpful in most parts of the world.) In fact, you’re very likely to be able to work consistently with the same rep because things are very well coordinated now. Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 6 of 44 Support staff don’t generally work at the main Google campus (the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA) anymore. If you’re a national US advertiser, you may well be talking to someone in San Francisco or Irvine. Depending on your vertical and Google’s way of assigning help to different kinds of accounts, you may deal with someone in New York, Denver, Dallas, or someplace else. Of course, Google has many international offices, as well, and they’re always expanding. Finding a helpful ear at Google is always a plus, so insofar as it is possible, try to get to know a rep. Fig. 2 – Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Brilliant engineers; great cafeteria; beach volleyball court. Just be aware that there are clear boundaries around the degree to which a support rep can improve your marketing. Don’t just expect to hand off your whole campaign strategy to someone at Google, obviously. Ain’t gonna happen. You need to dig deep and improve everything at your end, and/or with the help of an expert third party. Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 7 of 44 But help *is* there if you need it. The problem here is that on the most vexing issues you’ll face, like high minimum bids due to low “Quality Scores,” you might not get very clear answers. Also, be appreciative on the surface, but somewhat dismissive in your heart, of “boilerplate” advice. Over the years, Google reps have been coached in the “nice sounding” “best practices” suggestions that are best conveyed to advertisers. Pablum-like recommendations are generally easy enough to distinguish from hard core advice. Once in awhile you get the good stuff from a Googler. Other times, you should feel free to smile, nod, and ignore. What’s With All the “Non-Search” Inventory? Don’t mind me, but I’m going to talk about issues in the order they seem appropriate. The core of AdWords is of course “search” ads (the ads that show up next to or above Google Search results, or on partner search sites). This is wonderful, beautiful stuff as advertising goes. I won’t waste time defending its wondrous targeting qualities. From there, you’ll notice “search partner” traffic is available. That’s other search engines that show Google AdWords ads that have been syndicated to the other search engine. Sometimes it’s an Ask.com search results page. Or it might be an Internet Service Provider like Roadrunner that has a search box on their home page in partnership with Google. Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 8 of 44 Fig. 3 – At search.rr.com, the text ads at the top of the page are served by Google. It’s not worth giving a whole lot of thought to the distinction. The amount of search partner traffic you’ll see is relatively low these days, and the performance is consistently good enough that there is generally no reason to disable this channel specifically. If you go into campaign settings, you can set the checkboxes for “on” or off to various ad distribution options: search, search partners, and content network. Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 9 of 44 Fig. 4 – The graphic display ads at the top and right are served by DoubleClick. The "sponsored links" on the left are served by Google AdWords. The need-to-know essentials on content targeting traffic are as follows: • This isn’t search traffic, and people are viewing your ads on pages all over the web; • That isn’t inherently bad, it just tends to convert to clicks and sales at a lower rate than search traffic, and is less predictable; • Thus, you must bid lower on it – often 40-70% lower than search • The default is that this traffic is turned “on” in your account – you must enable content bidding (separate bids that you can manually enter) in the campaign settings area, or disable content targeting entirely if you don’t want to have a lot of “high bid” traffic from questionable sources draining your account Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 10 of 44 . Google AdWords: A Brave New World (A Pocket Guide to the Road Ahead) December, 2008 By Andrew Goodman President & Founder, Page Zero Media www.pagezero.com. Andrew Goodman and Page Zero Media Google AdWords: A Brave New World (December 2008) 1 of 44 Welcome: Author’s Note Thanks for stopping by. I drastically