Making Adwords Make Sense

I recently had an inquiry from a friendly lady who was interested in using Adwords to help sell her husband’s book The Ethical Executive. I thought it might be a good time for an ethics check before accepting this proposition.

Do you think I did the right thing?

– — – — – — – — – — – — – — – –

Friendly Lady,

(REALITY CHECK BEGIN)

Let’s take some time to consider your motivations for choosing Adwords as an advertising platform. Adwords of course is a very agile and inexpensive vehicle for serving ads and generating interest in a product. It is also very responsive and can begin to return results immediately as opposed to other types of advertising that have a long term cumulative effect.

As with any type of advertising, the revenue generated by selling a product must be considered when determining whether it would be worthwhile. In this case, with a book that may cost $25, after overhead the profit from selling one book might be $5 or less. The cost per click to get someone to your website in Adwords might range from 50 cents to $5. That is just to get someone to your website with no guarantee that they will make a purchase.

With a conservative estimate of an average $2 per click you could achieve 150 visits to your website per month from Adwords. With no historical data and no time to test and experiment to find the best conversion rate, it is hard to guess how many of those visits would be likely to actually purchase a book. Almost certainly less than 25%. Therefore based on that guess (25%) it would cost you $500 to sell 37 books per month. This is clearly not a profitable equation (unless you happen to profit $15 per book).

THE OPTIMISTIC POTENTIAL

That being said, there are other objectives to consider. As we discussed it would be tremendously profitable if Adwords could aid this book to make the best seller list. If this were possible, the momentum of being on that list would result huge number of sales.

While the number of books which must be sold in order for a book to be a candidate for the best seller list is unknown, it is also most likely more than 37 per month.

In addition to the specific trackable sales resulting from Adwords referrals,
there is the added benefit of interest and buzz which can be generated. It is possible to achieve a great number of ad impressions using Google Adwords which means that the name of the book could be put in front of a lot of people’s eyeballs. This could result in additional word of mouth and more purchases which would not be directly attributable to Google Adwords. Obviously with a larger budget this ancillary effect can be increased.

There is also the benefit of the vast amount of data that can be collected by using Adwords coupled with Google Analytics to track user behavior. In the case of a long term project this data can become the basis for findings which can help you to effectively develop your messaging, drive design changes in your website, as well as predict outcomes of other potential initiatives.

If you are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization you can apply for a Google Grant. Google provides grants that range from $10,000 per month to $40,000 per month in free advertising for qualifying organizations.

Now that OMS is passed and Webmaster Jam Session is over, there will be many of us interested in what the future holds for getting together with our fellow marketers in the Atlanta area. I thought that we could use this calendar to show the upcoming marketing events that are accessible to we in the Southeast. If you have any you would like to see added just drop us a line!

I think that there is actually a wealth of thought provoking possibilities in the suggestion that SEO is evolving. ‘SEO is Dead’ seems to be such an inflammatory statement that is sure to get noticed, attacked, defended etc. which of course makes it great link bait. What I find interesting about it though are probably some of the less inflammatory aspects.

1) The thought of being threatened by this idea is patently ridiculous. It seems that every good SEO professional is a general web strategy consultant. The website owner will need to be led through the jungle that is Search Marketing regardless of which tactics are involved. If the only thing that the threatened SEO does is tool around with onsite elements then maybe some further training would be warranted.

2) Tactics may change – On site factors are often what people new to SEO are concerned about, and while some on-site factors might lose importance there will never be a time when effective information architecture will stop being important both for search engines and for searchers.

3) Interesting that someone is making news that ‘SEO tactics will change sometime in the future’ – It is useful to be alerted to the fact that tactics have changed. Or are currently in the process of changing, or there is some specific event which might suggest that they will change in a specific time span, - but to exclaim that at some time in the future these tactics will change is to merely point out the overwhelmingly obvious without a description of what the tactics will change to.

I’m hedging my bets with the side bet that Web Analytics is not going anywhere. It is a significant aspect of SEO (using the broad definition) but it also ties into so many other aspects of the web development industry and touches so many needs that online businesses have. But Why?
Web Analytics Touches:

A/B testing
Competitive intelligence
Data integration
Data visualization
On-site behavioral targeting
Predictive analytics
Search analytics
Usability testing
Web analytics
Copywriting
Bid management

4) Aaron makes a good point in a recent SEO training module (which will probably be set to private soon) that there is a significant value in predicting the changes in the language – the example he uses is that the phrase Pay-Per-Click is more and more being replaced by the word Adwords as Google continues to develop their brand.

a. It would be important to recognize if the Acronym SEO were falling by the wayside. It is not, btw, and debates about whether it is dead or not will probably only serve to increase traffic, interest, and demand for SEO.

5) Bob Massa makes a good point that the industry may be able to rid itself of the “baggage laden misnomer” in his post about the Future of SEO.

It is hilarious being in an industry where everyone is so hypersensitive to news and recent events and discussions. While people in some industries use recently released textbooks to keep up to date, the people in search are aware of the news before it exists and will be able to tell everyone that they saw the death of SEO coming years before it happened.

This is all to the good and the people who are doing just that will be able to continue to mold the art of traffic development and continue to make money for clients.

I know that singular vs. plural matters in SEO, but does capitalization matter?

It appears to make a difference in the search engines some of the time. The official explanation is that ‘We may take this into account if we can recognize that it is relevant to the query.’ E.g. Someone search for ‘US’ is probably looking for info on the United States whereas someone searching for ‘us’ is less likely to. If you check you will see that queries for ‘us magazine’ and ‘US magazine’ return slightly different results. (Now that is the official explanation, in practice I seldom see that to be the case – it really seems more random)

So the answer as it relates to what you’re working on is that I would take how it looks to the potential client into consideration more than anything else. I usually capitalize the first letter of each word in the title and in the description I usually capitalize the first letter of words that I would like to emphasize.

Who Uses the Internet?

Some interesting data on who is using the internet. I found this while I was trying to determine the status of the “Digital Divide” in the United States. Is it worthwhile to market to an adult demographic that has a household income below 30,000 and no education?

The answer is a resounding yes with 50% of adults in that category using the internet regularly.

I did additional research to determine the amount of time actually spent on the internet by these people. Turns out that people with less education and lower income now spend more time on the internet. Explanations for this seem to have to do with the “opportunity cost of leisure time” — that low-income users have fewer other uses for the time. Another possible explanation is that low-income individuals find the internet more useful, are able to find information which they would not normally be able to pay for, and those with low-income who are willing to pay for internet probably value it more highly than others.

It is time for a legitimate SEO conference in Atlanta. I’m just saying. West Coast has it locked. The SEO Conference Circuit twists and turns through the West Coast, hits Chicago and New York and then gets on a boat and heads for London.

Not Fair.

Leave a comment if you want to help organize this thing or if you have resources or if you know others who will be interested.

I will update this post regularly with intermediate goals and projects as well as a description of progress.

Thanks,
Eric

When the new Google Local Business results began showing in the search results there was much speculation about what it took to get moved to the top of the listings. Around July of last year I heard reports from people who had attended some of the SEO conferences – apparently not even the top experts had the secret. Thanks to Lisa Barone from The Bruce Clay Blog for a great description of the SMX Give It Up session.

Google Local Ranking Tips: How Google ranks local listings in importance:

* Registration with Google Local
* Perceived closeness to center of city
* Number of local reviews
* Local link popularity
* Local Phone Number
* Participation in Online Menu Services
* Quality of local reviews (the stars)
* City name inclusion in anchor text
* Local Directory Listings
* Keyword/City in Business Name
* Domain Authority
* Address Inclusion on the Web pages

We went to the AiMA event last night. The topic was finding the value beyond click to conversion. There were some very professional speakers and they did a wonderful job presenting the material. The first two (Yahoo Guy and Google Girl) were really good speakers talking about things that we already know and that we’re already talking to clients about.

The Yahoo Guy (Ron Belanger) got really deep into why search is so important for Brand Development, going a little more deeply into the fact that customers use search to develop their concept of what your brand means to them. He had some stats to support the fact that most internet users will go to search and taste 2-3 brands before making a purchase decision. In this context if you’re the brand leader you can continue to dominate using search and ensure that your brand is there on top of search results in the most pleasing light possible. If your brand is less recognized you can use search to develop the brand and to disrupt the brand message of the top competitor. He makes the point that people go to search to find that positive message reinforcement even for products they may have already purchased or companies they already are engaged with. The post purchase value of search marketing is very easy to underestimate.

The Google Girl (Raku Coryne) talked more about actual metrics and using Google Analytics, but didn’t go into specifics as much we may have liked. It was very good, but a little like she was repeating the high level stuff from Avinash’s blog. She spoke of the importance of using Analytics data to develop actionable insights. She mentioned bounce rate as a key performance indicator, and described some of the ways you can use it. She also discussed the factors that make up a good metric. I think she would have done well to go more into the advantages of segmenting the data and comparing those metrics from segment to segment.

There was some talk of the importance of mapping offline purchases to online initiatives and vice versa, and promise that there were ways to do this although it still seems pretty grey. Coupons and online only 1-800 #s can be used to quantify online to offline to some extent. Google Analytics can be used to demonstrate the degree of effect an offline initiative might have to online. This can be done by comparing the geographic area where the offline campaign (TV, Radio, Mailers etc.) took place to a geographic area where it didn’t, or by comparing the online traffic for the time span of the offline initiative to a time span where it was not present.

I thought that the majority of this material has been covered and discussed thoroughly for quite some time now and I kind of had the feeling that the guy from Yahoo was giving the same story he gave 5 years ago. That being said, if you were not familiar with the concepts then it would have blown your hair back so I’m sure someone got something out of it.

In this industry every now and then you run into strange situations and strange client requests so often that it becomes the norm. Some of my favorites are the people who absolutely must get ranked for certain phrases but have a very limited budget. Other times there are people who have budget aplenty but have no ability to wait for Google to register the changes.

At times people feel like it is their right to be in the Google index almost as though Google were part of the global government - It’s my right to be indexed in Google! I’m a citizen of Earth!

Presently I have a company contacting me that does not rank for their own domain name in Google. If you search for their domain it shows that Google has indexed it as the hosting company place holder page. This is fun because we get to see if we can take some steps to get Google to reindex it in a hurry. (How do you rush Google?)

1) Examine Source for Errors
2) Customize Robots.txt
3) Add to Google Webmaster Tools
4) Add to Yahoo Site Explorer
5) Point a couple of hyperlinks to the site from a site that Google spiders regularly

These are the first steps I will take to lead the spiders to Arborview Capital Partners.

An Adwords Authorized Reseller in Atlanta may have made a significant error that could cost them their credentials and possibly litigation.

What is an Adwords Authorized Reseller? Why do I feel so much less confident in the term Reseller as opposed to Google Certified Adwords Professional? Or Google Qualified Company? Or perhaps best of all Google Analytics Authorized Consultant?

Why is it so difficult to find good information on the Adwords Authorized Reseller program?

Before I go into a detailed answer to these questions I should back up and tell you the story. Some of you already know, but bear with me I will try to keep this brief but pointless.

My first encounter with a Google Adwords Authorized Reseller was when one tried to woo a client of ours with the suggestion that they could give him great results in 30 days for a relatively low fee. This company then made a near exact duplication of the website we developed and put it at a slightly different domain name and proceeded to serve Adwords ads like it was their common practice.

When I found the site I was shocked. How could someone consciously do something that violated Google Guidelines and Adwords Policies and with no potential gain!? Now I know that there are plenty of people who will violate Google Policy in order to get traffic to their site. I know that there are plenty of people who have done this successfully. I do not know of anyone before who has done it in a situation where there was no potential upside and the potential downside is being completely removed from the Google Index.

It turns out that the results that this company provided was nowhere near as effective as ours and it was easy to explain to the client that he had made a boo-boo and that all could be forgiven as soon as the offending copycat site was removed.

But what of this unethical company? Is there a regulating body that should be notified of this behavior? Is there any potential blowback from reporting them?

These are the answers I don’t have - If you’ve got ‘em let me know. It is companies like these that give us all a bad name.

Regards,

Eric