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Promoting one’s business
This week I took my first foray into Google AdWords. We had an existing program, but I had a mandate to promote a newly launched website for a client. So while doing that I started experimenting with keyword based ads. This is great fun, and if you keep your bids and daily limits low, can be a relatively inexpensive exercise.
This combined with Google Analytics stats on our 20 or so websites can really bring it together.
While Google does not give out all its secrets, an adwords campaign combined with analytics gives you a decent picture of how traffic gets to your site.
Analytics even tells you where people are browsing from, their web browser (IE is still in the lead) even their internet connection method.For example, let’s say I have an AdWord keyword setup for the phrase “total proctocolectomy.” I can see from the AdWords stats that there have been 350 instances where that phrase triggered my ad to appear. I also see that 11 people clicked on the ad.
Then I can switch over to the analytics on cine-med.com and see how many people arrived at our site by google searching for the same phrase, both direct google searches as well as adwords click throughs. Let’s say there were the 11 adwords clickthroughs, but another 15 direct google searches for that phrase.
This may indicate that if 15 people searched for this phrase and linked to our site through a normal google result, I may not need the ad, which costs me 15 cents every time someone clicks on the ad.Now would be a good time to ask my fellow COW readers to please NOT google search total proctocolectomy. I can see my adwords costs on that phrase going through the roof thanks to the COW’s huge readership!
Just kidding, there is no adwords campaign for this phrase, it is an example, remember?
Getting back to what I was saying. If 15 people clicked through from a search result, and 11 clicked through from an ad, there is a possibility that there is some overlap. There may be only 4 people out of the 15 who were distinct users from the 11 ad clicker-through-ers.
Only Google knows for sure.
Needless to say, there is a big difference between adwords campaigns for “proctocolectomy” versus “video production los angeles”. If you are selling your services, you need to be much more clever in how you differentiate your ads from everyone else.
Fun stuff.
Mike Cohen
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3 Replies
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[Mike Cohen] “Getting back to what I was saying. If 15 people clicked through from a search result, and 11 clicked through from an ad, there is a possibility that there is some overlap. There may be only 4 people out of the 15 who were distinct users from the 11 ad clicker-through-ers.”
Mike, there is no overlap, searchers and content network clickers are not the same people. If you do a ‘site-targeted’ campaign you will pretty much see your client’s content network. I hope that helps.
Your image and video ads for your clients can return a 8-1 ratio over searches alone.
Study Google’s Ad-sense program. You’ll see what I mean.
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Randall,
I always wondered about this. Does one get increased hits through image/video-based ads because people see a pretty picture and just want to click it, or do these types of ads genuinely attract more people who are ready to buy?
More to the point, who cares about the click-through ratio of the ad itself, what about the conversion ratios once that visitor is on your site? I’d rather get 3 clicks a day (much cheaper) that all convert than 3,000 clicks that do nothing. Any stats or even ball-park stats you can throw out along these lines?
Thanks!
Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com -
[Brendan Coots] “Does one get increased hits through image/video-based ads because people see a pretty picture and just want to click it, or do these types of ads genuinely attract more people who are ready to buy?”
The site owner has already provided the keywords to Google for the related ads he wants to see on a particular page on his site – so in some ways that replaces an actual search. So everyone viewing that page is interested in dog-food or wedding veils or whatever. If they are looking to buy – they click through. The beauty of a video ad is that there is no charge for the viewing!
I haven’t gotten sales tracking info from my clients to give you any numbers on which group provides the most actual sales.
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