Pleasanton Web Design

UPDATE: I am out of gift cards for now. Will be getting some $75 credits soon, so check back. Please note that I need your mailing address, not your email address. Businesses in the U.S. get priority. Sorry – SEO and Web design companies are not eligible.

As a Google Engage partner, Google gives me $100 Google Adwords Gift cards to hand out to my clients. I have a limited number of left. To get yours:

1. Go to http://www.tpdesigns.net
2. Click on the “Contact” link at the top of the page
3. Fill in your contact information – put your mailing address in the “Message” field,

That’s it! I’ll mail you the gift card. Supplies are limited, so do it now. The $100 is only valid until January 31.

I had my first experience with a Google Adwords Strategist recently. As a Google Engage partner, Google issues me Adwords credits to pass out to my clients. The credits are only good for first time Adwords users.

I had just started to set up an Adwords campaign for one of my clients and issued them a $100 credit, when they received a call directly from Google. Google now offers free setup support for first time users, and this Google employee called my client to offer their services. My client is busy however, and after failing to contact them via phone, the Google employee emailed them a lengthy list of ways they could improve the campaign I was in the middle of setting up for them.

My client put the “Adwords Strategist” in contact with me, so we could work together to optimize their campaign. Here are the good and the bad ideas I got from our collaboration:

Good

1. Use all of the tools Google makes available to you to maximize click through ratio (CTR). This includes ad extensions (phone, location & sitelinks). It takes more time to setup, but for competitive keywords it should help your CTR. I think the major advantage to using all of these extensions is that it makes your ad larger than competitors who aren’t using them.
2. Negative keywords. This bit of advice was given as part of what I consider a bad strategy for this particular campaign, but I’ll give credit where credit is due.

Bad

1. Increase the budget. (My approach is to create a tight, efficient campaign and THEN increasing the budget, when the ROI is proven).
2. Forget about the niche, long tail keywords and only go after the highly competitive (aka expensive) keywords. ( OK, I can see now why I would need to increase the budget!)
3. Use broad match modifier type keywords to get more impressions and clicks, and add negative keywords to control CTR.

At that point in the campaign I was experimenting with exact match and phrase match keywords, and many of the phrase match keywords were giving me way too low a CTR, even with negative keywords. So how was I to control the CTR, and therefore the quality score, with broad match modifier keywords, which are less targeted, if I was already having trouble with phrase match? I didn’t get an answer to that question, just the repeated advice that I increase the budget and aggressively go after those competitive, broad match modified keywords and negative keywords.

I think the problem is that Adwords Strategists are low level customer services employees, well trained by Google in the mechanics and general strategies of running an Adwords campaign, but without a lot of experience in running campaigns for a variety of businesses. In addition to that, their strategies are not only aimed at making you a successful Adwords advertiser, but also maximizing earnings for Google.

For those of you who would like to take advantage of Google’s free Adwords setup support, and maintain the campaign yourself, keep in mind that Google’s advice will generally tend to:
1. Cost you more money and
2. Push you towards the higher traffic, higher cost keywords.

That has been my experience anyway.

Google Adwords Express is the stripped-down version of Google Adwords, the pay-per-click search engine advertising program that is Google’s bread and butter. Adwords Express launched last summer and has had mix reviews from advertisers.

The idea of Adwords Express is to give the non-techie business owner a way to spend money on local advertising with Google Adwords. Everything about the campaigns are automated, and the set-up is extremely fast, performed through your Google Places account dashboard. The problem? As with any activity, businesses not willing to put the time (do it yourself) or money (hiring a professional) into it will generally get little out of it. The standard Google Adwords certainly has a steep learning curve that gets steeper as time goes on, but without that learning period a small business advertiser will not understand online advertising enough to get much out of it.

The main benefit of Adwords Express touted by advertisers is that of increasing “local visibility.” So if you are not worried about getting clicks and converting them to sales, but rather just exposing your brand to the local searching public, maybe Adwords Express is a no-brainer. However, if you are looking to expand your audience beyond a 15 mile radius of your physical location, you can’t do that with Adwords Express.

Another major limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that you can only create a single ad per business category that you have listed in Google Places. So if what you want to advertise is not represented by a category in Google Places, you’re out of luck.

Does the “Express” mean that Adwords Express is less expensive than Adwords? In the competitive niche I did my research for, the answer was “No.” The cost per click (CPC) was within the same general range, but on the high end.

Based on my research, I don’t believe Adwords Express gives the small business owner the tools necessary to run and efficient campaign. This, coupled with the fact that the CPC costs are no lower than a standard Adwords campaign, makes it difficult for me to see how it would be possible to get a positive ROI when using this service.

Google is at it again. Their “Google Caffeine” infrastructure update was vastly increased their computing power. That update has paved the way for features many of the new features that we’ve seen recently, such as Google Instant.

Today you may notice little magnifying glass icons next the your search results. Clicking on any of these icons will activate “Google Instant Previews.” On clicking you are presented with a thumbnail image of the website in the result, and from then on, rolling over the other results will also display the thumbnail of the associated website.

One positive result of Google Instant Previews, for those of us in the web design business, is that sites that are horribly ugly (a.k.a. not professionally designed) will most likely see a drop-off in traffic. Of course this will depend on the vertical involved, but I think most consumers will use this preview to filter out sites that look cheap, low-quality and unprofessional. Made For Adwords (mfa) sites will hopefully see a significant drop in traffic as will a lot of other spam, which is often easy to identify visually.

Across the board I think people will see less traffic overall, but their bounce rate should also decrease, as searchers no longer need to click in to get a preview of their website.

Another consequence I would expect, would be a lower CTR (click-through rate) for Adwords. Why? 1)Because Adwords ads do not have the Instant Preview feature, they are functionally separated from the natural results more than they have been in the past. In fact many searchers don’t know the difference between sponsored results and natural results, and to them, clicking on one was no different than clicking on the other. Now if the searcher likes the Instant Preview feature, they will be less likely to waste the extra click on the sponsored results that don’t have it. 2) At popular screen resolutions the Instant Previews actually block the Adwords ads.

I must admit I can’t imagine that Google would do anything to decrease the click-through for Adwords. It’s their bread and butter, and almost all of the recent changes they’ve made recently have had the effect of pushing searchers to Adwords, be it by rearranging the real estate, or pushing searchers to more popular key phrases.

What do you think?

Does Google Adsense Make Sense?

I’ve been “messing around” with Google Adsense for a few months now. I’ve also been on the other end – running Adwords campaigns that included the “Content Network” or, in other words, Adsense ads.

I’m sure there are people getting more clicks and making more money from the program than I am. Somebody blogging on electronics, cell phones or other consumer products are obviously more likely to get those high ticket clicks. Probably the most successful at raking in the Adsense cash are those who’s sole purpose is to capture the searches and direct the visitors to the ads.

The most obvious way to increase clicks is to increase the number of visitors to the page. Another way is to embed the ad in the content, so that the user may accidentally click on it, thinking it is part of the article. Yet another way is to optimize the page for the long tail keywords, and provide no useful content, so that the visitor’s best bet to get at the information they seek is to click on the ads. I would consider this last technique spam, and would never use it. I would also see it as having the best chance at high click-through.

From the Adwords advertiser’s perspective, would you want a lot of clicks coming from spam? Do you want to pay for visitor’s who have accidentally clicked on your ad because it has been embedded in the content? I think there are two sets of answers to those questions, depending who you are:

1. If you are a small business with a limited budget, the first thing I would do would be to unclick the “Content Network” box in you ad campaign. Stop advertising through Adsense for a period, and see if your conversion doesn’t increase. In addition, I’ve found that not only the clicks per page view increase when excluding the Adsense network, but when you do get a click it is more likely to convert to a sale.

2. If you are a larger company with a diverse marketing strategy, internet marketing is probably giving you your highest ROI of all channels, so you probably don’t mind the lower conversion per dollar, if it means higher overall volume.

So, to answer my own question: does Google Adsense make sense? – I’d say, if you are internet marketer who’s raison d’etre is to get those clicks, then yes, or course. For a site like mine, however, that has the ads up incidentally, “because I can,” then no, it doesn’t really make sense. It’s a waste of effort. But it’s still kind of fun.