Adpuma: Search Engine Marketing

Good news:  Google AdWords has many special instruments making possible tracking and improving every detail of your campaign.  I will return to them in my future posts.

Your website can appear in search results in two places: organic results and sponsored links.  Both can be improved with well-applied effort or well-allocated money.  How do you choose between them?

Search engine optimization specialists (SEO) will tell you that organic results are, well, organic.  They reflect your actual content as well as reputation (isn’t it cool, things like karma, reputation and love expressed quantitatively?), they improve with time, and they are hard to mess with.

Advertising yourself in pay per click (PPC) campaign has its advantages, too.  

• Ad campaign starts to work immediately.  Search engine optimization takes much longer to bring useful results, it is more expensive in the short run (short as in years) and gets you only so far. 
• People who click only on organic links are harder to convert.  In short, they don’t shop, they research.   This may change as more and more prospect customers become technically sophisticated, but so far, unless your product is a computer professional tool or a geeky toy, straightforward ads may be more useful in terms of getting real paying customers.  On the other hand, organic visitors are free. 

Ideally, you should do both SEO and PPC.

• Your ads compete against other ads on max bid and quality score.  Higher PageRank and relevance of your site means higher ad quality score means lower CPCs for same positions (or higher positions for same CPCs).
• It is impossible to optimize a website for every relevant keyword without compromising the content meant for human reading.  In the end, you don’t write for the search spiders nor sell to them. 
• If you are big and lucky, your ads on top of the search results page AND your organic results on top of the organic list together will drive competitors down the page. 

Google AdWords is not the only marketing tool out there.  I promise I’ll be back with Yahoo and MSN later.

1. Type “google adwords” in google search window.   Capitalization doesn’t matter.  If Google AdWords is not the top result, something must be wrong. You will be prompted to log in or to create your account if you don’t have one.  You @gmail account is not an AdWords account, but you can use same name and password here.
2. Next screen will prompt you to choose the “edition” — a set of the available tools.  The rest of this post deals with the  
3. Welcome to Adwords screen prompts you to choose the language you customers speak and your location.  You are not charged anything and have no obligation until you confirm your account.
4. Create an ad.  This is what your customers will see, and you have only 95 characters (100 including display URL) to claim their attention. That’s why it is called “creating”. Technical requirements:  25 characters of relevant words in a title and two 35 character lines to explain.  Fourth line is for the short display URL, fifth for an actual URL there customer arrives.  The actual working  site is a must — Google AdWords checks for this before letting you to pick keyword.  Relevance, however, is not verified at this point:My actual ad: 
5. AdWords lets you pick search keywords on the next screen and suggest some categorized choices based on the available content of your destination site.  These are the words by which you will be found.  For the first random ad Keyword tool suggested keywords relevant to my old reviews and recipes site where no seaweed or brides are ever mentioned. For the actual ad, AdWords suggested keywords relevant to search engine marketing.  In some cases, prospect clients may not know professional terms for the products or services they need — it is your job to figure out how they call what they need.  These will be your additional keywords.  Bear in mind that different words have different CPC rates, and usually more specific are cheaper than more general.
6. Next screen prompts first to choose currency.  This setting cannot be changed once your account is created. Next, you choose daily budget Choose a currency, daily  budget and maximum cost per click. Budget controls frequency of your ad appearance: you can spend any amount starting with $1.00, but once your budget is used up, your ads will not show for the rest of the day.  Cost per click (CPC) combined with relevance of your ad controls the position of your ad among competing ads. 
7. Figure out the relevant CPC and realistic budget.  What is your conversion goal?  Do you really need to be in the top results?  Suppose you choose “best” keywords and outbid your competitors on CPC, but don’t get any deal.  You end up spending too much on an ad campaign. Traffic estimator link on the same screen will show you estimated CPCs, ad positions, click and cost per day.  If you set maximum CPC too low, the estimator will show the word “non-active”: your ad will never appear in searches for this keyword.
8. Review your selections and sign up.
9. On Campaign management screen go to My account -> account setup -> billing preferences.
10. Choose payment option.  It cannot be changed easily.
11. Hit “proceed”, sit back and watch.  I choose very low daily budget and relatively low CPC for this example campaign.  After first  24hour cycle Account summary on Campaing Management screen showed zero clicks and zero impressions.That means that they were shown lower than competitors’ ads — most of people searching for sem marketing specialist never got to see Adpuma ads. After second cycle still zero clicks and over 800 impressions.   And no one of this 800+ people was impressed sufficiently to actually click on ads!  
12. Next step of campaign is tuning ads.   Google AdWords allow you to create a group of ads to show in rotation, automatically choosing the most successful one to be shown more often.  An ad campaign can contain several ad groups.  Each group has it’s own set of keywords.  AdWords allow broad or specific matching and negative keywords.  We will talk about groups and campaigns in the next post.