All posts in Google Adwords

Adwords Support – Get It!

by UberAffiliate on January 12, 2008 in Google Adwords with 27 Comments

Many people always ask questions dealing with their Adwords account. Some people ask “Google declined my ads, what do I do to get them back up and running?”, or “Google randomly killed my campaign, how do I fix this?” Most people use emails, which suck and Adwords will get back to you in a week and not help you at all. I can’t tell you how many lives I’ve saved by giving people more Adwords contact information. Because email isn’t the only way to get in touch with them – they have a phone number AND a live chat option. First here’s the phone number that I call :

Adwords Phone Number : 1 (866) 246-6453

There ya go, call them up and tell them your troubles. They can actually be pretty helpful. If you don’t want the long distance call, or just don’t feel like talking on the phone, there’s a live chat option, here’s step-by-step how I get there (maybe there’s a faster way, but I just do it this way) :

Step 1 – Click the “Help” tab at the top of the Adwords main page.

This will bring up a little pop up box.

Step 2 – Click on “My Ads Aren’t Showing”

Step 3 – Click on “Why can’t I see my ad?”

Step 4 – Click “Chat with a specialist now”

And there you have it. Just enter in your info and chat away with a live Adwords representative. Hopefully now you guys don’t have to sit waiting long hours for emails that all in all won’t give you any solution to your problem. If something is messed in your Adwords account, just complain to them through the methods I showed you!

Popularity: 2% [?]

How I Would Win the Google Online Marketing Challenge

by UberAffiliate on December 20, 2007 in Contests, Google Adwords with 10 Comments

So a few of you actually have emailed me telling me to get in on the Google Online Marketing Challenge designed for college students. Unfortunately since I’m not in college, I can’t compete in this I don’t think, but I’ll think about it out loud right now and let you guys know how I would win it. To get a quick idea of what it is, I’ll post a quick quote about it from Google :

Student groups will receive US$200 of free online advertising and then work with local businesses to devise effective online marketing campaigns. They will outline a strategy, run their campaign, assess their results and provide the business with recommendations to further develop their online marketing.

How I Would Win

Alright now here would be my strategy in winning this baby. Keep in mind I haven’t thought about this at all, and I’m 100% thinking out loud with you guys here.

So the first thing that popped into my mind was the gym that I used to work out at. It’s a nice gym and used to be pretty crowded when it first opened (I was one of the first members). After about a year or so, less and less people kept their membership, and now it’s not that lively at all. You could tell they were getting desperate because they’d always call me saying I could have 50% off my membership if I renewed, and all these other deals. I’d probably work with these guys in getting their business back up and alive.

The next thing I thought of, was that there’s a vitamin/supplement store right next door, almost connected, to the gym. But they’re two separate places, they don’t work together at all. Before I started promoting the gym, the first thing I’d do is try to set up some deals between these two neighboring places. I’d talk to both places and try to get a partnership formed that could include possible deals like :

Spend $50 or more at the vitamin store and get a free gym membership next door.
Sign up for a 3-month plan at the gym and get $50 in free supplements/vitamins.
Sign up for an aerobics program at the gym (which is free, but you obv have to pay for the gym membership), and get a free bottle of Hoodia or something from the vitamin store.
Buy a fat burning product and get a free one-hour session with a personal trainer.

Just things like that in which both parties would benefit from increased business. Now that we have some deals set up, it’s time to advertise them. Because I established a partnership in which both places generate traffic for each other as well as themselves, I just doubled my audience. Instead of advertising to people who are just looking for a gym membership, we can also advertise for those searching for diet pills (which is a much larger market).

Next comes my lucky $200 in Adwords. Not much at all, but I guess we can try and make it work. Since we now have a larger market, there’s a ton of different things we can test. For one, we’ll obviously have geotargeting on, and I’ll be targeting cities within maybe 30 miles of the gym. That may even be pushing it, as there are fitness centers everywhere. I’d make adgroups for the following types of keywords :

fitness centers
gyms (local gym, gym in _____, etc)
weight loss center
weight loss (in general)
diet pills (as well as Hoodia, etc)
supplements

The list goes on and on. I could generate quite a number of keywords from all those topics. Now as far as potential ad copies, I’d write something like :

ABC Gym Buffalo
1 Month Free Membership.
5 Miles From {Hometown}.
ABCgym.com

ABC Gym Buffalo
1 Month Free Membership.
Free Supplements. Call Today!
ABCgym.com

Weight Loss Clinic
Find a Weight Loss Clinic
in Buffalo. Free Consultation!
ABCgym.com

Free Hoodia at Buffalo Gym
Sign Up for 1 Month and
Receive a Free Bottle of Hoodia!
ABCgym.com

I could write hundreds of different ad copies all day and split test them all. The ad would go to the companies website, and depending on the type of ad, would go to a different page. If someone clicked through the keyword “hoodia”, I would emphasize the free bottle of Hoodia with a 1 month membership. I’d have a contact form as well as the companies phone number. Since we have multiple pages, we can track where the converting traffic is coming from. I know that this company doesn’t advertise on Adwords, so perhaps they could increase business quite a bit by doing so. Once we got customers filling out forms and giving us their phone number, we’d start the second phase of our strategy in actually reeling them in. If the customer is about to turn down the offer, we make a “personal” offer and offer them two bottles of Hoodia, or two months at the gym, etc. From there we can look at revenues and profits, and see if the entire thing is making or losing us money.

I would definitely have to think about it and set it up for a couple weeks, but this is just my thinking right at the moment. So with 20 minutes of thought, that is how I would win the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

How would you win? Tell me either in your own blog post, comments, or through email. I’ll pick my favorite entry and post about it.

Popularity: 3% [?]

QuickTip Time : Adwords International Traffic

by UberAffiliate on November 11, 2007 in Affiliate Tips, Google Adwords with 18 Comments

What’s up guys. I’m heading back home later today and then Monday I’ll be back to normal blogging, but I didn’t want to leave this blog feeling empty so I’m posting a quick tip. I learned this maybe a month ago and it’s helped one of my campaigns make an extra $500 profit/day, so if you don’t know this trick maybe it can help you as well.

So about a month ago when I was posting about Adwords, I talked about how I had a big campaign running and gave some of my experiences with it. A few weeks after it was running, I realized I was getting an INSANE amount of international redirects to another offer. With a landing page CTR of about 60%, on the last day before I implemented the trick, I had over 800 international redirects. That’s redirects after they clicked through. I was losing a lot of money because of this, and had to figure out why.

I look in my campaign and see that I’m targeting the US only…no problems there that’s what I want. But for some reason analytics shows traffic from over 80 countries or something like that. So I call up Adwords and express my displeasure with international traffic, and the girl looks through my account and says “It’s not something on our end. In all my years working here I’ve never seen a US only campaign bring in international traffic.” Yeah…right. Here’s where the trick comes in: I went into my campaigns and instead of targeting just the United States, I targeted each individual 50 states. The next day my international traffic was nearly nonexistent. I went from 800 international clicks a day to 10-20.

To do this, just go into Campaign Settings, and then change the Geotargeting. Change it from continents to City/Region or something like that, and just go through and manually add all 50 states to the list and save it. Hopefully that cuts your international traffic down a bit and puts some more money in your pocket.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Google Adwords Launches CPC Site Targeting

by UberAffiliate on November 8, 2007 in Google Adwords with 8 Comments

I was in the lounge of the Hilton hanging out with a bunch of Wickedfire and Neverblue people, and someone was browsing their iPhone and said “whoa, it looks like Adwords just launched CPC for site-targeting.” One of the guys said “be right back, time to switch campaigns” and sprinted away. I didn’t really feel like moving so I waited until this morning, but Google did indeed turn on CPC bidding on a site-targeted campaign. Pretty awesome since in the past I had sites that converted pretty well for my offer but I ended up losing money because I was getting killed on CPM.

For those newer affiliates who haven’t messed around with site targeted campaigns : you can create content network campaigns and target what exact sites you want you ad to show on (you show up where they have Adsense ads). In the past, the only way you could have you ad running was with a CPM model : you paid for every 1,000 impressions to the ad. If you had a horrible CTR and got a ton of impressions, you could run up a nice bill. Now, you can just target sites and only pay when somebody clicks your ad.

You can still have ads in any format with the new CPC model, and minimum bids are $0.01 (as opposed to $0.25 per 1,000 impressions). I like this move a lot personally, because I’ve stayed away from site-targeting after some bad experiences with getting killed on CPM. I already had plans for sites I was going to run CPM, but now that I can run them CPC, I’m predicting that ROI is going to shoot way up. Good move Google.

For the official link, click here.

Popularity: 1% [?]

10 Adwords Mistakes

by UberAffiliate on October 20, 2007 in Google Adwords, PPC with 31 Comments

Instead of always look at what to do, it’s sometimes just as useful (or even more useful) to look at what not to do. You may be doing a bunch of things right with your campaigns, but not realize that you may be doing this one thing wrong. So let’s take a look at some common mistakes in our Adwords campaigns :

Mistake #1 : Combining Search and Content Networks

One reason this happens is people simply forget to turn the content network off when they start a new campaign. But people also just naturally run search and content under the same campaign. Separate search and content campaigns, they’re two different ways of playing the game and you have to play them both differently. Different bids, keywords, everything. It’s just easier to spread them apart. I personally split them between different accounts. My accounts are either search only or content only.

Mistake #2 : Dropping Bids too Fast

Another mistake people make is getting too anxious about dropping their bids and making the transition from the “losing money” phase to the profitable phase. Example : you start a new campaign and you’re bidding for the front page. You have an awesome CTR and your conversions are pretty good, but you’re losing money. You start your bids at $1.00 and you’re in position 3. After the first day, your average CPC naturally falls from $0.98 to $0.95. You’re sick of losing money and want to turn things around, so you drop your max CPC down to $0.95 to match the average. Wrong move. Your position is now going to drop, along with CTR. You didn’t give Adwords enough time to “love” your campaign. In this current situation, I’d wait until average CPC drops to about $0.85 before I start pulling down my max CPC to $0.95. Slow and steady wins the race. Maintain that position while ultimately paying less and less for each click.

Mistake #3 : Starting Bids too Low

Cool, so you start your campaign and all of your keywords have an OK quality score with a minimum bid of $0.10. Let’s start our bids off at $0.10 then, right? Wrong again. Starting your bids off at the minimum will start you in a crappy position (unless theres 0 competing ads), which will then translate into low CTR and everything that follows. Quality score gets slapped, you’re paying more with no improvement in position, etc. Ignore minimum bids and focus on what you need to bid in order to get you into a position that you’ll see good CTR.

Mistake #4 : Broad Matching From the Start

Don’t start your campaigns with broad matching keywords (unless you have a completely insane list of negatives). Broad matching will get you a lot of impressions, also a lot of which aren’t targeted enough to get a good CTR. Start off using just phrase and exact match, and you’ll start off with a better CTR. Play that for a little until your bid prices start falling and QS starts increasing, and then introduce some broad matched keywords.

Mistake #5 : Not Enough Testing

Many people simply aren’t testing enough ads in their campaigns for optimal CTR. They’ll split test 3 or so ads and once they find the best ad, just leave that one up and let her ride. Never be content with your ad CTR – always fight to increase it. Find the best ad out of that three, and then match it up against a new one. Test everything. Turn on “rotate ads evenly” and give each ad their fair share.

Mistake #6 : Too Many Keywords in Adgroups

I’m not going to spend too much time on this one because it’s boring and you’ve heard it 100 times before. Less keywords = more targeted = higher CTR and conversions. Don’t pull 2,000 keywords from Wordtracker and put them all into 1 group. Keyword Companion is an awesome tool to break up keyword lists. So don’t be lazy, the more time you spend optimizing, the more money you’ll make.

Mistake #7 : Not Tracking Everything

You have to track things other than just your ads – track keywords too! You may think your campaign is going well with a 3% CTR – which isn’t bad by any means. You look into one of your adgroups and see that there’s a keyword getting 1/2 of the impressions and has a 0.53% CTR. Taking out this keyword will skyrocket your CTR. Track the CTR of keywords and how they convert – it’s important.

Mistake #8 : Not Testing by Time of Day

When I say “track everything”, I mean track everything. Track down to the hour of the day. When you look at hourly stats, you can see times of the day when CTR is awesome and so are conversions. You can also see the “gaps” in your day that CTR and conversions are down – you may be losing money during these times. By optimizing this, you’ll increase your profit and CTR. Both good things for your Adwords account.

Mistake #9 : Realizing That Landing Pages Effect Adwords

Many people believe that Adwords is all about what’s in your account, and once they click the ad it’s now all just about the CTR on your landing page and how it converts. Adwords also looks at your bounce rate, or how many people leave your page after just 1 initial impression. Bad bounce rate = bad page in Google’s eyes. It’s tricky, but work on getting users to stick around your page for a little before moving on to the offer and converting there. You can actually increase conversions while decreasing bounce rate, it just takes some effort and testing on your part.

Mistake #10 : Getting Discouraged too Easily

One big thing to realize is that Adwords is certainly not an easy beast to tackle. I’ve talked to affiliate marketers that are making $5,000/day off of Yahoo and MSN, and still are having a rough time with profiting in Adwords. Too many people make a couple attempts at Adwords, fall flat on their face, and then walk away with their tail between their legs. Adwords takes a lot of time and more importantly patience to master. I’m not even close to mastering Adwords yet, but I’ve had the patience to lose a lot of money with it for the sake of learning a few things that I’m now sharing with you. Six months ago, I didn’t have the patience. I put up a few campaigns, had them run for about two days before they got slapped, and then called it quits with Adwords. Don’t be that me six months ago, because I know that’s how a lot of you are now. It’s like a David and Goliath sort of thing. Adwords is the Goliath, but a few small tricks here and there can have a big impact.

I know this was more of a “classic” article that’s been done many times before, but I hope you maybe pulled something new from this one. Cutting out the number of wrong things will increase the number of right things, which means more money in your pocket.

Happy Googl’ing.

Popularity: 6% [?]