Google Adwords Experiment – Week 2

Posted By: Paul

I haven’t been too impressed by adwords so far. Most internet marketing experts say that adwords is the #1 way to generate traffic for your site. I agree. However these people often downplay the fact that this traffic is expensive. You’re literally paying for every click.

This means you are getting charged every time someone clicks an ad to visit your website, regardless of whether they buy something or not. I check my adwords stats everyday. Whenever I see that I received several clicks, but no conversions, this reminds me of the fact that every 6 minutes, somewhere around the world, a kitten dies. In other words, this makes me VERY SAD.

The basic principle behind adwords is simple. You want to earn more money than you spend running your campaign. This way you can actually earn a profit. But turning this simple fact into reality has been extremely difficult.

Adwords Lessons Learned

My biggest goal this week was to control my adwords spending. I successfully accomplished this by targeting only the google search network. Over the past week, I haven’t come close to spending my daily budget. Last week, I was exceeding my daily budget cap of $50 a day… by the time I woke up at 7am to check my computer. Now I run adwords the entire day and this only costs me $1 – $2 per day. This situation is a bit of a paradox though because the lower cost means fewer clicks. This means fewer visitors to my website and fewer chances to make a sale. But the most important thing to me is that I’m spending an amount that I’m comfortable with, and I no longer feel stressed out that I’m spending $50 without anything tangible to show for results.

As mentioned in the previous week’s report, my biggest gripe was spending this money without recovering any actionable data. I effectively eliminated this worry by targeting only the search network. Now I can actively track which specific keywords and phrases convert well for my website. I don’t have enough click through’s to make any definitive decisions yet, but I can already tell you that this has been a very informative process.

Some of you might remember that I also lowered my daily budget from $50/week to $20/week. This didn’t really make a difference once I focused on the search network because my daily spending doesn’t even come close to my daily campaign budget. But this had a huge psychological impact on me. I get a lot of peace of mind knowing that my daily budget is at a much more manageable level and I’ll never be blindsided by the same blunders that I made last week.

Second Week Results

The first improvement I made this week was to target new keywords. I accomplished this by creating new adgroups focused around a single root keyword and adding several variations of the word to the adgroup. I only had 10 adgroups running last week, but I doubled this number by creating an extra 10 adgroups this week. Targeting new keywords has made the most visible improvement to increasing my website traffic. After I added the additional 10 adgroups to my campaign, the number of clicks I received on my ads almost doubled. Can’t say i’m too surprised with these results but I am quite pleased, and I look forward to continued exploration of this route.

The second improvement I tried was adding ALOT of spelling variations to my most popular adgroups. I added over 100 extra keywords of various misspellings to these groups to see if I could improve overall adgroup performance. The results were actually quite surprising. It seems like the only misspellings that performed well were the ones that deleted the very first character in my key phrase. For example, the misspelling of the key phrase “gmat study guide” become “mat study guide.” The misspelling of this term, actually proved to be pretty popular and scored me several hundred impressions. And a big bonus was that bidding for this term wasn’t particularly competitive. I was also able to achieve an average ad position of 3.8 for less than 20 cents a click. Strangely enough, the other 99 spelling variations of my root keyword turned out to be absolute garbage. I received zero impressions for the other miss-spellings. Needless to say I’m not going to be wasting my time targeting these variations in the future.

Adwords Campaign Improvements

I’m excited to apply a new function in adwords that I recently learned called Dynamic Keyword Insertion. The formula to insert this into adwords is {KeyWord: Default Text}, where if I were targeting the keywords “puppy dog training,” “poodle dog training,” and “police dog training” my ad would automatically insert the chosen keywords into my ad. For example if I composed my ad to read:
Expert {KeyWord: Dog Training}
From an award winning trainer
Satisfaction Guaranteed!

And someone searched for the term “police dog training,” my ad would pop up and display as:

Expert Police Dog Training
From an award winning trainer
Satisfaction Guaranteed!

The default text only comes into play if your key term exceeds the character limit on the first line. This is really supposed to increase your CTR because the exact search term is used in the advertisement, and the search terms are also highlighted in bold on the page.

Another idea I want to try is formatting my ad so that the three lines of text form an arrow. This is a visual trick that I read about from the Shoemoney blog that has supposedly improved his campaigns by as much as 25%. I have no idea why this would entice people to click on ads more frequently, but it sounds like a fun experiment to try.