Is your cost per click creaping up? Is your conversion rate sinking? If so, you have some new goals for next year.

Happy New Year!

The answer may be that your Google Adwords campaign has been limited by your budget. Timing your ad campaign is critical. What happens when your potential customer decides they are ready to buy, but they can’t find your ad when they search for you? The answer: They are going to buy from someone else!

You want your ads to show up all the time, but the reality is that no one has an unlimited budget. The best Adwords strategy is to manage your own spending, rather than passing the buck to Google, who isn’t thinking as hard about your campaign as you will be.

Read this blog to learn more about actively managing your AdWords account.

Limited Budgets Actually Limit Potential Customers

Every AdWords account has a pre-set budget. You estimate your budget based on what ads have cost in the past, and how much your company is willing to spend.

In theory this works – you allocate a monthly budget, and Google then divides that into a daily spending limit, for example $40. Once that is defined, a Google algorithm “decides” when to show your ad.

Because ads are displayed based upon your past click through rates, if you set your budget too low, Google will spread out when your ads appear to ensure that you only spend that $40 each day. (At least, Google makes its best efforts to hit that target.) In other words, in a limited by budget campaign, your ads won’t always show all the time. You can change the display settings to add some flexibility into your campaign, but overall, you don’t have any control over when ads are shown on a given day.

At other points in the day, the only ads that show up are your competitors – automatically costing you business.

If you are looking for your ad and can’t find it, your budget may be the problem.

A budget limited campaign also limits the effectiveness of your marketing to attract qualified customers to your website -the whole reason that you are created a Google AdWords account in the first place!

See the table below for an example of how you can tell if your campaign in limited by budget.

It’s the Repeat Visitors Who Really Matter

Budget always matter, but attracting quality clients to your website
matters more.

Very few people will buy from you the very first time they visit your site. It’s the
repeat visitors that are on your site to purchase your goods or services. One of
my clients found that returning visitors accounted for 15% of their AdWords
traffic, 28% of their conversions and a whopping 40% of their revenue since the
beginning of 2010. Almost half their revenue was generated by just 15% of
their website visitors!

When people do a search for you – whether they are first time visitors or returning
customers – you want to make your ads front and center. This means staying on
top of when your ads appear, a feat that is nearly impossible using a limited
budget campaign.

Active Management Attracts More Customers

It’s easy to understand why you want your ads show to your best prospects all the
time, but the reality is that no one has an unlimited budget.

The solution is to manage your budget yourself. Set your AdWords budget like you
would a credit card limit (higher than you are actually willing to spend), and
then hone your account settings with specific restrictions that will limit your
ads to appear only to your best audience. This would be similar to managing your
daily shopping budget by selecting specific stores and deals instead of giving
$200 to every store you walk into.

Here’s how to begin developing an actively managed AdWords strategy:

·         Restrict Keywords to Critical Searches:

The first step to active management is restricting your campaign’s
keyword and keyword match types. Look at your past Google Analytics and pause
spending on terms that generate the most conversions at the lowest cost per
conversion. This will decrease your overall spending, while still displaying
your ads for searches that have produced measurable results in the past.

The last time I implement this strategy with clients, their
conversion rates increased 23%, giving us seven additional customers that month
for the same spending.

Using active management, some days you will under-spend your ideal
budget, and some days you will overspend.  If are consistently
under your overall budget, you can now consider adding additional keywords. If
you are overspending, you can further limit your ads by taking a detailed look
at your AdWords traffic, and limiting other keywords.

·         Add Additional Limits: 

Additional strategies to further limit when your AdWords appear
include:

1.       Limit Which Searches Show Your Ads: AdWords’ default
setting spools your ads to Google, Google Search Partners, and the Google
Display Network. You can limit this display to only those networks that work the
best for your business. For some retail businesses, display ads (content
advertising) works well, but for most B2B clients it is a waste of money because
it does not attract new customers. You can also choose to eliminate Ads that
appear on Mobile devices, if you don’t have clients who will buy your goods via
their Smartphone.

2.       Stage Campaigns By Day or Time: You can also elect to run
certain keywords or campaigns just on a designated high conversion day, for
example a restaurant could show a special offer on Fridays and Saturdays when
people are more likely to go out to dinner. Campaigns can also be run at
specific times of the day, such as during businesses hours. By limiting traffic
to days and times that have produced conversions, your ads will show to the most
motivated buyers.

3.       Restrict Geography: If you are a local or regional sales
firm, consider limiting the geographic area where your ads are shown. Industrial
supply chains want to have national exposure, because you can ship these
products. But if you are a local vacation rental within a specialized locale
(e.g. those within driving distance), you not need to display ads to a
population who are unlikely to cart their grandmother and the dog for more than
3 hours in the car.

By honing your strategy, you can control your spending while
retaining your most profitable conversions.

You have developed an AdWords campaign to attract customers to your website. This
means finding the right search terms to attract good prospects to your website,
and by making it easy for those prospects to return to your site a second
time.

Conversion is the operative word. The more insight you use to
evaluate your AdWords campaign, the more likely your campaign will be to reach
people who are actually going to buy from you. You don’t want ads that are an
indiscriminate hammer, banging at every search criteria (nail) until you run out
of budget each day. Instead, you want a heat-seeking marketing campaign that
makes your budget work for you.

If you can’t find your ads when you search for yourself, how will good prospects
find them? Make sure your ads reach the right audience by continually evaluating
your AdWords processes, and actively revising your strategies on a regular
basis.

 About Ask-Susan, LLC Ask-Susan has been providing website marketing for small businesses
for 12 years. She specializes in Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising because it
provides great results that are measurable. As a Google AdWords Certified
Partner, Susan has in depth knowledge and 10 years of experience in how to run
successful PPC campaigns. Past and present clients include Business to Business
clients that sell nationwide and Vacation Rental companies.

From Google Analytics:

Visits: Site Usage –  The number of times your visitors has been to your site (unique sessions initiated by all your visitors). If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

Conversion paths, the sequences of interactions (i.e. clicks/referrals from channels) during the 30 days that led up to each conversion and transaction. Conversion path data include interactions with virtually all digital channels. These channels include, but are not limited to:

• paid and organic search (on all search engines along with the specific keywords searched)
• referral sites
• social networks
• email newsletters
• direct

The Path Length report shows how many conversions resulted from conversion paths that contained 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, or 12+ channel interactions.

It is possible for a visitors to have many channel interactions (clicks) during a 30 minute session which is counted as one visit by Google Analytics. So that is why the data looks so different.

Our Multi-Channel Funnel data shows that 59% of purchases and 56% of revenue is from paths with a path length of 1. While a “visits to transaction” report shows that 80% of of the purchase occur after 1 visit. So in a 30 minute “visit” the average visitor who purchased, had more than one interaction (click) giving a path length > 1. Not surprising.

Now you know why the data from each report looks different, wouldn’t it would be nice to see path length per visit and path length per visit.

Meanwhile, for our company that sells low cost rags, we started advertising for rags and towels to clean up the mess. And we are running these ads just in states affected by the storm. This flexibility lets us target clients when they need our products and services and keeps us from wasting money on vacation home rental when we know that people are searching for information on the hurricane and how to clean up!

Stay safe!

1) Google Webmaster Tools – another free, valuable tool from Google – use it if you have it set up for your website.

2) Yahoo Site Explorer – simply put your URL in the top box and it generates a list of the pages on your site as well as your inbound links.

3) In Google.com type   link:www.yourwebsitename.com with no spaces for a sampling of the inbound links (e.g. incomplete set)

For fun, check your Google Analytics account to see which of the websites with links to your site are actually referring you visitors. Look under “Referring Sites” in Traffic Sources.

Need more inbound links to post your referrals and rankings? Read my blogs on inbound links: select from the category at the right.

Have fun linking up!

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1) You plan to make a new website someday and want to use that name

2) You change domain names or have two similar names like sandandsea.com and sandnsea.com and people may type in one  by mistake. Then I would have the less dominant one point to the latest and greatest domain name. sitesofboston.com still points to ask-susan.com even though I changed company names seven years ago. That is a free or inexpensive service from register.com

3) You want to use it on marketing materials and have that domain “point” to an existing website. Personally I think that is confusing.

4) You don’t want your competitors to use it and owning it keeps them from using it. You don’t have to use it for anything.

Popular question: Who are your “friends”? Google says:
• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list.
• People in your My Contacts group in Google Contacts.
• People you’re following in Google Reader and Google Buzz.

Did you realize that everyone on your Google email list can see the +1′s you select? You can choose not to display your +1s through a setting on your Google Profile which is found at Google Profiles.

How to add +1 to your website and more of your questions answered at Google +1

This is what it looks like when you select +1 on a website:

Google +1

Obviously this is Google’s attempt at a “Like” button and they control the search results display page and formats but do not have as strong a network of “friends” as Facebook. It will be interesting to see how well this new function works for Google and for us.