Optimizing Your Conversation Rate
(Google Adwords)
History of Page Search
- GOTO.com established Page search in1998. GOTO later changed its name to Overture, which was acquired by Yahoo.
- Goto/Overture/Yahoo based its searches on "Linear Bidding" or "RPC" Rate Per Click.
- Basically stating higher the bid, the higher you will be appear in the search results.
Google took another approach to Page Search. Google decided to focus on "RPS" Rate Per Search. They focused more on Quality Score Based Bidding System. Scoring based on the following:
- Cost per click
- Click Through Rate
- Congruency between Keywords and Ads
- Historical Performance (If site does not have a history Google will use a comparison performance with relevant sites.)
What is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords is a quick and simple way to advertise on Google, regardless of your budget. AdWords ads are displayed along with search results on Google, as well as on search and content sites in the growing Google Network, including AOL, EarthLink, HowStuffWorks, & Blogger. With searches on Google and page views on the Google Network each day, your Google AdWords ads reach a vast audience.
Google Adwords lets you create up to 25 campaigns per account, with up to 100 AdGroups per campaign as of this writing. It's important to organize your keywords into separate AdGroups to maintain finer control over the ad text for each keyword. If you had one AdGroup for the following keywords: ‘widgets', ‘plastic widgets', and ‘wooden widgets', then the ads created for that AdGroup would have to apply to all of the above keywords.
If your ad text reads: "50% off all plastic widgets" and this ad is showing for the other keyword phrases in the same AdGroup, then someone searching for ‘wooden widgets' probably will not be inclined to click on your ad that is focused on people searching for ‘plastic widgets'.
Google Adwords are set up on 4 levels
- Account Level: User ID, Password and Billing.
- Campaign Level: Campaign Control- a) Geography b) budget c) schedule
- Ad Group Level: Managing Ads
- Keywords Level: Manage Keywords for ad groups.
Split Testing Ads
Comparing two ad groups by sending 100 visitors to the two groups.
It is critical to split-test your ads. Google Adwords has a built-in feature that lets you automatically rotate the appearance of your ads so different ads can be shown an equal number of times (or weighted more heavily toward the ad that gets more clicks if you prefer - you can change this in the campaign settings). The benefit of this approach is that you will be able to see which ad gets a better click-thru rate (CTR).
Since Google Adwords rewards a higher CTR with lower cost per click (CPC), it is crucial that you know which ad has a better CTR. Sometimes just swapping the ad text that appears on lines 2 and 3 will make a big difference in your ad performance.
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Robert Schow
StoresOnline, Inc.
