SEM Best Practices

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Guide To Ad Copy Testing

1. Decide how many copies that you would like to test.  Use the control as your baseline, and for ideas to test check out the competitive landscape.  Also, You can test ad copies based on what you are looking to get from your test (increased CTR, Branding, Improve Conversion Rate or Order Value.) Leverage product/service competitive advantages or what sets you apart from everyone else.  You can call out sales, LTO’s, or a Free value added service.
2. Once you have decided on the number of ad copies to test, make sure you can track each one independently from start to finish using tracking links, in-house reporting, or a Console Analytics Program. 
3. Launch the test, but make sure you test the ads on a rotating basis, this will ensure that each ad gets nearly the same amount of impressions and makes breaking down the results easier.
4. Allow the ads to run for enough time to get relevant and accurate results. 
5. Do not select the winner solely based on CTR but look at the results from start to finish for each ad.
6. Breakdown the ads versuses the control ad that had been running before the copy test.  Look at all aspects from the results and remove any and all outliers.  Select a winner based on a combination of CTR, Conversion Rate and Order Value.  Also look at the costs associated with each ad. 

Users Taking Longer to Convert

According to the following study it is taking longer for users to convert in terms of both actual time and site visits.

http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/e-commerce/41848.html

This is making paid search conversions harder to track because some users are buying weeks apart from their inital click/visit.  Patience and in-depth tracking are the keys to succesfully managing a paid search campaign.  There is more than just conversion tracking offered by each console that is needed to track the behavoir of users because they only are able to get a certain % of all the orders.  The full analytics packages or in-house reporting should be used to give you the visibility into customer behavoir and time between orders.

Increasing Traffic on Adwords

There are a few ways you can increase traffic.

1.) Increasing position. Obvious, but moving up to an average position of 3 will get you into most of Google’s Syndicated Network. If you are in positions 4-6 you might want to consider moving up to position 3. Once in position three you will start to be syndicated and get more impressions.

2.) Copy Testing. Test using new copies that have different call-outs than your competitors. If you have a free product/service, call it out. Use ALL Caps on the first letter of each word in your ad. Use the one alloted exclamation point. If you have a Patent Registered/TM use those unique characters in your ad. (R) or TM. To get an additional line of space you can sign up for Google Check-out. Or set-up a geo-targeted account that will add a line under your add to call out the geo-targeted area. Try adding the product/service to the Domain in your ad. I.E.) www.freeforums.com/adwordshelp. This can give you another keyword or two to be bolded.

3.) Turn on the content network. Be very careful with because of the number of impressions and clicks you might get. This users are not searching for your product or services so the Conversion Rate tends to be much lower.

4.) Open up the search traffic to other countries. Be careful with this because of click fraud issues and not giving the user the best experience by landing them on an english only site.

Google.com/adpreview

This link allows the advertisers to see where your ads show up to the common user.  Google has new technology that targets the IP address of a user and serves ads based on how they click or don’t click on each.  If you do a lot of searches for your ads and don’t click then Google will move them around on you, so you will not be able see the true spot.

https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Google Content Pay-Per-Action Beta Test

Google has offered something that can make the content network more valuable.  They are offering the chance for users to only pay for a competed action from the content network.  The action can be anything that you assign and Google takes care of paying the publishers.  You also have the ability to pay the price that you want for that selected action.  This test is important because of the content networks notoriously low conversion rates and questionable traffic.  You don’t have to pay for unwanted clicks, only for conversions.  For more information check out Google’s Blog http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/03/pay-per-action-beta-test.html.

Q & A

Q. Googlegal Jul 13th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

Hi there. Just a quick question. Is it worth using PPC Campaigns on other search engines besides Google?

A. Yes, it is worth it because of the additional reach that you can get on other search engines.  Yahoo & MSN account for nearly 30% of all internet searches.   Plus with the way things are going on Google, the CPC’s are getting more and more expensive.   In an ideal world, that may happen in the not so distant future, you would have one account rep, one console to log in and one invoice every month.  But to compete and get the necessary reach on the internet through all the search networks you must advertise on more than just Google. 

New Google Adword Feature ~ Search Query Logs

Google has recently added a new feature to Adwords, the ability to see the Search Query Logs.  This report allows you to see what search queries are being tied to your broad and phrase match keywords.  It also allows you to see performance of each with all the metrics and even conversion if you have conversion tracker enabled.  The benefits that this new feature offers are:

1. The ability to drive efficiency through adding negative keywords to block out traffic you don’t want.
2. The ability to bid on the exact variations of keywords you are being matched to that are performing at a decent clip.  Adwords rewards granularity and it is cheaper in some cases to bid on that exact match variation.  You can also track performance easier and potentially can create more targeted ads.

What to Think About When Creating Paid Search Ads

Obviously, first & foremost you must get the detailed limits for character use for the search engine that you are working on.  I will use Google in my examples, they allow a Title of 25 Characters, and two description lines each of 35 and only 35 on each line.  Then you have x amount of space for the domain name. 

 Writing a Google ad is an inexact science, there are so many different thoughts to take into account when writing your ad. Here is a list to name a few:

• Competition
• Product/Service
• Looking for Clicks & Only Clicks
• Looking to Qualify User before they Click
• Budget
• Testing

You must take into account the competitive landscape that will be around your ad.  You would like to make your ad stand out and be unique.  If you are offering a product/services that is different/better than the competition, make sure the users knows about it.  Also, you can try to generate ideas by looking at the competitors copies when trying to write your ads.  Try to use the search space leaders as a benchmark to compare your ads to.  What are they doing? Why are they doing it?  Put yourself in their shoes.

Your Product/Service plays a major role in your ad writing as well.  You could have a major competitive advantange with your product and you can spell it out in your ad.  If you are trying to chase the market leader, get creative and make your product look as appealing as possible.

If you are looking to just generate traffic through PPC and not get a sign-up/conversion than there are ways you can phrase the ad to make it look appealing to the user.  A Free Callout can work very well in certain situations to increase CTR as well as using ALL CAPS and (R) or TM Symbols.

If you are looking to qualify the user before they click on your ad then you should look to explain your product well-enough so the user knows what he/she is getting into.

Budget plays a role becuase you can have a more aggresive ad with a bigger budget or you can become very very conserative if you are on a tight budget.  There are many other ways to maximize your budget which I will talk about in other blog posts.

The final topic is testing.  Split run A/B testing plays the biggest role in writing successful creative.  Testing multiple copies and having the ads show evenly allows you to see which ad(s) provide you with the optimal CTR and Conversion Rate.  Then you can continue to test down the road after you have seen that type of ad that works for your product/service and accomplishes what you are looking for.