I’m inside of a month from attending the 10th semi-annual Stompernet Live Conference in Vegas & am getting pretty excited. I’m especially excited since I get to share my biggest passion at the conference… Twice.

My Speaking Gig; On Friday, Oct 8th, I’ll be doing a 90 minute presentation on the wonders of AdWords.  I get to talk about all of the things that you can do that can multiply ROI from your AdWords expenses 2x, 4x… or even 50x.  Free traffic is great, but even someone who’s ranking #1 for their desired keyword can’t test to improve conversions like what you can do with AdWords.

Set up your AdWords account in a day; On Sunday – I’m doing an optional 8-hour interactive bootcamp, where I’ll be spending 8 hours with a small group of business owners who want to set up their AdWords account the right way.  Our whole day will be spent working on the attendees’ AdWords accounts, and setting them up for maximum profitability.  I do this on a one on one basis all the time, but I’m really looking forward to the added benefit of the group dynamic, and I’m especially excited to see results that day vs. waiting 30 days as I do with my on on one clients.  I’m even thinking I might have a little contest, and give some sort of reward for who ever gets the first sale/lead during our actual bootcamp!

Get in for free. Non-members can attend the conference for $497, but if you’re a Stompernet member, it’s free.  Coincidentally, as a Stompernet faculty member, I’m allowed to give away 30-day free trials, so if you start your trial today, you can attend the Vegas event for free and then decide if you want to continue your membership.  Check it out.

If you attend the event, be sure to look me up. I’d love to meet you in person.

–Joel

I keep reading all of these debates about quality score on the forums, & even get into the occasional discussion at conferences, but I have to say… I’ve got some good news for you…  Quality score isn’t nearly as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be.

Yes, you won’t get a lot of impressions if you have a low score (as in below 3 or 4), and yes – boosting a score from a “7″ to a “9″ might reduce your minimum bid from $.50 to $.05, but let me ask you this; “Would you rather have 5 or 10 sales a month from the traffic you’re bidding a nickel for, and getting an average position of #10 or #12, or would you like 300 to 500 sales a month by bidding high enough to actually be on the first page of Google?”

If you want the latter, you should stop beating your head against a wall hyper-focusing on how to get a “10″ quality score, because all a “10″ is going to get you is the ability to get 3% to 5% as much traffic as you would get if you competed with the big boys for a legitimate amount of traffic.   If you want serious amounts of traffic, you’re going to have to bid to be at least in the top 5 or 6 spots, and unless there are less than that many advertisers, quality score won’t matter. I repeat; Quality score does not magically make nickel bids appear in the #1 or #2 spot for competitive keywords when others are bidding $1 or $2 for those same terms.

All a high quality score does is lower your minimum bid, but that’s a minimum bid that could end you up in position 10, 20, or even 30, not in the top 8 or 10 spots where the highest volumes of traffic are. If you’re competing for the top spots on Google, a quality score of 9 won’t be any cheaper than a quality score of 7. Trust me. Your time is better spent focusing on other aspects of your business.

It never fails — I’ll take over an adwords account, and be my client’s instant hero by dropping their PPC costs by 20%, 40%, or even 80% without sacrificing sales one bit. The sad thing is that one of the things I do is so simple – I feel guilty even taking their money. The secret?  I put those “helpful” tools known as “Broad Match”, “Phrase Match”, and the Content Network in their place so they stop eating up my clients’ precious advertising dollars.

If you’re advertising on Adwords, and want to get the highest ROI (from a percentage standpoint) keep this one simple thing in mind: Broad Match, Phrase Match, and the Content Network, are great for generating high-volumes of low quality traffic that will bleed your budget dry (and screw up your metrics) unless you really know what you are doing. If you focus 90% of your efforts on exact match, you’ll skyrocket your ROI by simply doing your homework, and then turning off (or significantly dialing down) broad match terms, phrase match terms, and the content network. If you cringe at the idea of turning off those match types because they’re driving the majority of your Adwords traffic, odds are that you haven’t done enough keyword research.

Here is a simple (and free) tip for letting Google help you do your keyword research:

Let’s say you have a dog training e-Book.

Step 1: Search for “Dog Training” on Google, and make note of the top few websites. (Pick the top one or two who are paying to advertise on Adwords, as well as the top one or two in the organic search results.

Step 2: Go to Google’s free Keyword Tool, and let Google tell you what they think those competitors’ sites are about. (Google will then GIVE YOU a list of keywords that you could be bidding on.)

Step 3: Wash/Rinse/Repeat the above steps until you feel like you’ve collected enough keywords from your competitors, and add the keywords you feel are most relevant for your site into your adwords account as “exact match” terms.  (Google will even help you collect them!)

After repeating the process above on 3 or 4 of your competitors’ websites, you’ll have 3 to 15 highly targeted sets of keywords that you can write highly targeted ads for, and drive that traffic to your site using exact match only.  You’ll be surprised at how much “exact match” traffic you can get at a fraction of what you were spending before on broad/phrase/content networks.

Then, after you’ve done some testing, you’ll be able to tell exactly which phrases are actually converting for you and turn off the phrases that you’ve been wasting your money on. Those two steps will allow you to exponentially increase your ROI in a surprisingly short amount of time. (There’s more you can do after that – such as tiered bidding on broad & phrase match terms to prevent “cross pollination”, use of embedded match to prevent “keyword contamination”, and very targeted placement targeting on the content network using both image ads as well as text ads, but that’s another topic for another day.

The method above is just one of many ways you can gather targeted keyword lists for your advertising efforts. Play around with it, and let me know your thoughts!

To your success,

–Joel

After I did an Adwords presentation last week in Orlando, my friend Toby Miller pointed out something very interesting on the search network. Below is an example of what we saw.  Our first instinct was that this was part of Google’s new testing with image ads, but that’s not the case at all. Depending on what you do about it, this can be good news, or bad news.  (continued below)

This discovery isn’t that they’re placing image ads where your text ads used to appear — it’s that they’re placing products that are listed with Shopping.Google.com in that space…

What does that mean to you? Quite simply – it means that if you’ve got physical products – you better get them onto Google’s shopping network.  If your products aren’t listed with Google Shopping, and one of your competitors’ products are — guess what… Your nicely performing Adwords ad that used to be above the fold will now be bumped down below the fold. Not only that, but since Google is giving themselves the benefit of having images next to their ads – buyers will click those ads far more often than yours – pushing your CTR (Click Through Rate) even lower, which in turn will drive up your CPC (cost per click).  For some – this will drastically decrease sales. Those will be the lucky ones.  This could very well push others out of the business!

The solution? Get your products on Google’s Shopping network before they start adding products in your niche. At least that way, you’ll have their help in selling your wares vs. helping your competition, and possibly pushing you out of that market.

PS – You can also expect to see image ads on the search network in place of text ads, but that’s another post for another day.

I’m attending Jerry West’s SEO rainmaker event this week and I gave a presentation on getting the most out of Adwords.  Because I was the last speaker of the day, I crammed about 2 hours of information into a 45 minute presentation, so I’m including the slides from my presentation here.

Just enter your name & email below & I’ll send them right over. Implementing the “best practices” I share in these slides could cut your adwords expenses by as much as 30%, and, increase ROI by 300% to 2000%. I hope they’re helpful.

PS – SEO Rainmaker ROCKS! Keep an eye out for the next workshop.

Learn how a company advertising on Adwords discovered a rarely used checkbox – and by simply unchecking that box, they nearly tripled their ROI, and instantly added about $115K to their bottom line.

I get into discussions with folks all the time about “paid traffic” vs. “free traffic”, and my contention is that free traffic is wonderful when you can get it, but the control you get with paid traffic can far outweigh any amount of free traffic that you might get.  In fact, I’d argue that to optimize your site to get “free traffic” is putting the cart before the horse if you haven’t first done research via Adwords to make sure the keywords you’re targeting actually convert.  Much like the precise control of a manual transmission over automatic transmission in a sports car, paid traffic can have the same benefits when you know what you’re doing.

Let’s use local real estate search as an example. Here are 10 things you can do with Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN Pay-Per-Click marketing (PPC) that simply can’t be done (or is very difficult to do) when you’re at the mercy of the ever-changing organic search engine algorithms.  Apologies in advance – this list is off the top of my head and in no particular order.

1. Track which keywords convert into leads, and which don’t. In most cities, “[CITY] real estate” gets 3 to 10 times as much traffic as “[CITY] [ST] real estate” or “[CITY] [STATE] real estate“, but in others, it can be the other way around.  I’ve identified some cities where “[CITY] real estate” only gets 20% more traffic than “[CITY] [STATE] real estate” — but “[CITY] [STATE] real estate” converts into a lead twice as often.  While everyone else is battling it out to be on the first page of Google for “[CITY] real estate” because they assume it is the most searched for phrase, I own the #1, AND #2 spot for “[CITY] [STATE] real estate” and pull in 3 to 20 times as many leads as the other suckers optimizing their sites for the wrong phrase.
2. Market on other people’s websites (including your competitors). Google has this wonderful thing called the Content Network that allows websites (both big and small) to advertise your site – when appropriate by using “Adsense”.  I’m not talking about going and adding comments on someone elses blog… I’m talking about flat-out advertising where you’re telling visitors exactly why they might want to come visit your site.  Anytime they display your ad and someone clicks on it, they get paid a few cents, and you can end up getting traffic that simply can’t be had elsewhere.  I’ve received thousands of highly qualified leads from legal blogs, local eateries, and even competitors’ websites. In some cases, those leads have cost me as little as twelve cents! (Not per click — per lead!)
3. A/B split testing. Wondering if you should offer a “7 deadly mistakes every seller should avoid” report or “7 tips to help sell your home fast, and for top dollar” report?  One just might get twice as many signups as the other, but unless you test them side-by-side and track which report has a higher interest from your visitors, it’s going to be difficult to tell.  With Adwords, all you have to do is have Google drive half of your traffic to one offer, and the other half to the other offer and within a few days, you’ll know which offer gets you more leads.  (In fact, as long as you are using their tracking code — they’ll tell you which version is better.) If you’re not good at math, you can use a tool like splittester.com or Google’s own “optimizer tool” that is built into adwords to make the decision for you.
4. Target two different audiences searching for the exact same term. A person who lives in Dallas Texas searching for “Dallas real estate” can be directed to a page that caters to someone with local knowledge who might also have a home to sell and wants a free market analysis on their home.  Throw in a “buy & sell through me and I’ll move you for free” type coupon, and you’re likely to get a double-header.  However, someone living in California searching for “Dallas Real Estate” is most likely considering relocating & you’ll be more likely to convert them into a lead if you direct them to a page that offers a free relocation package.  Send local sellers to one page directed at sellers, and send people relocating from another state to a different page that offers a free relocation package.  This can be done by using the “geotargeting” feature built into Google Adwords.
5. Get traffic from people searching for your competitors. If “XYZ Realty” has a strong presence in your area, there will be a lot of people looking for “XYZ Realty in [CITY]“.  Funny thing is that they are usually just looking for real estate information.  With the exception of a couple major franchises, there is nothing saying you can’t happen to have an ad for your website displayed when someone searches for that term. It doesn’t have to make any mention of their company — just mantioning “[CITY] real estate”
   in your ad will get enough of those visitors coming to your site.  (This traffic, BTW, can be 50% to 75% less expensive than bidding on “CITY real estate.“, and it usually converts into leads at a higher rate. Granted – this could be done organically, but you have to optimize your landing page for that company’s name, and that can be hard to do when mentioning a company that you are not affiliated with.
6. Drive traffic to the highest converting page – not just your home page. It’s a proven fact that most websites’ lowest converting page on their website is their homepage. This is because visitors are usually required to search for what they are looking for, and the more hoops your visitors have to jump through, the less leads you’ll get.  However, many search engines display the homepage of your website even though there might be another page within your site that would convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads/sales.
7. Rank for hundreds of long-tail phrases instantly. Are you a hyper-local marketer?  Great. What if instead of spending hundreds of hours writing hyper-local posts, you could simply bid a nickel per click on hundreds of those phrases, and determine which of them get the highest search volume.  Then, after spending $5 or $10 on hundreds of visits (and thousands of impressions), write posts based on the phrases that get the most traffic. That way, instead of hundreds of hours writing content for phrases that might, or might not get traffic, you can focus on the phrases that will get you the most traffic possible.
8. Get exposure 5 minutes from now – even for highly competitive phrases. Again – free traffic is great, but it can take months (or years) before the search engines find you and decide that you’re “worthy” of being displayed on the first page of the SERPS for the phrases you’d like to get found for.  After you take the 10 or 15 minutes required to set up an Adwords account, you pick what keywords you want to rank for, and bid on them.  You’d be surprised — A budget as small as $50 a month could get you a ton of valuable leads if you’re smart about what phrases you bid on.  The beauty is that you never pay for a click unless your visitors actually click on your ad.
9. Get the most bang for your buck out of classified ads/postcards. Do you canvas mail neighborhoods, or still run classified ads for your listings?  Before you spend who knows how much on such a campaign, test a headline or two via adwords.  In a matter of minutes, you could write two or three ads on adwords, and test which ad gets the highest clickthrough rate.  After spending $25 to $50 on Adwords, you might find that one ad “pulls” 3 to 5 times as often as the others. The same will likely happen if you use similar language in your newspaper ad or postcard mailing.  (This could be done via thousands of postcard mailers, multiple phone lines, and direct response tracking methods, but why bother? It’s way cheaper to do via Adwords.)
10. Switch websites or overhaul your old site, and never worry about losing your hard-earned search engine traffic because Google or Yahoo don’t like your new site as much and drop your site from the search terms you were ranking for before.  With Adwords, you can change the page you’re driving traffic to in about 2 minutes.

In summary, Adwords can either be a great way of getting additional traffic otherwise not obtainable, or it can be a tool that can be used to increase the efficiency of your SEO efforts.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.