Uncategorized | PPC Hacking: AdWords and Quality Score Secrets Revealed

The Magic Keyword “Buy” in AdWords

July 21st, 2009

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Most newbie AdWords users focus very strongly on CTR as a way to measure the success of their advert.

In previous posts I already explained why focusing on CTR is wrong and why instead you should focus on conversion:

What CTR indicates is simply how many people out of those that made a search clicked your advert. However it doesn’t indicates who those people are. Are they buyers? Are they people purely looking for information with no intention to spend a single dollar?

People that search on Google have a specific intent in mind, and they summarize it into the search query. However the search query being just a few words it doesn’t tell everything about the intent of the user. Is he looking to buy? Or just searching for information?

The second step in expressing that intent is clicking on an advert. The user will click the advert that he feels is the most relevant to his intent (and not just to his search query).

So if for example you add the word “Buy” in your advert people that have the intent to buy will click more on that advert and people that don’t have the intent to buy will click less. Usually by adding the word “Buy” in your advert you’ll get a lower CTR, but the reason is not because your advert is not good, it’s simply because the amount of people with the intent to buy is less than the amount of people with the intent not to buy.

Let’s look at this example:

magic-word-buy

In the advert with “Buy” the CTR is lower, however the conversion rate is higher and overall the advert with “Buy” generates more conversions.

Also besides generating more conversions this advert gets half the number of clicks, so the cost is is also less.

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Giotto De Filippi Uncategorized

Appearing on the left on AdWords

May 26th, 2009

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Sometimes it happens that your advert is showing on #1 on the right like in this example and there are just organic results on the left.

It’s actually possible in this situation to force Google to display your advert on the left like this:

(Note: Sometimes your advert will appear naturally on the left, what I’m talking about is how to ensure that when you are the #1 ranking advertiser on AdWords you always appear on the left and not on the right. The benefit of doing that is that by being on the left you’ll get more clicks and so a higher CTR)

The way to do this is to bid a large amount on the keyword. This doesn’t means you are going to pay more than when you appearead on the right (if your advert is already showing #1), you may actually end up paying less if your CTR increases.

So let’s say you are currently bidding $0.5 for the top slot, but you appear on the right. And let’s say your average CPC is $0.3 (this is determined by what the other advertisers did bid).

If you now bid $10 instead of $0.5 you’ll still be paying $0.3 as AdWords uses a proxy auction model, and your CPC is determined by what the other advertisers are bidding. So the rule is that if you are already #1 and you increase your bid your CPC will stay the same but your’ll now get promoted to appearing on the left simply because you have a large bid amount.

There is however a danger in doing that, if one of the other advertisers that are currently below you were to increase their bid let’s say to $9 you would have to pay $9 for that click. So you have to closely monitor your AdWords spend and immediately reduce your bid if you see your CPC increasing too much.

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