We’ve made a video of the Berkshire Google AdWords Presentation from July 28th at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts in Pittsfield, MA. This one is about 48 minutes but we will also do a “short and sweet” conceptual version that we will share here as well.
Here are the notes we handed out at the event:
Using Google AdWords for Business, Non-Profits and Artists
It’s not about doing EITHER AdWords OR Search Engine Optimized Content (SEO):
It’s about promoting the SEO content you’ve invested so much in creating.
Steps to Get Started:
1. Build Keyword List
2. Create Website “Landing Pages” Based on SEO Content
3. Create Ad Copy
Establish Budget:
Cost-Per-Click
Daily Budget
Monthly Cost
Bidding on Keywords
After July’s excellent turnout we urge you to register now for the September 30th ‘Web Wednesday’ clinic about using Google Local Business Center to get to the top of local search results.
Google Local Business Center is a free campaign product from Google to help make local searches for businesses and services more relevant. The clinic, which will start at 10am, will explain how to register properly as well as how to tie in a Google AdWords campaign. This will be a much less complex topic than AdWords so we should be able to wrap up the clinic by 11:30am.
We will also be able to answer follow-up questions to July’s ‘Web Wednesday’ on Google AdWords. If there are additional topics you would like to see covered in this or a future clinic, please contact us.
This clinic is FREE – please let your friends know and please register now.
About 20 people showed up to our clinic on how to get started with Google AdWords yesterday which really filled up a sweltering room at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittfield. Many thanks to everyone who showed up and endured the environment. Our next clinic, which will partially be on Google Local Business Center, will happen at the end of September.
Yesterday we went about 1/2 hour longer than expected due to the plentiful, and very intelligent questions from the attendees. AdWords seems very complicated because it is so feature-rich, not necessarily because it is a complex idea or method. We did have a lot of back and forth regarding search engine optimized content and we want to reiterate that AdWords and SEO are not mutually exclusive activities.
There is huge value in creating SEO content but there is a lot of time, effort, and $$$ involved in creating this content. Once you’ve created SEO content there is a false assumption that this content will immediately crawled and propogated around the world unless you already have a huge amount of web traffic and are regularly getting indexed by the search engines. It will take time for traffic to build on your SEO assets and it will take active promotion on your part to start getting traffic. Meanwhile, you’ve built an asset that you could more fully leverage by directing paid search traffic to it.
You can quite easily create a transaction-oriented landing page for a Google AdWord out of informational SEO content on your website. As revealed in the clinic, visitors to your website that arrive via organic links are “browers” looking for information, whereas visitors to your website that arrive via an AdWord are much more likely to engage in transactive behavior even if they are visiting the same content [this is a citation from a study by EngineReady.com and outlined on Webmaster Radio on 7/28/2009].
The numbers don’t lie and since the time required in fine-tuning your content for SEO is considerable, it only makes sense to make the most of the content you’ve invested in by getting a version of it to the top of results pages via a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign.
Thanks again to everyone for their interest and time – we will post a video version of the slideshow here presently.
This clinic: “Using Google AdWords for Business, Non-Profits, and Artists” will last about 90 minnutes and it will be held in Pittsfield, MA at 10am on Wednesday July 29 at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, 28 Renne Ave.
For more information and registration please go to the Eventbrite page or check it on Facebook.
As someone who specialized in helping clients get the most of their inbound marketing programs, I’ve always realized that inbound marketing is part of a marketing mix and should not exist on its own. Yesterday’s Google crash has been written up by some other marketers out there, but not many have taken the position that you should not be 100% reliant on any one marketing program.
Google handles well over 60% of all web searches and that, in combination with its other services means that a failure at Google can affect: email, chat, AdWords ads, chat, banner ads, YouTube, Google Voice, Google Analytics, and many other functions that include communications, advertising, and measurement. Sure, you might say, you should also have Yahoo! search ad campaigns, and ok, that might get you some other exposure but what I’m trying to communicate is that AdWords and SEO shouldn’t be what your organization relies upon exclusively.
Some changes in Google’s indexing algorithms last year prompted AdWords guru, Perry Marshall, to tell his followers via podcast that they needed to diversify their marketing efforts. Changes in indexing can severely affect a website and its AdWords campaigns for weeks or even months. What would happen to your organization if you stopped receiving web traffic from Google for a month or two?
There are regularly infrastructure outages that can affect cities, states, regions, and even hemispheres. Everything from a trawler cutting a transocean cable to a squirrel frying itself at a powerstation can knock drop your website off the map or your connectivity to the web for hours and days at a time. What will happen to your business processes if you don’t have connectivity or if your ISP goes down?
This is more than about having a contingency plan to get back online as quick as possible (which you all have no doubt) – it’s about recognizing that people interested in what you have to offer need to be able to exposed to your messaging and be able to reach you in avenues other than the internet.
Infrastructure issues aside, your target audience needs to know that your organization exists beyond the web and since they exist beyond the web, you need to know what magazines they are reading, what social events they go to, and establish a presence there. It goes without saying that you will have this all backed up with great SEO, a killer website, and sharp branding. The flow goes both ways – someone who has seen you online in all the places they look: websites particular to their subculture, your website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., will be reassured when they see your ad in “The Journal of ____” as well as the fact that you are a sponsor of _______ social event and that you have real people attending who can have real conversations with them.
You need to have a quiver of arrows, SEO is one of them, AdWords is another, but you need more than just those two unless you have a bank account that can handle the web not working for you for days to weeks at a time. It’s guaranteed to happen.
I’m a big fan of Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups blog, and his company HubSpot, I’ve used their capable and elegant service to improve businesses I’ve worked at and consulted for. I’ve had the privilege to see Dharmesh speak on a couple of occasions as well as talk to him personally. While I can appreciate the founder-focused perspective of OnStartups, I was disappointed to read his latest post which had elements that displayed a far too stereotypical technologist slant against advertising, and therefore marketing.
Technologists (with blinders on) have the view that anything that isn’t contributing to the actual production of their product or service is a negative. They tend to look at money spent on anything other than production salary, equipment, and software as money down the drain. They seek to eliminate all that “wasteful” spending. Obviously they are making a product so good, that is should sell itself. Any adjustment to features should result in the same customer base coming back to the cash register to fork over more money because the product, by its very nature, telepathically communicates to all parties who have either the interest or the potential interest, that this is the product they need right now.
Dharmesh states, “I still don’t like advertising. I really don’t. I can see why it’s important in a lot of industries — but I don’t know that software is one of them.” The irony here is that, a. Dharmesh’s company does advertise using Google AdWords among other tools, and b. that Dharmesh’s company, HubSpot, is 100% dependent upon advertising in order to survive. HubSpot’s platform helps businesses by improving their websites using search engine optimization and keyword strategy under the premise that a company should attract potential customers using these inbound and permission marketing techniques rather than “interruption” and attention exploitation of standard marketing and advertising.
The problem is that all of the search engines, with the partial exception of Microsoft’s, are 100% advertising-driven. Without advertising, there would be no search engines, and therefore no HubSpot. Advertising is what changed the world from agrarian societies to what we have today. While it isn’t perfect, no one has figured out anything better – they’ve only proposed refinements. There are plenty of producers, and particularly software developers, who think that their products need no advertising because they (Dharmesh again) “solv(e) a user’s problem”. The user has a need, the software addresses the need, a sale is made.
Dharmesh, it’s time to read some Paco Underhill. People don’t buy based on “need” – they buy based on “want”. There is also the false notion in B2B sales that you are working to sell to “companies”, “organizations”, and “business entitities” (my quotes). Sorry, those are all manned by people who still buy based on “want” and other emotional reasons. Advertising is a method to communicate to people reasons, attitudes, positioning, and availability in order that they should want to buy your products. Some of this is non-quantifiable (at this time). We don’t have enough data and understanding to make this coldly scientific enough for some technologists to grasp. I tend to think it’s part of the fun of being a human being.
If I may loosely quote Peter Drucker, “successful entrepreneurship is the combination of innovation and marketing” – advertising is a tool that should not be denied the marketer. Inbound marketing is extremely effective but it can’t do everything. Even noted Google AdWord wizard, Perry Marshall, was forced to admit last year in a podcast that it can’t all be done with SEO and AdWords – those are just two of the legs of the stool.
A question to ask here is: when is the last time you attended or even heard about a such an open, accessible, and informal meeting with representatives from a company as large, pervasive (as in embedded/utilized/available/etc.), and important as Google? These folks from Google, execs and evangelists, engineers and public affairs managers, wanted to meet with actual users of their professional systems. This is a company that operates under a microscope, with no end of analysis and press coverage, who decided to go around these sources of broadcast information to interact with real people.
This was not a focus group or some kind of measured and cross-referenced experiment. This was an environment to have interesting and relaxed conversations, to hear frustrations, suggestions, and praise. This was an environment for no-pressure networking between people, local and out-of-town, Google and non-Google.
I have a hope that Google will be able to pull off these kinds of meetings across the country, and hopefully even back in Boston. Due to Google’s extreme popularity, I think that this might be difficult unless they are prepared to put a cap on the number of attendees. I personally couldn’t believe that the event was for real and that I managed to get in. I know that many people who attended this event are eager for the next one and would sign up for it as soon as they hear about it. Count me in – I can’t wait for it to happen.
I also have a hope that other companies would follow Google’s example and provide this kind of access, it’s in their own best interests, it’s proof of availability, and it’s proof of goodwill.
It seems like a million years ago but back in December I did a presentation about web analytics for members of a local technology collaborative. One of the members of the audience was Diane Sabato, a professor in the business school at Springfield Technical Community College. Diane is also very involved with STCC’s Entrepreneurial Institute and has tailored one of her classes so that groups of students team up to help real businesses establish online lead generation using Google AdWords. This was the first time I went onto the old Springfield Armory part of the campus – what great history and what wonderful architecture, I can’t wait to go back and get a tour.
Knowing from my presentation that, as VP of Marketing, I manage several Google AdWord campaigns for Atalasoft, Diane asked me to speak to her class to give them an overview of the platform so this last Tuesday night I dropped by and ended up spending the evening with her class discussing mainly AdWords but also digressing into web analytics, and even Twitter.
I had prepared an outline (below) that was to cover about an hour of Google AdWords basics, but questions from her class led to us creating an actual campaign from scratch as well as answering business-specific lead generation strategies for their clients. The majority of her students asked questions, some of them asked several. I think the informal tone went well and I saw only a couple heads nodding by the end of the 3 hours that we spent together, and I don’t blame them. I can’t thank Diane and her class enough for their time, their patience, and their incredibly focused questions. [If any of the class reads this post, please feel free to email me with follow-up questions: tomdog "AT" gmail.com]
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- What are AdWords? AdWords are for Lead Generation – they aren’t really a part of the Traditional Advertising Mix. Your ads will only be presented to those who are looking for the specific keywords you are targeting. The size and format of the ads prevent any real branding.
- Are there other adwords options? Why go with Google AdWords? Google gets 58.9% of all search queries worldwide, they are distantly followed by Yahoo! at 22% and then MSN at 9%. Take care of the majority of search first – everybody is pressed for time, if you have the bandwidth to take care of these other lead generation venues, their priority is secondary.
- How can you connect AdWords to your business? You will be compiling lists of words that should be core to business. These are terms that shold be integral to the business and its customers.
- We’ve heard the term: Customer Centric. The premise of AdWords is as customer-centric as it gets because it is the customer who is in control, it is the customer who will be typing the words, as they perceive them, about their needs, as they perceive them.
- AdWords force you to think about the customer. Who are these potential customers? Where are they geographically/socially/domographically? How do these prospects talk about themselves, their needs, and the products/services they are interested in? Where do they hang out online? You will have to create customer profiles and customer roles.
- How to get started with Google AdWords:
Don’t be intimidated
You are in control
There is nothing that you can do that is “wrong”
You won’t spend any of your budget until you are ready to
The sooner you open up the interface and start a “fake” campaign, the better
- Start a New Campaign
- Placements vs. Keywords (Content vs. Search) = Do not do placements as a preliminary project
- Start With Keywords
- Choose via language (English I am assuming)
- Choose via location: you will be in better shape if you can do some geo-targetting of your campaign(s)
-Create an Ad:
Headline (25 char)
Description Line 1 (35 char)
Description Line 2 (35 char)
Display URL (35 char)
Destination URL (1024 char)
- Keyword Input (you will need to work closely with your clients to get their keyword list, this is their homework):
Put in your list and pay attention to the “suggested keywords” that appear in the right column
Add the appropriate “suggested keywords”
Pay attention to and review Match Types:
keyword = broad match
“keyword” = match exact phrase
[keyword] = match exact term only
-keyword = don’t match this term
- Hopefully the URL your ad links to will have some kind of action or goal on it: Product/Service Page, Newsletter Sign Up Page – you and your customer/client will need to find some way to measure the success of your ads [As you get more sophisticated, web analytics with conversion measurement should be employed]
- Don’t be intimidated. Just get started. Read as much as you can about the basics. Ask questions.
Eric T. Peterson had a great post today about how recession-proof the field of web analytics might or might not be. Not only does Peterson provide an overview of the business functionality of web analytics, as well as industry trends and marketing survey, he also provides a ton of links and a mini action plan for those interested in/devoted to the practice.
Peterson states that the recession-proof-ness of the web analytics profession might be overblown, despite the huge contributions to ROI, as well as showing the path to business opportunities. I could very well agree with this because one can see the mistakes that so many businesses are making during this period of economic contraction. The fact is that companies can not manufacture or otherwise innovate their way out of a recession – they market themselves out of a recession. The problem is that since marketing initiatives, promotion, ad buying, etc. are not fixed costs like salary or product inventory, they are frequently the first on the chopping block.
It’s a predictable pattern. Slash marketing budgets in order to save jobs, only to watch business contract further, thus resulting in inevitable layoffs. How about otherwise cutting salaries across the board, or eliminating some production positions, but expanding marketing efforts? You won’t maintain sales by communicating to fewer people. That has never worked in the history of business. You can only maintain/expand revenues in a downturn by connecting with more people, not less.
Business owners and management boards, pay heed and don’t fall into what has become a typical business downward spiral. If you choose not to, just pay attention to the companies that not only survive, but who excel and expand during these tought times – I guarantee you that they expanded their marketing efforts.
Of the four tools offered, these two made the most sense:
“Google Analytics Report Enhancer by RoiRevolution. Brings up tens of new reports in Google Analytics. It also calculates for you “True Time on Site”, which is the average time spent on site, excluding all bounces.
Google Analytics Downloader by Juice Analytics. Adds a highly valuable button to your keywords and referrers reports, stating who sent you unusual traffic. Really great info can be brought out of it.”
About 20 people showed up to our clinic on how to get started with Google AdWords yesterday which really filled up a sweltering room at the Lichtenstein Center in Pittfield. Many thanks to everyone who showed up and endured the environment. Our next clinic, which will partially be on Google Local Business Center, will happen at the end of September.
This clinic: “Using Google AdWords for Business, Non-Profits, and Artists” will last about 90 minnutes and it will be held in Pittsfield, MA at 10am on Wednesday July 29 at the Lichtenstein Center for the Arts, 28 Renne Ave.