Berkshire AdWords Presentation from Thomas Attila Lewis on Vimeo.

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

Google AdWords

Competitors to Google AdWords:
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Microsoft adCenter

Keyword Tools:
Google Keyword Tool
Google Search-Based Keyword Tool
Google Trends
Wordtracker Keyword Tool

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

For Non-Profits:
Google Grants http://www.google.com/grants/details.html

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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.

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.

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.

I focused on measurement because I’m working on an analytics presentation for the local technology collaborative.

Here’s the list:

1) Inbound Marketing

2) Content Marketing

3) Social Web

4) Search

5) Measurement

6) Web Software Solutions

7) Next Generation Leaders

Value-Based Pricing

9) Mobile

10) Website Development

I highlighted 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 9, and 10 because the effectiveness of those efforts and their calibration will be determined by #5, Measurement. If the measurement infrastructure isn’t there, and if the time isn’t set aside to gather and analyze the data, it is 100% guaranteed that organization resources: money, and perhaps even more importantly, time, will be spent ineffectively, thus jeopardizing delivering on goals and otherwise undermining the organization’s mission. It could be argued that if you don’t have the time to establish metrics to determine the success of your projects, then you don’t have the time to even begin the engagement of your project.

The second video does get into fully-qualified domain and pay-level domain discussion which had some value in it. The third video starts getting into mozRank (SEOmoz’s “page rank” equivalent) and despite being informative starts getting hairy after a little while. Perhaps if it was broken into two shorter videos (vs 19 minutes) that were a bit better organized.

Still, these videos are part of an education series by SEOmoz and I hope they keep it up! Very helpful!