I have received heaps of enquiries as to how we get such high click through rates on our Google cost per click campaigns as stated in my post last week.
Like everything in SEO it is not very hard, just very laborious. The first thing is to focus on your keyword selection. You want to find search queries that have a sufficient volume to make targeting them worthwhile, but also that match the product or service you are selling through your ad campaign. For example, for a hotel in Sydney targeting terms like Sydney hotel and central Sydney city hotel are going to lead to much higher traffic than simply targeting terms like Sydney, and Darling Harbour. I have seen lots of research that shows that the more words that are in a search query the more likely that consumer is to be a purchaser. For example, cheap hotel Bondi Beach Sydney is usually better than cheap Sydney hotel in terms of getting a website visitor that wants to be a customer.
Once you have identified the basket of keywords you are going to use (and there are a plethora of tools to do this) the next step is to write your first ad. There are a number of rules here - firstly, if you are targeting more than one range of keywords, let’s say for example tours in New Zealand and tours in Australia don’t write one generic ad and run it for all keywords. Instead break your campaign into Ad Groups around your keywords. This way you can target your ad content more specifically to your keyword. One great example is the distinction between camper vans and motor homes in search queries. To the company offering these there is probably not much difference but to the web user there is. So rather than having camper vans and motor homes as your keywords against one ad split them into two ad groups and display an ad about motor homes when search queries contain motor home and an ad about camper vans when search queries contain camper van. Users are far more likely to click on your ad if it contains the terms they have searched for.
Secondly, and one of the secret ingredients is to not just write an ad and leave it up there costing you money, but to continually rework your ads. The best course of action is to create two ads virtually exactly the same except for subtle differences and set them up to be displayed an even amount of times. Let’s say we have a shoe shop, these are the two sort of ads I would start with:
Shoes for sale
Womens shoes in all sizes - special online deals
Shoes for sale
Ladies shoes in all sizes - special online deals
Let both your ads run for a period - about a week is probably about right (early on in the campaign you are probably changing more regularly than later in the campaign when you become more settled in your ad content etc) - and monitor the click through rates and the average cost per click. If variant one is generating more clicks then change variant 2 or vice versa. In this case I might change variant 2 to read:
Shoes for sale
Womens shoes and heels in all sizes - special online deals
Always continue running two ads and trying to eek up the click through rate. In the example the next things I might try is to change deals to specials, I might add womens to the title, and so on. Only change the ads little bit by little so as you can monitor what is happening - too many changes and you don’t know what was effective and what wasn’t. It is important also that you continue to match the ad text to the search queries you are targeting.
There is one more consideration which so many people overlook - regionality. In setting up your campaigns you can select languages, countries and regions your ads will be displayed to users from. If you are promoting something that has a relatively short time to purchase maybe a special deal or an event then you should consider who will see your ad and whether in fact they are able to consume your product. One ad campaign I am running is for accommodation near the Tongariro Crossing. I decided that we would focus only on Australia and New Zealand web users as although the walk is very popular with international tourists we wanted to see immediate payback on the campaign and therefore the visitor really needed to be within a month or so from the region as it is nearing the end of the season. Brand recognition and the like were not a goal of the campaign, but they may be in the winter months when this market is doing its research in which case we would extend the target area and also look at the ad content to promote a more long term strategy. I very rarely use this but the times of the day your ad is displayed can also be set as part of the campaign. If you know from your analytics that website visitors between certain hours are more likely to purchase than visitors at other times of the day who are more likely to be browsers then you can also set your ads not to display during those times when you are less likely to get sales and therefore may be perceive that you are actually wasting money running the cost per click campaign.
The final ingredient is perhaps the most important and that is Google’s role in the whole process. Google has a thing called the quality score which it applies to your keywords and ads based on their perceived quality. The quality score has two great outcomes, firstly, Google applies a discount factor to your average cost per click for higher quality terms and secondly it also displays higher up ads that are considered higher quality. Effectively you can be getting more traffic for cheaper. Like everything Google we only know the gist of how the quality score is determined but unfortunately not the algorithm. The quality score is calculated based on the relevance of your keywords to the content of your ads (the better they match the better your score) and the relevance then of the content of the landing page on your site to the ad. So, if your ad is about skiing in Queenstown, and your keywords revolve around this term ensure that when a visitor clicks on your ad they are taken to a page about skiing in Queenstown, not just some generic home page. The keywords you are targeting should appear in the content of the page and preferably in appropriate headings. We believe the quality score also becomes self perpetuating, if you are generating a high click through rate, then Google recognises the quality of your ad further and applies further cost per click discount meaning you appear higher in the ad hierarchy for less dollars.
