On the one hand, searchers already want to buy from you and might well find you in organic links where the clicks are free, so why pay for the click?

On the other, there may be competitors bidding on your brand and stealing your profit from right under your nose if you don’t.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but there some factors you may want to consider;

Google knows that this is your domain name and/or your brand, so it’s very easy for you to achieve top paid position.

Clicks on your own brand keywords tend to cost pennies – we’ve often seen clicks at £0.05 for position one.

CTR, as critical as ever, is typically awesome – 25-50% CTR, which won’t do your overall campaign CTR any harm at all.

In one of our most advanced campaigns, our client makes over 100 sales every month on one single competitor keyword for less than £0.20 a click.

Whether you like the ethics or not, there’s profit waiting on the table.

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As poor Filipe Massa proved at the Hungarian Grand Prix this weekend, having the pace to overtake and lead the race almost all the way to the chequered flag just isn’t enough – you have to have all parts of your game on song to beat the competition; the right driver, so many small performance parts that all have to work in unison, the right strategy for each track. But most of all, you need the right team, all working together to achieve a common objective.

Winning business online is a very similar proposition. You might have the best web site in the world that converts 35% of your visitors to hard cash. But, with the wrong visitors, or too few of them, that’s just not going to get you over the finishing line.

There are multiple parts to your strategy that all need to work in synergy to squeeze every last drop of performance from your race car;

• the right strategy
• quality visitors landing on your site that are looking for exactly what you’re selling
• landing those visitors on the absolute sweet-spot on your site that addresses their need immediately
• good copy that reinforces your ability to fulfil their need or desire
• obvious calls to action to motivate your visitor to buy, pick up the phone, sign up for a trial, or whatever it is you want them to do

…and we’re still only at the second pit stop!

The ‘conversion‘ isn’t the end of your race – you still need more to reach the chequered flag of success.

1. Qualifying: Getting the right traffic.
2. Stint one: Making sure your visitor lands in the right place and stays
3. Stint two: Converting that visitor to a sale
4. Stint three: Maximising your return on that customer
5. Chequered flag: 10 points in the bag, the glory and a big bottle of champagne

To discover your winning strategy and avoid a Massa-style blow-up three laps from the end of your race, have us join your pit crew – 08000 47 47 14.

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But there’s a little-known element that’s really beginning to annoy me and a lot of the other search community: the Search Network.

You’ll be familiar with the two primary networks; Google Search – essentially, the Google you know and love, and then there’s the content network where your ads are showing alongside some forum or blog that contains the keywords on which you’re bidding.

The Search Network is somewhere in the middle of these two and relates to sites that technically are search engines like Google, and merely send the visitor’s search query off to Google, and then get Google’s data back. And your paid for ads too. And yes, you’re still paying per click the same way you do on Google Search.

It’s good idea in principle, at least for sites like www.sky.com and www.orange.com. These are search engines where the audience will behave in a very similar way to the audience on Google.

However, this is where it starts to get a little concerning. Google doesn’t publish a list of its “Search Partners”, so there’s no way of knowing in advance which sites will be carrying your ads, and where your money is being spent.

Depending on your market and your product, for example, you might not really want your ads to show on www.ebay.co.uk, or Amazon.co.uk. Or perhaps you do? Either way, you really want to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of these sites carrying your ads and the clicks that come from them – how many Amazon clicks does it take for you to achieve a sale?

Right now, the only way of knowing this is to use Google Analytics or similar software to check the source of visitors to your site, how they behave, and if they convert to a sale or not.

It isn’t currently possible to run a campaign only on the Search Network, or to see where your ads are showing, or which site individual clicks are originating from. You can’t currently calculate your Cost Per Aquisition, the average ad positions or the average cost per click. All of these stats are rolled up in the stats for Google Search in your campaign.

So what happens if you don’t want your ads showing on a particular property like www.FreeIndex.co.uk or www.DoorOne.co.uk? A nice simple site exclusion tool like the one provided on the Content Network? No, I’m afraid not – you have to actually call Google and request that they manually exclude your ads from showing on those sites.

Maybe some of these sites perform really well and have a great CTR and awesome CPA figures. And maybe they don’t. But without the ability to individually target ads for the audience, without the ability to measure it’s effectiveness, it’s difficult to make a case one way or the other.

You could always opt out of the Search Network, of course, but there’s definitely some good quality traffic in there you’d be missing out on.

If only we could tell which traffic it was.

If you really want to be able to measure performance and optimise your campaign effectively, there’s a little more to it.

Example

Dennis and Steve run a garden landscaping business in the South West of England.

Their campaign uses location targeting, of course. There’s a main ad group, already bidding on all the relevant terms; landscaping, best landscaping, landscaping experts, landscaping company, landscaping firm and so forth.

There are also other ad groups with keywords and ads relevant to each geographic area that services are offered; an ad group for Bristol, and ad group for Somerset, and ad group for Bath. All great practice that will demonstrate relevance to the audience and improve their CTR.

What They Missed

But here’s something they hadn’t considered:

Keyword 1: landscaping company – shows a generic Landscaping ad

Keyword 2: landscaping Bristol – shows a Bristol Landscaping ad.

When a searcher types in “landscaping company bristol“, Google has to guess which of your keywords is most relevant. Remember, Google AdWords is a piece of software that measures words, it has no idea that the word Bristol is more important than the word company in this example.

Clearly, this is a very simple example to demonstrate the point. The obvious remedy is also to bid on the keyword “landscaping company bristol” in the Bristol ad group, of course.

But your campaign is going to be a whole lot more complicated, with a whole lot more keyword variations, so the most effective solution (for this example, anyway) is this:

Use each of the locations as negative keywords in your generic ad groups.

Therefore, it would be good practice to use Bristol as a negative keyword in the main landscaping ad group. This tells Google that if the searcher is looking for landscaping services in Bristol, their search matches only keywords in the Bristol ad group and the searcher sees Bristol Landscaping ads and nothing else.

Lower Cost Per Click

This practice will improve your Click Through Rate (CTR), and improve your overall quality score and lead to a reduced cost per click and therefore a reduced Acquisition Cost.

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1. I’m selfish, only interested in me. Right now, I don’t care about your business, I care about me and whether you can deliver the product, service or solution I need. I’m not interested in the 400 other things you sell or do, just the one thing I need.
2. I’m impatient. Get to the point quickly, demonstrate to me that you know what I need and that you can deliver it. I don’t want to go trawling your site for more information until I know I’m in the right place.
3. I don’t trust you. I landed on your site because you matched my search on Google, and it looks like you have what I need. But I still don’t trust you – now I’m going to browse around your site and find reasons to confirm my doubts; ah, jack of all trades, huh? Not for me! Ooh, only started up three months ago? No credibility. Spelling mistakes or broken links? Do they represent the shoddy way in which you’ll deal with me, too? Maybe.
4. I’m confused: What do I do now? How do I contact you? How do I order? Why is it so difficult to find this information on your site? There are so many options, I don’t know which to click.
5. I’m suspicious. Is your payment gateway secure? Can I trust you not to spam my email address or sell it to someone else who will? Will my order ever arrive? Who have you worked with before? Did you do a good job?
6. I’m looking for a reason to leave. I’ll need lots of reasons to stay, but just one will make me leave.
7. I really need to be told what I need and how I can get it. Please make it easy for me.

In the last few days alone, business owners have told me that sole objective of their site is to get someone to pick up the phone, and have then been shocked by the revelation that their telephone number isn’t on every page – it’s buried somewhere on a contact page. It’s a simple thing, but easily (and frequently) overlooked when you’re viewing your site from your perspective, not that of your visitor.

Achieve a greater perspective. Call free on 08000 47 47 14 or email:

Work with your customers in the knowledge of the end result. If your end result is a quick sale and no repeat orders, where is the motivation to do a good job, or make sure that they are happy? If the profit in acquiring new customers is in the long term relationship, you’re much more likely to be considerate, helpful, supportive and understanding. You’ll consistently work hard to do a good job.

Seth compares the follow-through to the action required in Tennis or Golf – the ball is long gone, so why keep swinging? The same is true for football, boxing and my personal favourite, snooker – if your cue continues in a straight line after the shot, you know the stroke itself will also be true.

Seth’s Blog: Follow through
If you know that the last two inches of your follow through don’t matter, then you’ll start slowing down at three inches, or even four, and suddenly it does matter. If you draw the line on money back guarantees you’ll keep sliding backwards, bit by bit, until it does matter. If you’re quick to fire the employee who needs a lot of help, you’ll be quicker with those that need just a little, and then, pretty soon, it’s a very different place to work, isn’t it?

The purchase of an asset such as a plant, a division, or even an entire company.

What do you do with an asset? Maintain it so that you can get the most benefit from it for the longest period of time? If the asset were a building, you’d ensure that it retained its value, you’d repair it, you’d carry out preventative maintenance to stop expensive things going wrong.

How would you go about acquiring an asset? You’d search and evaluate each opportunity and judge it on its merits. Does it fit well with my needs? How much will it cost me to maintain? What’s the return on my investment? How high is the cost of acquisition?

What if a customer or a new market were an asset?

Before considering any acquisition, you need to consider the cost. How much is that asset worth? If the annual spend for that customer is £1000 and there’s 20% gross profit in it, that sounds OK. But what if that customer was really demanding and you spent a whole day pitching the sale, and three days’ on customer service in the first year alone?

Consider this sum:

Return on Investment (ROI) – Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) = Asset Value

Somewhere below the asset value is what you can justify spending on the acquisition, and this figure differs from business to business and from market to market.

Before undertaking any business development or marketing activity, you need to define what you can justify as the cost of acquisition.

Now, it may be that in your market, customers are buying high value goods and spending a lot of money with you over a three-year period. You might well justify inviting that potential customer to an exclusive sporting event or two, but if your customer is just going to buy one book from you, that isn’t going to work.

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