If you don’t already have conversion tracking implemented correctly, you’ll need to resolve that to make use of Search Funnels.

You can find Search Funnels for your account on the Reports tab on the Conversions page in the left navigation.

This is a pretty simple premise, but scratch the surface and there’s a rich seam of data. Here’s the low-down:

By default, you’ll be shown the last 30 days’ data, but you can change the date range as you might expect. If yours is a longer sales cycle, looking at the most recent data might skew your results and analysis, so factor that in.

Aside from the number of conversions, there are three interesting figures here; average ad impressions to conversion, average ad clicks to conversion and most importantly, average days to conversion. This last one surprised us when we first got access to this data, which will vary depending on your product or service, the market competition, the cost/value and of course the keywords that you bid on and the overall performance of your campaigns.

Knowing that visitors typically click more than one ad also puts some context to the performance of specific keywords. We’re often asked, “why not bid only on those keywords that convert most effectively?” This data helps to demonstrate that the conversion is often achieved through more than just one keyword and one click.

The conversion is only allocated to the last click – take away those search terms that position your offer through the search funnel and your offer loses some of its impact. Take away the frequency of your ad being seen for every relevant search and your CTR and conversion rates go down and the cost per conversion more likely to rise rather than decrease as you might expect.

In short, if your ad appears consistently for each of four relevant searches, and your competitor only appears once or twice, it is more likely that you’ll get the click AND the conversion rather than your competitor. It’s the cumulation of seeing your ad multiple times that wins the game, not one search, one ad one click (wouldn’t that be so much simpler?).

The knowledge that customers take a number of days to convert also helps to build a strategy to address that conversion rate. In this example, an average 5-day funnel suggests that remarketing should influence the rate at which visitors return and also position your site more firmly in their memory when they make that decision to buy or enquire.

There really is enough science and psychology to write a book, but to summarise:

• Conversion tracking is required to use Search Funnels
• Analyse a date range that ends before your average days to conversion to avoid mis-diagnosis
• Investigate paths to understand what visitors search for before they convert
• Build this knowledge in to your strategy using the other tools at your disposal such as remarketing and Content Network campaigns.

The headlines:

• 43% of iPhone owners earn salaries in excess of £65,000
• 200 million Internet enabled phones shipped in 2009 with 22% growth projected for 2010.
• 38% of mobile phones worldwide will be smartphones by 2013
• UK mobile searches increased by 260% for commercial keywords from 2008 to 2009

Whether your business is suited to mobile browsing or not, mobile should be on your agenda.

Mobile Advertising

As a method for reaching your audience at the right time, mobile is growing faster that any other existing marketing medium. The latest advances in mobile technology have developed significantly and mobile advertising has come a long way.

No longer limited to SMS messaging, the mobile opportunity has evolved into a highly-targeted platform for advertising to an audience ready to buy, find or engage. Mobile advertising is mainly aimed at users on iPhones and other similar mobile devices with full internet access.

How Mobile Works

6 things to consider

1. Is your site usable on a mobile?
2. Is your target audience likely to search for or browse your product or service on a mobile device?
3. How quickly does your content load on a mobile device?
4. Can you engage a visitor on a mobile device and generate an action quickly (more quickly that a desktop device, for example)?
5. Examples of what works well; find your nearest location, opt-in for some information, find your phone number; browse your products or even buy.
6. Examples of what doesn’t necessarily work well; lengthy, technical content. Lengthy data capture forms. Large image files.

The Benefits

Right now, the mobile market is less competitive than desktop, with reported conversion costs being lower than desktop devices – the time to position your site as a market leader is now.

Creating separate campaigns with different targeting, you can segment and measure the response and ROI independently for mobile, or even for specific types of devices.

Mobile Marketing Plan

1. If your target audience never (ever) searches for what you do using a mobile, or you’re not ready to exploit it, turn it off – but remember to come back to it later.
2. Check your site’s statistics to see how many visitors use mobile browsers.
3. Segment your campaign(s), creating a dedicated mobile campaign with it’s own budget and performance data so that you can measure the response and ROI.
4. Targeting is the same as desktop devices and the same best practice applies; segment Google Search and Search Partner networks and the Content Network.
5. Depending on traffic volume and performance, consider a dedicated mobile version of your site. You can detect the browser type and size when a visitor lands on your site and redirect to the right version automatically – a desktop visitor gets the desktop site, a mobile visitor gets the mobile site.

Ask a Google AdWords Professional about this

We spotted this neat video which demonstrates the value of CTR and explains in simple terms how Google ranks your ads amongst competitors’ ads.

Learn more about quality score here.

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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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To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the content network is a bad strategy, far from it. But remember that to be successful you need to test, measure and refine what works and what doesn’t, and mixed together in one campaign, you’ll find it tough to understand where keywords are generating clicks and turning in to sales.

Google search is simple; it’s Google. You type something in to it, you get results, and sponsored links across the top and down the side. The audience here is specifically searching for a solution to a problem or to fulfil a need. If it’s a product or service, they probably have a budget and are ready to part with it.

The Google Search Network is a little different. The same principal applies; someone has a need and they are actively searching for a product or solution and have already identified their budget. But search network partners include Amazon and e-bay, Sky.com, Orange and many others, no doubt. A different audience, right? Firstly, you’ll appreciate that ads are shown in a different way on these sites, in different positions on the page. Secondly, this is a different audience: yes, they are searching, but a searcher on e-bay isn’t compelled by the same messages in your ads as a searcher on Google. Ditto for Amazon.

Let’s put it this way: identical products are sold in some swanky boutique in London and in your local car boot sale or market. They will be sold for a vastly different price. I appreciate the argument about overheads, but that isn’t the driver here – if your market trader could sell for the same price, he surely would! The audience’s perspective and expectations are different, and so is the surrounding competition.

Thirdly, there’s the Content Network, also known as AdSense. AdSense is an easy program to sign up to for any blog publisher or site owner to monetise their web site through displaying and generating clicks on Google ads. You’ve seen them all over the place, and probably ignored them, mostly.

The main principal is the same though, you bid on keywords (much broader ones) and Google matches your ads to pages that feature those keywords. So the mere fact that Suzie reads Helen’s blog about Helen’s friend who bought a Prada bag at the weekend means that Google might just match your keyword bid on ‘Prada bag’ and show your ad.

That’s OK? Sure, it’s OK. Will Suzie click on your ad? Well, perhaps, but unlikely. That doesn’t really matter, Google doesn’t measure your CTR here or judge your overall campaign performance on it either. What does matter though, is that what compels Suzie to click your ad will be a different message to that which compels someone to click it on Google Search, or its Search Network. It will achieve a different CTR, and more importantly, a different number of sales, or conversions for the cost of the clicks.

Even if Suzie were to click your ad when it appeared on Helen’s blog, do you think she’d be more, or less likely to buy than our friend who searched on Google?

The best way to tackle this is to split your campaigns. You’ll then be able to test, measure and refine what works for each audience, what you’re spending and what’s converting to sales. Depending on your product, service or market, you might want to split it three ways for each media network, or perhaps just Search and Content.

Learn more stuff like this.

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Big Bubble? Maybe. Big Trouble? Definitely.

There’s nothing like a bit of Google-bashing, huh? Bill Gates must love it! It certainly takes some of the usual negative attention away from Microsoft.

If Google is squeezing the AdSense partners, and I don’t especially advertise on the content network so I wouldn’t know or be too bothered, there are competitors in the marketplace like Yahoo and Microsoft that will happily take their advertising real-estate. If sites have any decent level of traffic, they’ll actually be able to sell ad space on their sites through an agency anyway, or at least those smart enough will enter in to affiliate programs to monetize their sites.

Pay per click is the same as any sales and marketing tool – if the ROI doesn’t stack up, dump it. This is true of telemarketing, direct mail, billboard, TV or radio advertising or even your humble sales guy or gal.

There’s also some confusion of the facts here – AdSense isn’t search, it’s the practice of Google displaying ‘relevant’ ads on a site based on a page’s content. Most visitors to these sites aren’t actually searching for a solution to their problem. This is incidental advertising, not the ‘qualified customers’ that this article mentions and Google search produces.

With AdSense (the content network), ads are displayed to a viewer that might be interested in what you’re selling, but far more often than not isn’t: just because the term ‘cat food’ is mentioned on a page a viewer happens to be reading, doesn’t necessarily mean that the viewer even has a damned cat, let alone looking for some food for one!

Is the economy a bubble about to burst? Well, perhaps and perhaps not – but advertisers will keep using a medium that generates a good return on investment, and dump it when it doesn’t. And if web publishers are getting a raw deal, the smart ones will always go elsewhere for a better deal too.

However, there’s a downside: what if you’re searching for a product or service in another country? Google‘s technology presents the searcher with paid ads that are listed in their own country.

The two images are results from the same search, ‘dog care florida’. The first image is the results I get here in the UK, the second are the results users would see in the US.

So, if you’re an international business, perhaps a web store that sells all over the world, how do you check you competitors? How can you research your keywords and see what results they produce?

There is a solution. Hopefully, you’re using Firefox as your browser? If not, there are other, similar tools available for IE. Download the SwitchProxy extension for Firefox that allows you to switch between proxy servers at will. Identify a free proxy server somewhere else in the world at XRoxy.com and get googling to establish who is advertising on your keywords.

In case you need it – Wikipedia has a definition of a proxy server.

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In my experience, this is typically where many businesses form the opinion that Google AdWords doesn’t work. Their keyword choice is limited to how they describe their own business, often resulting in a small range of keywords pointing to one ad. This often results in poor keyword, high cost per click and even worse conversion.

Google already has a keyword suggestion tool that delivers a pool of associated terms that you might want to chose, although I recommend caution in choosing terms that are still relevant to your ad, of course. This new report adds a further dimension to this intelligence, providing a view of what search terms concluded in a click-through.

If Google only included the search terms that didn’t result in a click on your ad, that would be so much better. You could use this to exclude future irrelevant searches from producing your ad, and increase your conversion rate, in turn increasing your ad position and therefore click-through rate.

This would also help you to build market intelligence and to create a better understanding of how the marketplace describes what you do.

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The result of Google and the prevalence of search means that people are far more forgiving of things that need to be sought out, and less patient than ever with selfish marketers that insist on showing up in your face.

Search marketing works for precisely this reason, if it’s done well, of course. You audience only gets your message when they are searching for what you do, or they have a problem that you can fix.

In case you missed it, there’s a free paper on how to get the best from AdWords available here.

This is only part of the story, of course. If done well, AdWords will get you visitors. Without putting as much effort in to the rest of the strategy, you’ll end up just paying for visitors to land on your site, and disappear without engaging with you, without buying anything, without giving you an opportunity to sell them what they are looking for.

Sound like a good deal? It does for Google – but not for you.

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