Google Launches a New AdWords Tool: Conversion Optimizer

Google recently introduced the Conversion Optimizer as a new tool for Google AdWords clients. The idea behind this tool is to manage one’s advertising costs around specific conversion goals. You still pay per click, but instead of setting cost per click (CPC) bids, you specify a maximum cost per acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. The Conversion Optimizer manages your CPC bids for you, making adjustments and showing your ads only when you’re likely to get conversions.

Using the Conversion Optimizer does have some requirements that you should be aware of before getting started. First you must have conversion tracking enabled for your campaign. Secondly the campaign must have at least 300 conversions in the last 30 days. These two requirements are essential for the tool to work properly, so if you don’t meet these then unfortunately Google does not allow you to use the Conversion Optimizer. You can set up the tool quite simply in your client center within the “Edit Campaign Settings” section under your “Bidding Options”. In addition, you need to be aware that the Conversion Optimizer does have limitations. There are several AdWords features that are not compatible with the new tool at this time. If you’re not willing to part with things like position preference, budget optimizer, site targeting, advanced ad scheduling, and preferred cost bidding, then the Conversion Optimizer isn’t for you (yet?). Lastly, campaigns that are using the Conversion Optimizer may not be modified using the AdWords Editor.

To find out more on your own about the new Conversion Optimizer please go to the AdWords Help Center.

WebShare is a Google AdWords Qualified Company and is ready to assist you with your Google AdWords Management. We have a great deal of experience in helping customers get the most out of their advertising budgets, and we offer options ranging from training programs to full service account management. Whether you’re starting from scratch or simply would like to learn how to use new tools such the Conversion Optimizer, Webshare has a plan for you.

Yesterday, America Online announced that it will be enacting a number of changes that will “position the company as the world’s largest and most effective advertising network.”

They’ll be doing this with what they call Platform A, an entity that, like Google Adwords, Yahoo!’s Search Marketing platform and Microsoft’s adCenter, will offer advertisers the chance to reach their potential customers through a network of web advertising. So is this any different? Or is AOL simply stepping up their efforts in the pay per click game? Well, first off, Google distributes paid links on AOL’s website and it’s Google technology that runs AOL’s search functionality. Google is also a 5% owner of AOL after its 2005 $1 billion investment. Platform A is not out to replace Adwords, but it will offer access to a whole new type of audience by leveraging already successful AOL advertising products.

According to comScore Media Metrix, Platform A is already reaching over 90% of the domestic online audience, and the platform is leveraging Advertising.com – the world’s largest network of third-party sites that are ready and willing to display ads. Additionally, AOL is bringing in some serious customer targeting features by integrating TACODA (a behavioral targeting company that AOL recently acquired). The platform will also buddy up with Third Screen Media (mobile media network), Lighteningcast (video ad serving) and ADTECH will round out the international ad serving.

We’ll be watching this one closely as it rolls out, and if you’re managing your pay per click advertising efforts, we suggest you do too!

So what, exactly, is the “long tail” and why is it important to search marketing? The concept was coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 Wired magazine article and applied to merchandising, but this concept is particularly well suited for the world of search marketing.

You’ve got a few keywords that you know you want to rank for. They’re the ones you know bring in lots of traffic and the ones that you have to work hard to keep your rankings for. When we talk about the long tail for keywords, we’re talking about the hundreds or thousands of other keywords that people type into search engines every single day to find products and services just like yours.

Take a look at the graph above. This is a typical representation of the kind of daily traffic you might see that results from your keyword research, with the keywords broken out into tiers. It’s obvious that our Tier 1 keywords have the ability to generate the most traffic on our site, right? While it is true that individually, those keywords can bring in the most potential traffic, you also have to realize that you’re probably not the only one who knows about them. Competition is going to be fierce for these keywords…and take a look at your Tier 2 set. While none of these keywords alone has the ability to stack up to a Tier 1 keyword, collectively you can attract TWICE as much traffic from the Tier 2 set!

Now have a look at Tier 3. As the line moves rightward, it drops off steeply with a nearly flat long tail - hence, the term “long tail”. But these keywords hardly attract any traffic at all, why would we bother targeting them? Individually, that may be true, but collectively, these keywords represent 55% of the traffic available to your website. And your competitors probably don’t know about these or aren’t focusing on them, so they won’t be nearly as competitive to rank your pages for. An additional benefit is that these keywords are likely much more specific to your products and services, and have a high probability of generating extremely qualified, targeted traffic.

How an organization targets long tail keywords depends on the type of business, search marketing strategy and budget, but the important thing is that you do the research to find your long tail keywords and you actively target them. Webshare provides a variety of keyword research solutions to help you identify and harness the power of the long tail keywords in your industry.

And keep in mind that there are a number of attractive qualities in long tail keywords for paid search marketing campaigns as well as your organic efforts. Long tail keywords tend to be available for lower bid prices on the pay per click markets, and can often comprise a significant portion of an organization’s search marketing sales. Long tail keywords are a fantastic way to get a big “bang for the buck”, and are a great place to start when developing your search marketing strategy.

Nielsen / Netratings company reported that Google continues to lead the way as the search engine of choice for many users. The market research company also reported that Google has the highest retention of users. For at-home users, Google sees 79% of its users return, followed by Yahoo! at 69%, and MSN/Windows Live with 65%. The trend was similar for at-work users with slightly higher retention numbers. However, Nielsen / Netratings in the same article reported that search engine users are choosing more than one search engine for their search providing needs. In the big three, 84% of the MSN/Windows Live Search visitors went to either Google or Yahoo! or both as well as their usual MSN/Windows Live. 78% of Yahoo! and 63% of Google visitors went to the other engines as well.

What we should take from this data is that Google is clearly important to your search marketing plan – this is your classic 900 pound gorilla. But you should not forget about the other search engines unless you’re happy leaving potential traffic on the table. For example, when starting a pay per click campaign, there is nothing wrong with choosing Google’s Adwords to get a proof of concept. Since it has the highest amount of users, Google can give you an idea of whether or not your ad campaigns will be profitable. However, after your campaigns are proven, remember to consider expanding into Yahoo! Search Marketing and potentially Microsoft’s adCenter for access to more traffic. Spreading out to more than one search engine can often put you in a less competitive arena and will also help cover your business in the event users choose a different search engine from their typical choice. As the Nielsen / Netrating report shows, more users are searching more than one search engine these days.

It is important to pay attention to market research done by companies like Nielsen / Netratings to understand how to appropriately divide your search marketing efforts amongst the search providers. In the search marketing programs that we offer, we monitor and work towards results in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN / Windows Live, as well as a host of other paid and organic traffic sources. We work with our clients to help them understand the importance of diversity in supplying targeted visitors and how to appropriately budget to the different search engines, because as the Nielsen / Netratings report points out, the internet is becoming a very competitive place, and more of your potential customers are finding you from a more diverse range of sources than ever before.

For details of the Nielsen / Netratings report please see Top U.S. Web Sites Enjoy High Visitor Retention Rates, but Face Significant Audience Overlap with Competitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.

Google announced that within the next few days, it will begin including ads on the Google Mobile Search pages as an extension to its Adwords program. Google is promoting this new service to its advertisers on the premise that it will help advertisers reach additional qualified customers. The ads will be displayed to users searching Google on their cell phones free of charge until November 18th, 2007. Beginning November 19th, however, Google will begin charging its advertisers for clicks on the mobile ads unless you tell them otherwise. The trial period is available to all Adwords account holders, which will allow them time to experiment with the mobile platform by reaching actual qualified customers.

We highly suggest that you take an extra close look at your Adwords metrics to see just how profitable these ads are for your business and then make an informed, data-driven decision on how to proceed with your campaigns come November 19th. If you’re taking advantage of our Google Adwords management services, rest assured we’ll be doing this with your accounts.

Google is using this opt-out approach versus an opt-in approach, making this an opportune time to review your Adwords accounts. All Adwords account holders should review their ads campaigns to ensure that the campaigns not benefiting from the new mobile ads are excluded from that network. Additionally, if you plan to use mobile results then you should ensure that your ads are targeted towards mobile users.

Adwords account holders should also be advised that their mobile ads should reflect a landing page that can viewed in a mobile browser. Google is reporting that they have seen an upward trend in mobile usage this past summer, making this an opportune time for Adwords account holders to reach a new section of potential consumers. As wireless internet becomes more widespread and mobile devices (such as the Apple iPhone) become more user-friendly for the internet, this is going to be an exciting area to watch.

Read more in Google’s Adwords Help Center…

This week we’ve rolled out a new service in response to the overwhelming need we’ve seen recently for a solid email marketing solution that allows for easy management, conversion testing, and perhaps most importantly, industry leading deliverability.

Frustrations with the management and legal aspects of opt-in list management are commonplace these days, and being able to perform A/B/N split testing or even

multivariate testing on your email blasts is becoming a necessity in the online marketing world. And once the mails are sent, keeping your email broadcasts out of the SPAM filters has become a problem that requires an entire department to manage.

We’re proud to offer our clients access to a system that can address all of these concerns and more – and has been helping businesses for more than 6 years and boasts over 10,000 users around the world. Depending upon your level of expertise or customization, we offer services from complete self-service email marketing to advanced services such as statistical experiment design and analysis of individual email broadcasts.

If you’re already doing email marketing, then you know that mailing lists, newsletters, email blasts, and customer communications can mean a big boost to your website’s ROI, and using professional hosting can help you make sure that you’re getting the most out of these efforts.

If you haven’t yet explored the powerful tool of email marketing, then what are you waiting for? You could be reaching your customer base and tapping into a fantastic

source of traffic and conversions for just pennies per email!

Find out more about WebShare’s email marketing solutions here and contact us when you’re ready to take your email marketing efforts to the next level.

by David Booth
Founding Partner at WebShare, LLC

In the world of Ecommerce, those of us who have been involved in conversion marketing and statistical testing know just how big an impact even the smallest of details can make to website performance and the bottom line. Some buttons just work better than others. Some product images provoke more purchases time and time again. Some colors are more likely to cause newsletter signups than others, and even details like punctuation and capitalization can have an effect on the rate at which your site converts visitors into monetized customers.

For some time now, the timeliness, breadth and depth of analytic data available about an array of usage metrics for websites has created a statistician’s dream – the capability to test virtually any aspect of a website and observe its relationship on conversions, time spent on a website, or any other measurable aspect of the visitor’s experience. Well, thanks to tools like Google’s Website Optimizer, you don’t have to be a statistician to reap the benefits of statistical conversion testing and ensure that you’re constantly improving the performance of your online activities.

We caught up with Google’s Website Optimizer Product Manager Tom Leung to talk about the new set of Website Optimizer features that was released yesterday, and here’s what he had to say:

A good conversion marketing strategy includes consistent experimentation of every aspect of your website. With tools like Google’s Website Optimizer available, it’s now easier than ever to set up tests and find out what aspects of your website can be changed to improve your bottom line. If you’re not converting at 100%, then you should have a test running!

In a recent post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog, Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur have shed some light on a few questions that are likely close to many web developer’s hearts.

1. The relationships between search results served to varying geographies, the geographic location of a website’s server, IP addresses and domain extensions are playing a part in which sites top the lists of search results pages.

Domain extensions can tell you something about a site before the first glimpse of a page actually loads. If you’re running a website in Australia and targeting Australian customers, then the .com.au extension will likely help you in Australian search results pages. “Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance,” states Shashi Thakur in the post. Additionally, IP addresses can be used to determine geographic location, and Google is not ignoring this information. Be smart about who your target audience is and where they’re located - you can use this information to your advantage.

2. What effects can be expected from cross linking a number of websites that you control, and what guidelines are there for linking strategies if you own and maintain multiple websites?

Shashi weighs in on this issue in a manner that is very consistent with any other linking guidelines that we’ve seen from Google – no surprises here. As with any other linking strategy, the general advice is that links between sites that “provide value” to a user are good, and links that are there simply for the sake of linking are bad. The interesting piece here is the explicit mention of links between topically or thematically related sites: “If the sites are related in business …then it could make sense — the links are organic and useful.”

This advice can be applied to any links, whether between two sites that you own or otherwise. The importance of links to your rankings cannot be understated, and making sure that your limited time and resources are applied to linkbuilding strategies in the most efficient manner is essential.

3. What suggestions are there to helping search engines “comprehend” websites that use DHTML, AJAX, Flash and other Web 2.0 technologies?

Greg Grothaus in his post reaffirms our belief that search engines are not human, and not yet capable of human comprehension. As human visitors to a website, we can look at a photo of a car, and in a fraction of a second draw the conclusion that we are looking at a car. We can watch animations and video and make sense of what we’re seeing. Search engine spiders, on the other hand, can “see” only a mess of pixels and compiled code that does not assist in comprehending what the images or animations are about. For this reason, when designing websites and pages, one must be conscious of the balance between what a search engine sees and a human user will see.

Google officially recommends using Flash “only where it is needed,” and warns of the dangerous ground you enter when your website displays different content to a search engine spider than it would to a human visitor. Without malicious intent, it would make sense to find a way to tell a visitor that does not have Flash installed (or a search engine spider) what they’re missing in a non-Flash manner. Techniques such as cloaking, doorway pages, scripted redirects, and the use of CSS to hide text CAN be used to accomplish this, but as these are the same techniques that are commonly abused in hopes of manipulating a search engine, using these on your site is begging to be penalized.

In a separate post, Mark Berghausen of Google’s Search Quality Team writes “the only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users.” We’d heed that warning.