Tag: AdWords

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When Should You Lower Your AdWords Budget?

Most everyone know when to increase their AdWords budget, but many do not know when they should start to lower their AdWords budget. Here are a few tips to consider as you review your own AdWords budget and decide if you should keep it the same or lower your budget.

1. If your business is seasonal and you have a historical market drop in sales at specific times of the year, as you approach those slow sales or booking times, you should equally drop your AdWords budget. There is no point in continuing to spend at the same level as you would in peak selling times.

2. If you do not have historical data on sales and bookings then you should watch for flat periods of activity. AdWords will try to spend all the money that you allow it even if you get no sales conversions. If sales are flat for a week and you are at your same budget, first review your keywords, cost per click, and create new ad text. If you have not generated conversions in the second week, I would strongly consider pulling back on your budget especially in December. There are simply some businesses that will sell strongly in the holiday season and others that will not. Your product or services may be one that would be best served by keeping a toehold in now and bumping your budget back up in January.

I’ll talk on Friday on when you should increase your AdWords budget.

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AdWords Starter Edition – When to Use It

Google AdWords is not for everyone and every product, but it can be an excellent way to promote your products on the Web. However AdWords set up and management by a professional is an expense and for an untested product or a new service you are thinking of promoting professional set up and management may be too costly for your initial testing.

Enter the Google AdWords Starter Edition! For unusual products never seen in the marketplace, e-books, or unusual services that you wonder is there a market for, there is no better way than to test online marketability than with the Google AdWords Starter Edition.

The Google AdWords Starter Edition is so simple and easy to set up that any business owner can do market testing themselves to find out if there is even interest for their product. Not sure if people will pay $5 for your e-book about your vacation to Paris with your wife? Test it on Google AdWords Starter Edition. Not sure if people will want to buy a magnetic scalp roller that grows new hair – test it!

If you generate clicks AND sales during your test, the next step is to find a professional Google AdWords account manager to set up an AdWords program that will build on your test and really work to market your product. The information that you have garnered in your two week to 30 day test on the Starter Edition will be considered valuable by your account manager and will help them to focus on what has been successful initially and to build on that success.

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PayPal Versus Google AdWords

I wanted to bring to your attention some issues in using PayPal and tracking conversions on sales on Google AdWords in this issue.

Right now with PayPal, if the user selects to purchase with their PayPal account they will be automatically be redirected back to your selected landing page in which you have embedded your Google AdWords conversion tracking code. However, if the customer selects to pay by credit card (not the one tied to their PayPal account), they will no longer be automatically redirected to your landing page accruing a conversion. For this type of user, your buyer must now click an orange button to return to your website on their order confirmation page.

If they perform this action, they will go to your landing page and a Google AdWords conversion will be recorded. If they choose not to click the orange button to return to your site, the sale is recorded, but a conversion for Google AdWords is not recorded. This is a very big problem for any client who is using PayPal and then marketing these services on Google AdWords and really needs to know conversion statistics.

As a Professional Google AdWords Account Manager I will not be recommending that clients use PayPal if they are promoting their items on AdWords unless they are using a third party PayPal Web Pro integrated shopping cart. As an account manager, the recording of conversions is one of our biggest tools to understanding if the advertising spend on AdWords is an investment or an expense.

So what can you do if this is a problem for you?

1. In your PayPal settings you can force all users to use either their PayPal account or set one up. This means they will be redirected at the completion of the order to your conversion tracking landing page.

2. You can move to a different credit card processing program – I use Sage Payment for my online credit card transactions. Although PayPal makes it very easy to do online transactions, the issues in regards to accurate conversion tracking may force you to use an alternative service. 

3. You may even want to test, for two weeks or so, forcing customers to use their PayPal account for transactions online and see if you receive complaints. The reality is that most people who do buy online at some point have set up a PayPal account, but for some reason may not want to use it. If tracking a conversion is crucial to your business, you may need to force them to use their PayPal account to shop on your site.

It is easy to change this one setting (forced use of the buyers PayPal account) in your PayPal account settings and easy to undo as well. If you choose not to do this, you and your AdWords account manager simply need to be aware that some sales simply will not be recorded as AdWords conversions. If that is the case, AdWords conversions and overall sales should be evaluated together when reviewing the success of an AdWords program. The big draw back to all of this is that your statistical data on which keywords convert for you and which do not will not be accurate.

I wish these work arounds were not needed, as the redirect issue has not been an issue before, but for some reason PayPal has decided to make these important changes in the order confirmation page that impact conversion tracking forcing us to look for alternatives to their service.

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Google AdWords Trends From August 2009

There are several marked trends that we have seen across many business sectors in Google AdWords this past month. One has been an increase in advertising start up and the other has been a marked increase in conversion activity. Both trends bode well for a change in our economy and for increased business for the fourth quarter of 2009.

First, many clients who have moved out of AdWords due to budget restraints and the economy are moving back into AdWords this past month. We’ve had several new account set up and several paused clients re-start programs. What is interesting to me is that with this flow back into AdWords, typically we see a rise in the cost per click as more competition drives the click cost up on AdWords, but we have not seen this activity yet. Possibly we will this next month, but not so far.

Second, we’ve seen a real jump in conversions across nearly every market sector. Conversion activity has been particularly strong in August with many clients having their best month ever or for the best month in the past six months. Now not all conversions are sales in “AdWords language”. For some accounts a conversion does mean a true online purchase, but for other clients a conversion actually means a lead. A conversion lead really should called a micro-conversion, but AdWords calls it a conversion in their tracking and control panel. Whatever you call it, increased leads and increased sales is good news for our economy and our own personal clients.

So based on these trends should you be moving back into AdWords or should you wait out the economy a bit longer? The decision may be in part based on what you sell. Most of the activity we are seeing is still for products under $1,000 or so and not the big ticket purchases of $2,000 and more, but based on the activity we are seeing, the prospects for a strong economy for the fall are looking pretty good.