Tag: Google AdWords

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Google AdWords, Is It Right For You?

How can you decide if promoting your business on Google AdWords is right for you? Here’s my checklist to consider as you evaluate if you want to make the investment in Google AdWords pay per click ads.

  1. Ask yourself to you have enough money for a six month test for both a respectable click budget of at least $800 per 30 days PLUS account manager fees?
  2. Do you have the resources to try the program even if you have no conversions or leads in the first two months?
  3. Do you have the ability to modify the content on your website to refine AdWords landing pages, add Google Analytics code, and add the Google AdWords conversion tracking code?
  4. Do you track your sales back in your office or have a program where prospects are asked by your office team how they found you?
  5. Do you want to grow your business, expand your reach and sales base, and are willing to commit time and money to do so?

These are key questions that should be answered before you start really testing the marketplace with Google AdWords. The next step is to find a skilled Google AdWords account manager to help you implement and address issues for set up and issues that arise as your pay per click testing program rolls. We feel that we are that management team! We invite you to visit our AdWords services page to find out more about our program and our AdWords service ratings.

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Measuring the Phone Calls You Get From Google AdWords

If you didn’t know, Google AdWords is now allowing you to track phone calls from Google generated phone numbers attached to your Google AdWords ads. The big news is that we are really seeing measurable results with this new feature. For clients and account managers this now validates what Google AdWords has said all along; that Google AdWords ads are more than clicks, activity impacts off line activity and phone calls. Now we have the real proof!

It only costs a click plus $1 per phone call to get in the game. Although enabling this function does not track every single phone call that an AdWords ad may actually generate for your account, it does show hesitant clients the true power of AdWords beyond scripted form conversion response tracking.

We have enabled this feature in all of our own client accounts this past month and boy are we starting to see some results! For my own personal account I have always known that people will sit on my landing page and not fill out my form, which is tracked by an AdWords conversion script, but will pick up the phone and call me right there. Now with phone tracking I can actually determine which phone calls came from direct AdWords activity – a powerful thing!

The phone number is only shown at the top of your AdWords ad and will not appear on your landing page, the phone number may change. Besides that Google doesn’t really share what the phone number is with you. What Google does do is forward that call from a Google generated toll free number to your selected office phone and then record the call in your AdWords account.

Not every ad shown will show the phone number. So far we are seeing the phone number show on less than half of all ad impressions, but the results for many clients is striking. Find out more about call metrics by reading this blog post on the AdWords blog so you can take advantage of this new feature too.

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Google to Roll Out Call Metrics for AdWords to All End of June

This is great news for all AdWords customers, Marek at Google Agency Support told me that the plan is for Google AdWords to roll out call metrics to all US clients by the end of June 2011.

I have been testing call metrics and I think that it is a must have for anyone using Google AdWords. Once you turn it on in your account, expect about 30 days of service free (you will only pay a cost per click charge) and then expect to pay $1 per call on top of your cost per click charge.

For advertisers who have expected that AdWords has been driving phone traffic and not website form conversions you’ll now have the proof to evaluate further your success with AdWords. We have several clients who will really benefit from the new call tracking features.

This is how it works. Your ad will now have a click to call icon. The user can either click into your ad or click to phone you. If they phone you, they will be calling a phone number generated by Google that will then forward the call to your regular phone. Google will track the length of the call and time. They will then record the call as a conversion in your AdWords account in the call metrics section. We’ve long known that Google AdWords can drive off Web traffic and now we will have the proof.

We are excited about this new feature and plan on implementing it for nearly all our our clients. Watch for it to arrive in your AdWords account interface this month or early next month.

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Google Add the +1 Button to AdWords Ads

Google is really pulling out all the stops when it comes to pushing the new +1 button. Now Google will be +1’ing AdWords ads. In fact I am seeing them already.

“The +1 button itself will appear next to your headline on search ads. Personalized annotations will appear beneath your Display URL. For example, Maria +1’s a page selling a neat laptop holder on a website. When a search ad
with that same URL appears, her friend Sam might see the ad with the note “Maria and 28 other people +1’d this.”

With the +1 button Google is banking on increased growth in the social sector. With your connections and friends now able to personally, via the +1 button, recommend sites and products ads are now instantly more relevant and personal.

Make sure as you allow the +1 button results to show up in your Google.com search results that you understand that others can see sites that you +1 and that this results can be tied to your name.

For AdWords, I would imagine that +1 button votes will count heavily into the hidden quality score factors in the months to come. Google may never tell us about this, but with relevancy being the code word for all Google does, I expect +1 to be SERP and ad changing pretty quickly.