Many of the ‘homemade’ accounts that I see, make no use of negative keywords, which is a serious mistake. Here’s the deal, if you type in your keywords without quotation marks for phrase match, or square brackets for specific match. Then your keywords are all set for what Google calls ‘Broad Match’. This means that ANY search phrase containing your keyword phrase (in any order) will return your ad.

Example:

Your keyword listing for “ice cream” (without the quotation marks) will display your ad when the following phrases are searched on:

ice cream maker
ice cream franchise
ice cream recipe
ice cream flavor
ben and jerry ice cream
ice cream parlor
ice cream addiction

Assuming that you don’t offer all of these products/services on your website, you have a problem because your ad is less relevant, and will get a lower CTR – and that means a higher cost per click.

If your site sells ice cream makers, you should use word such as “franchise” and “parlor” as negative keywords, so that your listing would not appear for these search phrases.

How to use it:

Typically I add negative keywords at the Ad Group level, which is very simple. Click the “Edit Keywords” link and simply add your negative keywords to the bottom of your keyword list. They should be formatted with a minus sign and no spacing. Example: “-addiction” (without the quotation marks).

In essence I would suggest that you build your site backwards. In other words, beginning with your site goal (i.e. a conversion) and creating a site structure that effective leads up to it.

For example, instead of creating a very open navigation structure, consider reducing the number of clickable links in order to drive visitors down a specific path. Let me tell you why I think that is important. Imagine you have the opportunity to sit down with a potential client to do a sales presentation, my guess is that you have a ‘story’ that you tell in a specific sequence. In other words, layer-by-layer you build the intellectual and emotional reasons for owning your product/service.

I believe that effective websites use this exact same strategy, pointing visitors down a specific path that builds an understanding of the value of your product/service.

Just like any other marketing copy, your web text really needs to be concise, clear, and compelling.

Concise: We’re all busy, so don’t use 57 words when 7 will do.

Clear: I understand that some target audiences are more technical than others, but if your message requires a PhD or a dictionary to understand then you’ve probably lost most of your visitors in the first sentence.

Compelling: You need to appeal to emotion as well as intellect. Tell me why I want it before you tell me what it is…

Google have built-in an incredibly powerful capability to split test your ads.  This means that when you create multiple ads for an Ad Group, Google will display them alternately, and track which one gets the best response rate (measured in click-throughs). 

This is important for two reasons.  Because of the Quality Score calculation, you pay less for ads with a higher click-through-rate, and secondly, a higher CTR usually means more visitors to your site (and more opportunities to sell).

How to use it:

At the ‘Ad Group’ view level, you’ll see a “New Text Ad” link next to the display of your existing ad.  Click this button, and ‘presto’, you’ll have the fields to complete to create a new ad. 

Once you’ve had multiple ads for a period of time, you can scroll to the bottom of the Ad Group page to see the CTR, and CPC for each ad.  It’ll also show you the percentage of time that these ads were show.  All of this data is for the time period you have selected in the drop-down box above the clicks stats columns. Beware of jumping to hasty decisions – unless you’re getting thousands of visits per day.  You probably want to let each ad version run for a week or more before deciding to delete the loser, and make a new competitor.

In order to calculate your conversion rate, you must identify two individual metrics; first the number of visitors that your site receives, and second, how many of them take an action that you consider a conversion. Once you have those numbers, the math is simple:

By way of comparison, a ‘good’ e-commerce site conversion rate is considered to be in the high single digits. For lead generation, a ‘good’ conversion rate is the high teens.

If your site is ‘average’, you’ll probably be between 0.5-1% for e-commerce, and 3-5% for lead gen.

If you target group is diverse, you might want to consider creating multiple websites – especially if you have different products that attract different groups. At first glance, this option might seem cost-prohibitive, but we have found that the difference between a 3% conversion rate, and a 10% conversion rate can often justify the extra expense of creating multiple sites, and provides a return-on-investment after just a few months

It’s funny, but many of the companies I talk to have developed a website for no real purpose. Sure, at the time there was some sort of rationale – “you need one these days, don’t you?” or “our competition has one, so we must keep up”. Unfortunately these reasons provide no guideline for the creation of a site. Nor do they contain any criteria for measuring success.

To compound the problem, they give no real consideration to the needs, desires, and characteristics of their target audience. In my opinion, this has led to the plethora of un-navigable, poor content, zero conversion websites that seems to be the standard for corporate America. Harsh? Maybe. But if you fall into this category, you’d better do something about it ASAP because the web is here to stay.

A web site is a corporate resource, and like any other resource it should provide a return on investment. That return should be immediate and measurable, meaning that the bottom line for any website is – how specifically has the web site grown my business today/this week/this month, and so on. Enter the concept of ‘conversion’.

For a business web site, there are three primary goals:

- generating leads

- selling products via e-commerce

- generating referrals

The reason that I say this is because these are the only actions that lead to real dollars. So, they’re the only way for your web site to produce a return-on-investment. When a visitor takes one of these actions, that is counted as a ‘conversion’ (as in converting visitors into leads and customers).