Adwords Tune-up

Google Adwords is a powerful tool for search engine lead generation and branding, but it can be easy to waste money, clicks and therefore lead generation opportunities if it is not managed to run at optimal effectiveness, speed and efficiency.

This Adwords Check List comes from a B-to-B perspective, where we're going after niche-services leads and clients.

1. Google Ad Optimization:

a. Is your ad written in a way that best attracts the people you are wanting to capture.

b. Is the ad clear and concise, so you can better filter out the rest of the audience you don't want to attract.

c. Does the ad have an implied call-to-action (given the limited ad space).

d. Are you using enough Negative Keyword Terms to help filter out low quality clicks?

Learn more about the importance of negative keywords at:
http://erikholladay.blogspot.com/2009/06/negative-is-positive-with-google.html

2. Google Ad Position:

a. Being in the top position is not always a good thing - - those ads get more clicks but at a lower quality and higher price.

b. Placement at the 3 or 4 spots mean less visitors but higher visitor quality, and less cost.

3. Define what are the desired "Goals" for your Campaigns:

a. Total Clicks, Leads, Sales?

b. Click Rate (CTR) versus Conversion Rates?

For me, high conversion rates for lead generation are much more important than CTR.

Optimizing any paid search campaigns like Adwords is an ongoing process. Being successful with paid search is not unlike being an active stock trader. The search engine "search-term market" is never ending, and always dynamic and changing.

Victory goes to the methodical, alert, nimble and opportunistic. Victory can be defined in many ways, but the points above give an idea of the creativity, research and work required to make it happen.

Greg Statal has posted an excellent article entitled "What to do when Adwords doesn't get results" on his blog Digital Tonto. He goes into more detail with ideas one should consider in order to make an Adwords campaign more effective.

Best Regards; Erik Holladay

Freedom of Choice: Give Potential Customers Easy Options for Contacting your Company from your Website.

I have for some years allowed enquries to contact our divisional website through Telephone, Email and Contact Us Form. Adding a Chat option eventually will round things out. The primary goal for B-to-B marketing is make it very easy for a potential or returning customer to contact us! Let them chose the method, as long as we get the lead.

From my experience over the last 5 years, there is a clear pattern of contact preferences from enquiries:

The largest enquiry group uses and prefers the Telephone, and the quality of these leads is on average higher than the other options and often time-sensitive.

Next are Emails, this option is easy and convenient for people to use, and we can often capture complete contact details and attached project information along with the email. We receive very high value enquiries from Executives as emails, for example.

Last are Contact Us Form enquiries. This is not to say these forms are of little value, we also receive high quality leads this way. However, from my experience, using a Contact Us Form is the least popular way our B-to-B clients have wanted to contact us, if given the choice.

Yet, there are significant internal advantages with Contact Us Forms for CRM data capture, analytics, etc. And a Contact Form can be tweaked and optimized to encourage more people to use it.

But the Bottom line for us is the Telephone first, then Email, then Web Form in terms of enquiry options chosen by visitors.

Designing a webform long enough to capture the contact information Bus Dev and Marketing want, but short enough to encourage someone to fill the Contact Us form out and send, involves compromise, flexibility, experimentation and an open-mind.

A special thanks to Howard Sewell, President of Connect Direct, for posting the question
"Contact Us" Forms - Do They Work?" in LinkedIn... this question motivated me to share my experience with Contact Forms, Phone and Email.