APD-Marketing Newsletter

Hello and Welcome to the April newsletter…

…and at last after what seemed like a very long, dark and cold winter here in the U.K, some nice weather!

I’ve been promising myself a holiday for it seems like ages now, but we have been pretty busy and it just hasn’t happened, but, it was nice to be able to sit in the garden, in a t-shirt and enjoy a cup of tea in the sun over the weekend!

So, why have we been so busy?

Well it’s a long story and I don’t want to say too much just yet as we haven’t finalised our plans, but it does involve a change of direction for Alison, Lee and I.

It may even mean the demise of this newsletter.

The reasoning is that it just seems that the Internet Marketing niche has started to get a bit silly! I have always had this “thing” about a lot of “IM” products being recycled, old, pretty useless information.

And, it annoys me that no-one tells you the full picture, or very few Gurus do. The products that they release a fad based rather than rooted in factual, hard profit-making information you need to suceed.

And the bottom line is I’m getting even more pissed off with it.

It also seems that some of the Gurus are getting desperate as well! The headlines on emails are becoming ever more sensationalised. The stories are becoming harder and harder to believe and the sales pitches are getting ever more incredulous.

Headlines like “Accident”, “I was *dared* to do this” and “1.2 Billion Email Leads”, for goodness sake, come on! Credit us with at least a bit of common sense!

I haven’t purchased an “IM” how to product or software for…well I can’t remember!

Don’t get me wrong here, there are good products out there, but the really good stuff is not hyped up, it’s sold factually, under the radar even.

I guess this frustration is one of the reasons we launched Internet Marketing Strategic, because we wanted to really help people and rip away some of the hype.

So, we will be changing direction and soon. Some of that change of direction may be relevant for you, most of it will probably not be.

We are currently researching the tools we need to take us where we want to go!

So, in the spirit of wanting to see you succeed while the newsletter lives (as it has for nearly three and a half years now), I am going to give you as much useful info as I possibly can.

We haven’t publicised this, but Lee and I do the ocassional one-to-one consulting for local businesses. Generally for friends of friends. So, I am going to use an example of from one of our live coaching clients to illustrate a point.

This particular client knew he was spending too much in his PPC budget but didn’t know why, so Lee and I had a look.

In a fiercely competitive market, where clicks are $3.00 or more,  we were able to quickly establish that he was wasting around $77 PER DAY on irrelevant clicks that had absolutely no chance of becoming sales.

Why?

Keyword match-types.

You should (hopefully) be aware that Google Adwords provides three different keyword match types; broad match, phrase match and exact match.

Exact Keyword matching will only show your ad when the search term (what your customer types in to Google) matches your keyword exactly, in the exact same order, no misspelling, no typos, no plural, no partial matching.

Secondly, Phrase Match will match the search term if it includes your phrase somewhere; the phrase “red dress” would be matched to searches for ‘ladies red dress’, ‘girl in a red dress’, ‘make a red dress’, ‘red dress design’, ‘red dress lyrics’. Now, of course some of these are relevant, but some are not and the irrelevant keywords waste your budget.

Phrase Matching is quite tightly targeted though, so the same phrase would not match searches such as ‘red evening dress’, ‘red cocktail dress’ or even ‘dress red’. The words are in a different order or do not form the phrase you’re bidding on, so you should thoroughly research and include each variation in your campaign to avoid missing that traffic.

Lastly, Broad Matching is the widest possible match type, and matches any search which includes the words in your keyword, misspellings, plurals, the words in a different order.

This is fine in some circumstances, but you need to exercise extreme caution when using this match type;

You should research all possible search variations which might match your keyword. But you do need to be oh so careful with broad matching. In the example broad match ‘red dress’, this matches; red head dress, dressing in red, red gingham dress, red white and blue dress, red or
dead dress, red dressing gown and many other, potentially wasteful clicks which aren’t relevant enough.

Can you now see why you have to be so careful?

Yes, some of the terms may be relevant, but other will be completely irrelevant.

You may argue that you wnat the traffic, but what use is a click for red head dress if you are selling red dresses? It’s a complete waste of your PPC budget.

Also, matching one broad match keyword in this way will make it difficult to target that keyword with a relevant ad and to land that searcher on a totally relevant page on your site. This in turn will make it impossible to measure the success of each search term and…of course you WILL pay a lot more for each click.

Worse still, Google will uses what it calls, ‘expanded matching‘ on broad match keywords, often using synonyms. Can you see where this is going?

In a recent example I saw, fujitsu bracket was matched with ‘mount fuji’! And ‘monitor mount’ matched for ’shower screen bracket’!

Completely irrelevant.

So, what should your keyword strategy be?

Depending on your market, budget…

I would recommend bidding on exact phrase matches to begin with.

I would research as many variations as possible and stick with exact match to see what results you get. Once you understand how your market is working then you could introduce some phrase matches, but just a small number and in a separate ad group…and monitor closely!

Once you have monitored and understood your market further then maybe a small number of broad matches could also be included to pick up anything you missed in your research.

You should continue to monitor frequently and in particular the search query report for your account to add more phrase or exact match variations.

Finally, make sure you use negative keywords to exclude the irrelevant searches you find and obvious mismatches. For example if you have “wilson federer tennis racket” as a keyword make sure you have negatives such as wrap, handle, bag etc. (You don’t want to get clicks for tennis bag if you are selling rackets do you?)

One final word of caution if you have been using broad match keywords in your account, removing them all in one go can upset the ecology of your campaign – be very careful before implementing a policy change such as this.

O.K, that’s it for this month, I will be back next month, but as I have said, I’m not sure for how much longer as this newsletter does take up a lot of my time and I don’t think it is going to fit in with our new direction.

Enjoy it while you can!

Have fun and make money.

Cheers now.

Derek