Marc Schillaci - Oxatis Founder and CEO

Get the Most Out of Google AdWords, Part 4: "Zen in the art of Google AdWords"

The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill

Eugen Herrigel (1884–1955) in "Zen in the Art of Archery"

Forget about Google AdWords to better hit your target.

I'm always struck by the fact that, contrary to everyday life where common sense is our main guiding force, when we use Internet tools, we're often more focused on the details than on the core. To get the most out of Google AdWords, you have to follow the example of the Zen archer: to better hit your target, forget about it for a moment.

Let's take the following example from everyday life.
You have £1,000 and you decide to launch a direct-mail advertising campaign (snail mail) to reach customers. You have 4 main cost items:

• Creation of the advertisement,
• Printing and envelope insertion,
• Purchase of the right target file
• Postage fees

Because you're a small company and you only have a £1,000 budget (which won't be making any service provider's mouth water), you're not going to have much negotiating room when it comes to the price of printing, envelope insertion and postage fees.

You still have two cost items: The purchase of the target file and the creation of your advertisement.

• When buying the file, common sense is going pull you toward choosing a smaller, but more targeted file that may be a bit more expensive but will be more responsive to your product proposal.
• So, all that's left is the advertisement. And you're going to spend days and nights writing it up because your common sense (yep, that again) is telling you that it would be really stupid to do all of this...and not have your message speak to your potential customers!

However, it's rare that the same common sense is applied on the Net and with Google AdWords.

Get the Most Out of Google AdWords, Part 3: "The right keyword for your key ring."

In keyword, there's the key. If you want to maximize your chances of ending up in "good customer heaven", build yourself a nice, big key ring...Saint Peter style.

The success of your keyword campaigns depends on 2 elements concerning your keywords:
1.    Choosing enough
2.    Choosing the right ones

The first mistake would be to only bid on 10 or 20 keywords. With that small a number, chances are that you're bidding on the same keywords as everyone else and, consequently, their prices are higher.

You should be setting a goal of working on about a hundred or more keywords (depending on the number of products you sell).

Why a hundred?
Because, if, for example, you sell mobile phones and you bid on "Nokia Mobile Phone", you're going to be up against 30 or 40 bidders. But, if you work on the keyword expression "6234 black Nokia Mobile Phone", you'll only be up against a few other bidders and you'll have a much higher chance of being positioned on the first page of search results at a low cost to you! 

This might seem ridiculous and you're surely asking yourself "Well, then whey isn't everyone else doing the same if it's as simple as that?". The two reasons are connected: the work involved and/or the money. 

If your competitors are large merchants, they are:

1. more focused on the idea of not losing a customer who might want a "6234 white Nokia Mobile Phone" if, one day, it exists. Therefore, they're not going to over specialize their ads and are going to choose "6234 Nokia Mobile Phone" or, even more likely, "Nokia Mobile Phone".
2. more affected by their lack of human resources and are going to work less on keywords based on telephones because they have a lot of other themes to cover.

We can sum up by saying that they have more money, but less time. So, they're going to choose the most general and most expensive words, which are going to produce ads that are a little less pertinent and a little less efficient in terms of performance. That's going to leave you gaps for less expensive ads on the products you've taken the time to target and work on.

On the other hand, if your competitors are small merchants (assuming that they know the tips and tricks for getting the most out of AdWords as well as you and they have the same budget), it's the most clever, and hardest worker that's going to win! Of course, it's going to be you. :-)

The next question is: "How do I find the hundred keywords?"

1. You can start out by being lazy (you'll get the chance to do some hard work later) and looking where the answers are: written in black and white in the names and item codes of the products in your catalog!
2. Then, type the keywords in Google and visit your competitors' sites.

You're going to discover a simple truth. Every family, group of people, club, community, etc. uses their own words and vocabulary to describe certain products or services. It's not necessarily the same vocabulary used by professionals. The vocabulary can change according to generations, regions, trends, etc.
Example: I (as do my colleagues) use the word "e-commerce", while some of my competitors prefer using "online commerce" or "merchant site". Simply reading your competitor's sites will allow you to create a table with your words and nearly all of their synonyms. This will help you find a significant amount of keywords you never would have thought of.

Then you can use a tool provided by Google's competitor: Yahoo Search Marketing (who, if you remember, don't currently use the CTR rule for determining display order and, consequently, the advice that I give you about positioning in AdWords doesn't apply to Yahoo). Because Yahoo stores the millions of searches entered by Internet users, this is going to give you an excellent idea of what your prospects may be thinking.

To do this, click here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_GB/yahoo-search-marketing.php and enter your keywords. Read the list all the way to the bottom and mark down the keywords and keyword groups that you find in a table.

By grouping these three methods together, you can create a good set of words. I highly recommend carefully organizing this list in a table, which will help you group them together into larger sets of keyword expressions. This is going to help you better organize your AdWords campaigns.

If you're clever, there's another "inexpensive" way to generate visits.

You may say to yourself that a significant amount of people make spelling or typing mistakes when they enter their search terms. This is certainly true and you may decide to place a low bid on "fiar trade" (the i and a of fair inverted) because it's a fact that a small percentage of people are going to make this mistake and your "inexpensive" ad will be displayed, while those for "fair trade" won't be visible. This technique has its limits because it's only going to give you 1, 2 or 3% of potential visits compared with searches without the mistake. However, this valuable trick can also help lower the cost of your visits. 

Of course, this technique should be used with moderation and only after you've worked on the fundamental techniques for finding and organizing your keywords, just like a good locksmith (or a good burglar).

This is probably the first time that somebody's told you that making spelling mistakes can be useful. So, make the most of it!

In these first three posts, we've seen:
1/ How Google AdWords works,
2/ How to increase the CTR of your ads via Ad Splitting,
3/ How and why to choose a lot of keywords.

These three points are fundamental and I highly encourage you to put them into action and devote the necessary amount of time to make your campaign a success.

You can see these three points as the first three links in a chain that is going to lead a prospect to purchase on your site. And as you know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In the next post, we'll see that our chain is made up of more than three links and that the weakest ones are not always where we think they are.

Till next time,

Marc

A Few Figures From the English Market to Illustrate the Future of E-Commerce

I've been in London the last few days in order to get a better understanding of the English market, where we've now been present for a little over a month (See the Oxatis press release).

I wanted to share a few figures that seemed pretty relevant for Oxatis e-merchants:  Analyzing them at a time when a lot of folks think that there are too many people on the net, that profit margins are falling, and that buyers are drowning in data and you can understand why I'm so excited to pass this information on!


IMRG “The voice of e-retail” conducts a survey every quarter on the top 10 subjects concerning English buyers from 2006 to 2009.


These are the top three concerns and their perceived level of satisfaction:

1.    Product range: Up 81.7% with level of satisfaction down 2.7%. Despite the explosion of products offered, people are still looking for products and not finding them.

2.    Price competitivity: Up 75.7% with level of satisfaction down 3.9%. Customers don't feel that online prices are more attractive than offline prices.

3.    Product information: Up 74.6% with level of satisfaction down 0.6%. Buyers want more content and explanations about the products.

I see this as a great opportunity for any SOHO or SMB that offers these hard-to-find products and describes them thoroughly and with a passion!

Other incredible figures:

• This year, e-commerce accounted for 20% of retail sales in the UK and will reach 50% in 2020.

• Even more significant: Internet influenced sales will rise from 40% today to 90% in 2020.

Note: By "e-commerce" we're referring to all sales (consumer goods, trips, theatre tickets, services…). You need to divide by 2 or 3 to get the % of consumer goods, which is about 7% of retail sales in England and will reach 15-20% in 2020.

This confirms the figures given to me by many Oxatis e-merchants who make a lot of offline sales thanks to their e-commerce site.

Have a great day,

Marc

Get the Most Out of Google AdWords, Part 2: "Divide and conquer." Niccolo Machiavelli

In my last post, I explained that Google rewards you by lowering the price of your clicks if your ads are relevant. This should immediately spark off two questions in your mind:

1. How is that possible?
   Especially when I'm the one setting the price for my bid.
2. Why would Google do that?
   It's not in their interest for me to pay less for a better service, is it?

This is the SECOND thing you need to understand about Google AdWords if you want to stop paying too much for your ads. The price you set for your bid is NOT the price you pay, and the person who bids the most is not the one who brings in the  most money for Google!

There are two reasons.

The first is a simple question of honesty in the bidding system on the net (eBay and others use the same system too). The price you pay is not the price of your bid, but is just one penny more than the price of the bidder just above you.

However, the second reason is much more important. It stems directly from your Click Through Rate (or CTR), which is actually much more important than your bid amount.

Remember, the CTR shows the number of people that click on your ad when Google displays it. A 1% CTR means that 1 person out of 100 clicks on your ad.

Let's assume that your competitor has a CTR of 1% and pays £1 to be in second position.

If you have a CTR of 2% and you do it right, you're going to pay 51p to be in second position and push your competitor, who's paying £1, down to third position. 

To put it more clearly, if your ad is twice as relevant as your competitors' ads, you are going to pay half the price for a higher position. I'm pretty sure you're starting to like AdWords (otherwise, re-read the preceding text once or twice).

And the best part is that it's a virtuous cycle.

Get the Most Out of Google AdWords, Part 1: "I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions." Confucius

There is ONE central idea that you need to understand to work with Google AdWords.

If you understand, you are going to be able to turn your time into gold, because:

1. Google is going to literally reward you and you'll see the price of your clicks fall.
2. With the same budget, you are going to get more visits and your customers are going to be the ones rewarding you for the second time. As a general rule, more visits means more sales.

On the other hand, if you don't understand Google's philosophy, you are going to pay way too much for your clicks, your competitors are going to swallow you whole, and using Google AdWords is going to be really hard on your wallet!

THE thing to understand is that, for Google, relevance is the only thing that matters.

A series of posts about Google AdWords management

Every profession has its own "tricks of the trade" that are traditionally passed on from generation to generation. 

With e-commerce, things move so fast that those who succeed often figure out which tricks lead to success on their own because there is no one there to pass on the information.

At Oxatis, we think it's really important to give our (future) customers "insider tips" based on our years of experience in the profession.

This pertains to our relationships with different Web players (the much talked-about Oxatis partnerships), as well as good practices and advice we gather and always test ourselves because, after all, we're online merchants too!

So, I've decided to post a blog series about AdWords campaign management. Adwords is an efficient way to quickly generate qualified contacts or sales while monitoring profitability in real time.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. First Post, 2 June 2009:
   Get the Most Out of Google Adwords, Part 1: "I seek not to know the answers, but to understand the questions." Confucius
   In other words: "Relevance is the only thing that matters."

2. Second Post, 8 June 2009:
   Get the Most Out of Google Adwords, Part 2: "Divide and conquer." Niccolo Machiavelli
   In other words: "The click through rate is more important than the price of the bid"

3. Third Post, 17 June 2009:
   Get the Most Out of Google Adwords, Part 3: "The right keyword for your keyring"
   In other words: "Use more keywords""


4. Fourth Post, 24 June 2009:
   >Get the Most Out of Google Adwords, Part 4:  "Zen in the art of Google AdWords"
   In other words: "Help your visitors land on your site"