Traffic Brand

Most online marketing agencies don’t like to take on clients with advertising budgets of anything less than R20k per month. There are a number of reasons for that, but the fact is that there is a place for smaller companies, or companies with limited budgets in the search specific advertising space.

Firstly, can you really expect a South African based company to whom internet marketing is still to a large extend a relatively new concept, to immediately start spending R20k per month on some new unfamiliar marketing channel? It’s not always an easy task convincing people to look further than the traditional marketing avenues when there are new budget allocations involved…

Secondly, depending on which industry you’re trying to market and who you are targeting, you can in most cases, easily prove to a client that search marketing or more specific, paid search marketing, will work for them with a monthly budget of R6k to R10k. One of the best selling points of PPC marketing is the great ROI generated by the channel. This will ensure that clients who start off on small budgets will in time see how their investments are working for them and increase their budgets accordingly.

In short what I’m trying to say is that if you have a marketable product, search marketing can definitely work for your company, even if you don’t have a massive budget to start with.

Last week, somebody from Google made a crucial mistake, which sparked a flurry of cross channel marketing attempts.

On Friday morning when I looked at my inbox, I found a mail from the Google Advertising Professional team which at first seemed like just another mail from them asking advertisers to participate in one of their online surveys. In this case, the survey was to help them gather information about a potential new proposal document for advertisers to use when pitching to clients.

After reading the mail I noticed that for some reason the sender left all the “to” addresses in the mail, visible to everyone. As you can imagine, this list could be quite valuable as it is a real list, with real advertisers and no fake or generated email addresses… Almost immediately one of the recipients replied with an attempt to advertise his own marketing company. Soon after that the original sender replied, apologising for the mistake and asking everybody to respect their fellow Adwords advertisers and not to use the list for their own marketing attempts. The apology did not help and quite a few emails rolled in after that, some of them even stating that this is an opportunity not to be missed. Most of the opportunists asked for referrals and offered rewards for them.

Personally I don’t think spamming the list is the right thing to do. I did however appreciate the opportunity to go and check out my competitors without much effort in finding them. It’s easy to find the company website by looking at the email addresses. Looking at their websites, you can quickly get a very good image of the companies and decide if you want to try and align yourself or partner with them or not.

My advice to the people who have the list is to use the list to find the companies you think would be good for you to partner with and then contact them via the appropriate channels and to stop spamming the list.

To summarise, I think it leaves a bad impression when you are supposed to be a credible search marketing company, but yet, make use of the first dodgy opportunity you get to market yourself… O yes, and of course it’s good to see that even somebody working for Google can make a mistake

Is Google trying too hard to think for advertisers?

Any search engine advertiser knows that there are very good reasons for knowing exactly what search terms users are really finding your ads for. There are quite a few ways of getting this information, which is not what this discussion is about, although I might delve into that another time… For now though, all I intend to discuss is Google’s way of trying to “help” advertisers by matching terms that Google sees as related, to the actual terms advertisers choose to bid on.

When looking at the actual phrases your ads are actually showing for, you might be very surprised and even shocked. Your ads could be appearing for terms or phrases you would never dream of bidding on and that have absolutely no relevancy to your site. Best of all is that you would never even be aware of it if you don’t check your data… As we all know, there are three types of keyword match types for advertisers to choose from, namely Broad, Phrase and Exact match. The aim of this discussion is not to teach anybody about keyword match types, but rather to delve into the “Broad” match type a little.

Before I go into my explanation of broad match types, I feel it is necessary to say something about why I even use broad type keywords: When launching a new campaign, there is absolutely no way of knowing exactly what the keywords are that people are using for your specific product. Not even the most extensive keyword research can give you all the words people in your target market are using. You can get a good indication using various available tools but in order to find out what people are really using, you have to make use of broad type keywords. Using broad types can be rewarding, but could be more damaging than anything else if you don’t know what you’re doing. Combine your gathered search phrase data with your various groups by adding relevant terms and adding irrelevant terms to your negative list and you have a winning recipe. How you do that is not to be disclosed here for now… (Most good advertisers will know exactly how to anyway!)

So, what I actually want to discuss is Google’s initiative to show your ads for terms you’re not specifically bidding on. Here’s an example of what I’m referring to: Say for instance you’ve got a website selling tennis equipment. On your site you have a tennis shoe section, for which you have created a specific adgroup with specific keywords and specific ads that go to specific relevant landing pages. You might have the term “tennis shoes” as a broad match type in your keyword list as it is absolutely related to your site and specifically this section. By having this key term in your list, you would also be able to pick up and gather new terms related to tennis shoes, which will help you build and expand your keyword list. The reason I say that you should check your data every day is because even if your ads aren’t supposed to, it might also show up for searches like “sport shoes” or anything to do with sport and shoes… In some cases this could be very helpful, which is obviously the reason Google is doing it, but in other cases, it can destroy your budget if you don’t pick it up. I know that very few advertisers even use negative match types, which makes me wonder, just how many millions of dollars are spent daily on clicks by totally unqualified traffic to websites across the internet. This Google technology is called “Expanded Keyword Matching” and is only intended to show your ads for searches that are still relevant to your terms, but as I’ve been saying, that is not always the case as what Google sees as relevant to your site, is not always the same as what you might see as relevant. On the other hand, it is also this very technology that helps advertisers who know how to use their data, build and expand their keyword lists.

So how do we use this to our advantage?
By simply using the data at our disposal to regularly add relevant terms to our keyword lists and even more regularly add irrelevant terms to our negative match keyword lists. Remember to make sure you know exactly how negative matching works before you start blocking traffic to your site though…