8 Tips to Avoid Costly Mistakes When Managing Your AdWords Account

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication" - Leonardo da Vinci

In this article we explore a few pitfalls to avoid when planning online marketing campaigns.

1. Be Strategic Figure out what your online goal is before you plan the AdWords Campaign. The page where your visitors will land needs a defined purpose. That might be a *Quote Request, *Contact Us form submission, *Shopping Cart purchase or *Newsletter signup (as examples)

2. Keywords The keywords you wish to bid on have to be popular with Google and the public. Well known industry jargon does not necessarily make for a useful keyword list. Satisfy yourself (get expert help if necessary) that the public does indeed search on the terms you think they do – before building the page

3. Weigh up Cost versus Return The price of a click varies widely from one industry to another. Find out what the price of a click in your industry is and then set yourself a realistic budget – for both *daily spend and *monthly spend. If you can’t responsibly afford to buy say ten clicks/ day at the market price, it may be wise to either postpone until you can, or explore other forms of media

4. First impressions Industry insiders say you have a window of around 5 seconds to capture your visitor’s interest before they move on. Ask a stranger (rather than staff members) to road test your page. If they aren’t clear in less than 8 seconds what they’re being asked to do on that page, you may have a problem.

5. Which business model Be flexible and willing to tweak your battle strategy, as the market dictates. Perhaps you chose a shopping cart purchase as your online goal earlier. How will you respond if your AdWords is not generating online sales, but is making your phone ring with enquiries? Could your business be better served by a campaign which aims to generate leads by phone or email, rather than online purchases?

6. Simplicity Avoid the clutter and try to build a page around just one theme. The page needs adequate, unique content (around 150 words as a guide) and this applies to dynamically created shopping cart pages as well

7. Know your competitors If time suggests that people are visiting your e-commerce site on the right keywords, but not buying anything, could it be that the opposition is stealing your thunder? Is your pricing and service equal to –or better than – your online competitors? People shop around online just as they do in malls. And price comparison is much easier online!

8. Hometown advantage Whilst not a certainty, it’s possible that competition in AdWords will determine that your budget won’t stretch as far as you’d hoped. If this eventuates, be prepared to campaign in a smaller radius first, and then later expand to State-wide or Australia-wide when your model is proven

What We Can Learn about Customers' Online Behaviour

The fundamental things marketing professionals want to learn about customers online are similar to what we want to learn offline. For example, we would like to understand and refine our target segments. We would like to better understand the customer journey, demographics, psychographics, consumer behaviour and decision making process, how best to differentiate, propensity to buy, seasonality factors etc. Similarly to direct mail, the web can provide you with timely data to demonstrate and quantify the effectiveness of campaigns. We have a feedback mechanism through analytics that can tell us whether or not we are on track with our marketing objectives - provided the data is treated in the correct manner (e.g. ‘comparing apples with apples’). As the ability to measure online activity with analytics increases we can also learn additional things about our customers relating to buying behaviour. For example:

• Understanding the language that customers use and where they are in the buying cycle by examining the keywords that they use to find the site and search its contents;
• Watching what customers do versus what they say;
• Learning what offers visitors respond to best. Visit www.whichtestwon.com to see how small changes to a web page can make big differences in results;
• Using visitor behaviour information to create targeted offers, identify the propensity to purchase and estimate the sales pipeline.

Successful companies who are ahead of the pack are now investing in learning about and understanding the online customer. They realise that converting digital data into insights has currency. As customers become more empowered the emphasis will be on understanding the individual in real time and responding accordingly.

Further reading on the shift to data-driven marketing and the implications of the empowered consumer can be found in the IBM CMO Study