The AdWords Phone Seminar: My Takeaways

A little more meat than I thought. Where it helped me was in shifting my thinking about keyword campaigns.

My background is in print production, an industry that's very old. Not a lot of ground-breaking innovation there. In fact the big movers in the industry are the consolidators, the companies that find ways to commoditize and standardize services. SEM/SEO is very new and ever-changing, and I've met very few people in this industry who intended to be there right out of college. It strikes me as an industry built on people who were handed the company website and told to "see what you can do."

The seminar reminded me to look for ways to make radical change. To look at elements of my campaign, break them down, and find ways to move beyond what Google or other industry leaders says is standard and acceptable.

So I'm a bit more rejuvenated.

My SEM Reccomendations for a Printer

A good friend of mine started a printing company 20 years ago. In 2007, he was enjoying 8-digit sales. He survived the post 9/11 crash where others didn't, and I must say I was very happy to see his success.

However, the current credit crunch is a slightly different animal. Where 9/11 dried up his business, the credit crunch dried it up AND took away his ability to get access to credit lines. His business was being squeezed, and he reached out to me for advice.

Remember, I'm a newbie to SEM/SEO. But I've got 15+ years experience in business. The Semmersion blog is a way for me to share my journey as a career-changer as well as SEM newcomer.

After talking with my friend for awhile, and looking at his current web efforts, I proposed a plan built around his current web efforts. Naturally, I can't tell you all the juicy details, but here's what I can share:

1) The plan was not a reinvention of the wheel. For this company to add ecommerce/SEM required them to make some changes to an existing landing page of their website, and communicate these changes to their customers.
2) The second part of the plan called for the company to begin a small online business, and guidelines on how to grow and expand it.
3) The final part reccommended how to integrate the new ecommerce with the existing sales force and customer service staff.

SEM/SEO is a way for experienced businesses and new ones to take advantage of what the web can offer. Our current economic problems will ebb. For me, the question is will businesses be ready to go once the economy turns? My friend's business will, because by the time the tides change, he will have learned all the lessons of moving into ecommerce, and will be better positioned to take advantage of the new environment.

Test Update

The test I spoke of yesterday is in full swing now. I'll talk more about trends closer to the end of the week. What is striking me right now is how the control group gets off to a blinding start in the morning; but the test group for underperforming states comes on strong toward the end of the day.

The "day" being 5am-6pm. Why so short? Google Analytics tells that I get less visits (8% of total) after 7 pm. Today I'll configure a report in AdWords to break out impressions and clicks by hour of day for comparison.

The other thing that is striking is with the relationship between the AdWords and AdSense clicks and CTR. I'm digging in a little more to find the relationship. It would be great if Analytics, Adwords and AdSense were rolled up into one package. That would make it easier to see relationships.

But it's not, which is fine.

3 Cool Marketing Reports

SEM is pretty much about sticking your hands in the mud of individual url's.  Say goodbye to thinking of sites as individual entities.  Well not a total goodbye.  SEM is a lot about assigning a value to individual sites on a list of url's, keeping the "good ones" depending on your goal, and excluding the rest from your ad, site, etc.

The numbers will lead to trends.  With trends come ideas for improvement.  And so forth.

Anyway back to the topic.  I saw this article on marketing reports in SEOmoz, and decided to pass it along to you.  When I was interning, I didn't see reports like these, and I must say it's led me to play around with reporting for my site as well.

Here's a snippet on Impression Share reports.  If you make these hourly, then you'll start to see how visitors come to you.  

This is the report that you can print out, make all pretty, point to and say “LOOK! I need more money!” I know … that works in all companies right now, right? Well with this report you can show how much traffic your campaign is missing out on due to bids and position. It comes out of the Campaign/Account Performance report. The trick is to turn off all the other data points that you usually see and focus on what you are missing.

Here are the instructions for creating this report.

Here is a look at what you might see. This report shows that this account lost almost 60% of traffic due to their ranking and 2.37% based on budget. They take in about 38% of the total impressions their account could be seeing. Not good. But in a slow economy, some of this might make sense. The report only gives you part of it, the interpretation of the data is why you have a job. *wink*