This video smells of Uncle Google’s PR machine, offers zero specific information, and from start to finish resembles a Coca Cola TV advert ala ‘We Are The World’. Ugh.

I recently commenced with a new Adwords campaign on behalf of a UK client who is looking to break into the gift market in time for Fathers Day. A small part of what his store sells is an alcoholic range, including wine, spirits, port and champagne.

I have been aware of the Adwords policy on ads relating to alcohol for a little while and thought I would double-check with them regarding advertising wine gifts.

It seems that it is perfectly acceptable to include ‘wine’ in your ad copy, but you must not say ‘alcohol’, ‘whiskey’ or ’spirits’.

I decided to call the Adwords support team and check to see if ‘port’ is allowed, and apparently it is.

So to summarise, Google, our moral guardians, are happy for us to promote the sales of wine, beer, champagne and fortified wine because they clearly are not dangerous.

So with this in mind, why does the drunken vagrant who is sitting in the park near my office have a brown paper bag containing Tennants Super lager? Maybe he doesn’t realise that drinking that stuff isn’t going to get him drunk!

Just a short and fairly basic video from a UK SEO on the subject of on-page title tags. I thought this may be of some use to some of the more inexperienced webmasters looking to learn the basics…

This video from the guys at Affiliate Marketing Diary gives some useful pointers towards tools that will assist you when searching for a product niche to promote via PPC.

Certainly worth a look…

A small trader with a new e-commerce store came to me in February for a quote on managing his Adwords campaign. His store is a (very nicely designed) niche online gift store and he had been managing his own campaign with little success in terms of sales and he had got to that point (that I see very often) where his CTR was almost non-existent, his quality score was poor and his click prices had gone through the roof. His adgroups (and keyphrases) were illogical, his ad-copy all wrong, etc, etc…

His average cost per click was 37p and most of those were not targeted correctly. Suffice to say, he had no REAL idea as to how it was performing other than to say his sales were non-existent.

In short, it was a mess.

Anyway, when I first spoke to him on the phone, in the first minute he said the words that I never, ever, ever understand.

He said something like… ‘well the problem I have now is that I can’t afford to spend much on Adwords’.

Hmmm…

To that I said what I normally say…

[him] *Laughs* - as much as i could buy…’

The Point? Well, if an Adwords campaign is correctly managed, this is possible, and in his case, is actually doing so. Less than 3 months on, his average click price is 24p, but, and here’s the killer part, we know that, on average, EVERY click is making him a profit.

How? Firstly, it’s about knowing how to manage an Adwords campaign (obviously), but less obviously, it is about measuring the performance of your ads and doing so constantly. You can use Google Analytcis to tell you exactly what return in terms of revenue each click gives and so once you have done this, you can see what a click is worth, and if you see what a click is worth, you know how much you will pay. After sufficient testing, If you know that a click on a certain keyword, consistenly results in an average profit of 50p per click, then you know what to pay up to.

So, in summary, if you are inexperienced with Adwords and need a single piece of advice, make very sure that you have installed Analytics and that you KNOW how to measure your campaigns performance.

It can be just like ‘buying profit’.

Today, I took over a new clients Adwords campaign which has been running for over 2 years. He owns a website related to the UK travel industry and has been dishing out a fairly significant monthly lump to drum up business.

Upon inspection, he had added ALL of his keyphrases as ‘broad match’ and had not used ANY negative keyterms.

This made me shudder.

Why?

Well, I spent some time delving into the reports of what he had actually been paying for and I reckon that upto half of his clicks were completely irrelevant to his desired market, not to mention his CTR which was abysmal for the same reason.

So, heres a little tip…

If you are not going to look at adding negative keywords ONLY use exact match (or in some rare cases phrase match). Do not leave it at Broad match just so Google can buy even more champagne ofor their Christmas party season. You may as well get your money and ask Northern Rock to look after it for you.

My client today has wasted thousands of pounds and severely punished his Adwords account through not thoroughly understanding the difference.

This is a guy who oozes professionalism and know-how. I think he may actually be the pioneer of ‘from the bed’ marketing as is becoming the sweeping craze of Web 3.0.

If you start watching this video (actually, i wouldn’t advise it), and then start dragging the ‘forward bar’ to the point when he stops waffling about helping people then you will be disappointed.

Rumour has it that he is still on that bed talking about it right now…

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