Thanks for the Shirt, PSU!
Published on Monday, March 9 2009
Here I am wearing the t-shirt sent to me by Jim Jansen’s AdWords Challenge class at Penn State. I tele-lectured for them last week, and got this cool shirt as thanks.
Hey, PSU’ers, post any AdWords questions to comments and I’ll answer them as best I can.
Howie,
First, thanks a million for tele-lecturing to the GOMCHA course. The students loved it!
Second, is that the coolest t-shirt ever? :-)
Third, given teams have a $200 and 21 days to get results, how would you start the campaign off (e.g., bid prices, traffic estimation, etc.)?
Love the shirt!
What’s the goal? How are you being judged? Elegance of ad groups and ad copy, or some results?
Criteria are:
Performance
Account structure
Tool and feature usage
Advertiser savviness
Budget management
Performance – I assume CTR only, since conversion data are too subject to manipulation and error.
Account structure – lots of ad groups w/unique landing pages (make sure to add noindex tags to “duplicate” content)
As you monitor CTR, peel the outlying high-impression keywords into separate ad groups to optimize keyword/ad relevance
Tool and feature usage – dunno, just show them that you saw all the tools. See if there’s some scheduling trick you can try (no ads on Saturday nights, etc.).
Also, consider a small placement-targeted campaign
Also, do some geo-targeting in a campaign
Advertiser savviness – I love negative keywords. Google loves broad match keywords with negatives (they say it’s a best practice, but I prefer moving to exact match, but they’re judging, not me).
Budget management – with only a couple hundred bucks, monitor every click. Be hyper-responsive to expensive clicks. Run reports daily that filter for clicks that cost more than X, and pause those keywords.
Weird to be giving this “non-ROI” advice. I want to be clear that this is not for normal advertisers trying to make money via AdWords!!!
Thanks, Howie! Much appreciated!
My team is working on the HungryBuffs.com campaign. So far our content network is generating the most impressions; however, no clicks. Do you have any recommendations to increase our CTR?
Jenna – What sites are showing your ads in the Content Network? Why are people visiting those sites? What are your ads promising that’s exciting enough to interrupt the site visitors and make them say, “Wow, I want that right now!”
Right now we’re working with social networks like Myspace and Facebook targeted to our campaign age group (18-24). I’ll work more on the copy, it may need to be revamped.