Sometimes you can do all the right things with AdWords, like deleting expensive keywords that don't lead to sales, and discover that your best efforts have actually killed your sales.
What's going on, and what can you do about it? Read on… Read the rest of this entry »
Most people who've tried to grow their business with AdWords have given up in apparent failure. After struggling to understand the complicated interface, they finally get a campaign up and quickly see lousy results. They pay lots of money to Google and their sales don't increase at all.
They turn off the campaign, mutter something about another Internet scam, and go back to all the other ways of getting traffic that weren't sufficient before.
Why does this happen so frequently? And what can you do to avoid this gaping chasm of failure? Read the rest of this entry »
A reader asks:
I purchased your Google Adwords book and on page 54 at the bottom, you said to "click the approx avg search volume header to sort by average monthly search volume, from greatest to least", but I don't see this option on google's keyword tool. Is there something else I can click on to get the same results?
My response:
I'm lying in bed with a wrenched lower back, so the keyword I gravitate toward is "low back pain." Next time someone asks me a keyword question, I hope I respond with an example more like "ultra-marathoning over 40" ;)
Here's how you do it in the new Google Keyword Tool:
1. Enter your keyword and get a table of results:
2. Next to "Sorted by" at the top right, click the drop-down menu that currently shows "Relevance".
You'll see the whole menu, and then you can select the sort field:
If you're doing keyword research, what do you do with all that research? How do you write compelling "Game Over" Ads based on all your insight and hard work?
Most instructions on market research tell you what to research and where to get the information, but now how to use that intel to create compelling marketing messages that make you the obvious choice to your ideal customers.
Camp Checkmate is the answer to that problem. Two days of high level workshop and mastermind, where you'll come away with your marketing done for you.
Read more: CampCheckmate.com
Quick heads-up: Registration is now open for Camp Checkmate Chicago, June 10-11, 2010. Two days of intense "Playshops" (fun workshops), quality time with me, Perry Marshall, and Glenn Livingston. Click to find out more (opens in a new window so you can keep learning about the Search Funnel Report on this page).
And now to the Search Funnel Report. Here's what Google has to say about it:
In a nutshell, here's the problem that the Search Funnel Report solves:
You run a keyword report and discover that a certain broad keyword gets lots of impressions, many clicks, and no conversions.
So you delete the keyword.
Then, next month, you realize that your sales are down, even for keywords that had done really well before. Keywords that weren't even in the same ad group or campaign as the one you deleted. Not only conversions, but clicks as well.
What the…?
Suppose you walk into your favorite diner tomorrow morning, go up to the counter and tell the short order cook, "I'll have the usual." Eight minutes later, you get the tall stack of banana pecan pancakes, three slices of bacon, wheat toast with orange marmalade, and a pot of English Breakfast tea.
Next week, you're traveling on business to an unfamiliar city. You find a diner that looks just like your favorite one, walk in, go up to the counter, and tell the short order cook, "I'll have the usual." The cook looks at you like you have three heads.
Obviously, the words "I'll have the usual" don't have any magic power. They work at your diner only because of numerous previous interactions with the cook. They don't work where the same history isn't in place.
Your best converting keyword may be a version of "I'll have the usual." Suppose you sell digital cameras. Your money keyword might be "PowerShot 780SD". That's the click that brings the customer ready to buy.
But suppose customers will buy from you only if they already have a history with you. Suppose they have to start buy searching for "digital camera" and then find your store. They don't buy, but they spend time looking.
A couple days later, they search for "Canon cameras", based on information they got when they were on your site. They see your ad, but go instead to an organic listing that reviews Canon cameras.
The following week, they search for "PowerShot 780SD" as the camera they want, and they see your ad, click it, and place an order.
Until now, Google would tell you only that the keyword "PowerShot 780SD" led to a sale, and the keyword "digital camera" brought a bunch of tire kickers who never bought anything.
Based on that data, you might have deleted "digital camera" as an ROI-negative keyword, and never realized that keyword was an indispensable early stepping stone on the conversion path.
Conversion tracking just got 300% more complicated. That's good news if you're willing to spend the time to understand and engage the new complexity. And bad news for those advertisers who would rather not pay attention to results, and just let Google optimize everything for them.
Of course, you can always hire an ROI-obsessed AdWords management agency to do this for you. (If you've been burned by agencies before, I feel your pain. Check out the agency that Kristie McDonald and I started in November: ThePPCagency.com.)
Join me for a Camp Checkmate preview call Thursday, 11 March 2010 at 1:00pm EST, where I'll take you through a 30-minute exercise that will give you insight into what your market wants and isn't getting.
You'll discover how to play the Google search results page like a 1955 Gretsch Chet Atkins 6120 guitar, so that you can cut through the clutter and become the obvious choice for your market.
Full disclosure: this is a preview call for the Camp Checkmate live event coming up in Durham NC in 3 weeks, on April 1-2. Frankly, I've done a sucky job of promotion so far, so my plan is to entice you with my best stuff and then make you an offer you can't refuse.
My friend and business mentor Danny Warshay of DEWventures.com and I had our bi-weekly "intimate-phone-chat-that-we-record-and-send-to-anyone-who-will-listen" on Monday.
Danny teaches entrepreneurship at Brown University, the only Ivy League school named after the first word of a Van Morrison song title, and he is an alum of Harvard Business School, which impresses you even if you won't admit it.
Plus he spent a few years in brand management at Procter & Gamble.
Plus he's a serial start-up guy, lending his talents to a bunch of new ventures in publishing, natural health, engineering, and so on.
Plus plus he travels around the world teaching and consulting on entrepreneurship, from China to Egypt to Portugal to Israel to I can't even keep track of where else.
So when we got on the horn to talk about what he calls "bottom up research," I was all ears.
And when – this was totally unrehearsed – I mentioned an early mistake I made when I was first starting out on my own, I got Danny onto his soapbox in a big way. It starts at 4 minutes 30 seconds in the audio (below).
Danny's mild-mannered, calm, earnest demeanor vanished as he ranted about how many times he hears otherwise savvy entrepreneurs pull out this particular number – the one I had used – to justify their business plan to themselves, to partners and to investors.
In the process, you'll discover how to conduct free research that's arguably more valuable than anything you can buy or commission. Danny shares two examples of "bottom up research" from his P&G days, showing how Tide and Dawn teams innovated based on this method of research that's available to all of us, regardless of how pinched our pennies.
Click the arrow below for a short course in entrepreneurship from one of the leading teachers in the US. Or click the blue link to download the MP3 for listening at your leisure:
Join me for a Camp Checkmate preview call tomorrow at 1pm EST, where I'll take you through a 30-minute exercise that will give you insight into what your market wants and isn't getting.
Full disclosure: this is a preview call for the Camp Checkmate live event coming up in Durham NC in 3 weeks, on April 1-2. Frankly, I've done a sucky job of promotion so far, so my plan is to entice you with my best stuff and then make you an offer you can't refuse.
In September 2010, I’ll be giving a couple of intensive AdWords Master Classes in the Netherlands and Belgium. Each master class will consist of a small amount of presentation, combined with a lot of hands-on practice.
Participants will work individually and in small groups on practical strategies and techniques that will increase clicks, leads and sales, especially in very competitive markets. If you attend, you will make improvements in your AdWords campaigns during the master class, and will gain skills that will enable you to continue improving those campaigns once you return to your office.
Or for the Dutch and Flemish speaking visitors:
Tijdens de 2-daagse Master Class leert u hoe u Google AdWords zó inzet dat u met minimale advertentiebudgetten uw online campagne doelstellingen bereikt. Het intensieve programma bevat een mix van theorie en praktijk.
U gaat zelf individueel en in groepjes aan de slag met de opgedane theorieën en technieken. Tijdens de Master Class maakt u al een start met uw eigen AdWords campagne die u na afloop direct vanuit uw kantoor of huis verder kunt gebruiken en uitbouwen.
For more information, please contact Reint Jan Holterman from orange+lime marketing at adwords@orange-lime.nl or check out this page regularly for more news.
Some good educational opportunities coming up in the next couple of months. In chronological order:
My friend, colleague and mentor Perry Marshall's AdWords Elite Summit in Maui is looking to be a must-attend for top AdWords players. How seriously am I taking this? Perry invited me a couple of months ago to be a speaker, and I couldn't, due to a long-standing client commitment. As soon as I could, I ordered the live streaming video and DVD set of the event. That was hard, to pay for something that was offered for free ;) But as someone who plays in the AdWords Big Leagues, I couldn't afford not to.
If you play in the AdWords Big Leagues, or aspire to, and you're not jetting to Maui next week, do yourself a favor and order the videos. Perry's kindly hooked my affiliate link up with a $100 coupon, already applied:
https://m171.infusionsoft.com/go/HJMauiDSC1/SC94217
The coupon expires on Thursday, Feb 25 (that's two days from now).
I'm a fairly low-key guy, but if we were in the same room I'd be shaking you by the shoulders telling you that Camp Checkmate is the most powerful marketing experience you'll ever find, and that you should do whatever you can to attend.
Unlike the other events, this is not an informational seminar. It's an experiential workshop, where you come away with a completely revamped marketing message, as well as the skills to compete in just about any market. (I gave a small taste of the workshop – 6 minutes worth – to Perry Marshall's roundtable members last month, and they were over the moon about the results they got even in that short time. See the link below for a video roundout of their reactions.)
Stay tuned for more information over the next couple of days. This is a small group event (30 people max). The floodgates open as soon as I get the sales letter up, so if you want to get in ahead of the rush, and you don't need a ton of persuasion that spending 2 days with me in a small group workshop environment is worth it, go to the link below to get the ball rolling. If you go there, you may discover a shopping cart mistake that may make you very happy. I'm fixing the mistake tomorrow morning, first thing. But if you spot it now, definitely take advantage!
http://askhowie.com/camp-checkmate-unveiled
I've attended just about every System Seminar since they began in 2002, and it's no exaggeration to say that my training there has been the foundation for my online marketing career. The first two events were the most powerful for me, as they focused on fundamentals.
Ken McCarthy, who runs the seminar, has put together a speaking roster that reflects a "back to basics" focus on copywriting, positioning, traffic generation.
If you sign up through this link, you're invited to be my guest on Saturday night, April 10 at a small group dinner with me and some of the sharpest minds in marketing: Perry Marshall, Drayton Bird, Timothy Seward of ROIRevolution, and Ben Moskel (the "super-affiliate").
Ken always puts on a razzle-dazzle pre-seminar series of expert interviews and articles, which you should get even if you have no intention of attending this year. The link below gives you access to all that, as well as entice you to attend the main event.
When you see a sales pitch for a live event, you'll always get a long bulleted list of "what you'll learn" and "what you'll now be able to accomplish." That's terrific – ultimately we attend events and develop ourselves professionally to increase our knowledge and capabilities.
But something else happens at the RIGHT live events that's simply magical, that can't be explained, and that can't be described adequately to someone who's never experienced it.
You come under the sway of a powerful, positive, optimistic, proactive and generous energy field.
And for the time you're there, you reorient your behavior, self-image, and actions to attune with this field.
And if you're diligent at networking, you form relationships with people that sustain the field long after you return home.
Take stock briefly: how much time do you spend in the presence of a positive, optimistic, proactive and generous energy field? Does that describe your work environment now? Is everyone raring to go, focusing on how to better themselves, serve others, and take full responsibility for outcomes? If not, how does that affect you on a day-to-day basis? Are you curious to see how your entrepreneurial spirit can soar in the presence of warm, supportive thermals of energy?
Of course, I'd love it if you came to Camp Checkmate (if you can't make Durham in May, there's always Chicago in June – stay tuned).
But any time you can put yourself in an "elite" situation, where people self-select for self-improvement, you'll benefit. If the content is appropriate to your needs. And if the organizer has "heart" – a spirit that resonates with your own.
While ebooks are useful and home study courses are valuable and teleseminars are empowering, a live event can be life-changing. I've experienced it many times, and I want the same for you.
Wishing you health, happiness and prosperity,
Howie
Imagine if you discovered a new medical procedure that could be used in every Intensive Care Unit in the world.
One proven to reduce infection rates, save lives, and reduce hospital operating costs by millions of dollars a year.
That costs next to nothing to manufacture or deploy.
That is so simple to operate that a kindergartner already knows how.
And that most doctors refuse to use, despite the clear evidence for its safety and efficacy.
That's just the position that Peter Provonost, a critical care specialist at Johns Hopkins University, found himself in 2001.
He wanted to tackle a specific problem: infections that occur when an IV line is put into a patient.
Theoretically, these infections are 100% preventable if doctors just follow five simple steps:
(1) wash their hands with soap
(2) clean the patient’s skin with chlorhexidine antiseptic
(3) put sterile drapes over the entire patient
(4) wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves
(5) put a sterile dressing over the catheter site once the line is in
In case you've never gone to medical school, this isn't exactly the sort of stuff that causes would-be doctors to flunk out in despair. Not exactly rocket science, or heart surgery, or even organic chemistry. Basic procedure that every med student, resident and intern has been taught – and done – a thousand times.
Yet when he asked ICU nurses to record how well doctors performed these five steps, he was shocked: fully one-third of the time, at least one step was skipped.
Leading to infections among ICU patients, who are among the last people in the world you want to infect. They don't respond that well to opportunistic infection, turns out.
In response, Provonost instituted a simple 5-step checklist that doctors had to complete for every line they put in. They balked at the "extra paperwork," so nurses were authorized Nurses were authorized to stop doctors who skipped a step, with administrative backup to intervene if necessary.
What happened? Atul Gawande, writing in The New Yorker, relates:
Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs.
The lowly checklist, as powerful as any drug or procedure developed in the past 50 years?
Gawande makes a strong case for the use of checklists in his new book, The Checklist Manifesto. Anywhere you have a complicated situation and a high cost of failure, create a checklist.
Not any checklist will do. It turns out, Gawande discovered, that there's an art to writing good checklists. (For full details, read his book.) The right kind of checklist can save 200 lives when a plane loses an engine and has to glide to a landing in the Hudson River. The wrong kind can discombobulate the co-pilot so much that he can't think.
I realize that AdWords is not the same as critical medical care or air safety, but it's still a complicated situation, and if it's your business, a high cost of failure.
With that in mind, I've created a bunch of AdWords checklists, following the AdWords best practices I teach in Traffic Surge, Profit Surge, and AdWords Checkmate, and the checklist best practices I learned from The Checklist Manifesto.
They include:
1. Keyword Research Checklist
2. Ad Preparation Checklist: Search Network
3. Ad Writing Checklist
4. Ad Split Testing Checklist: Top Level
5. Ad Split Testing Checklist: Lowest Level
You can download them here, absolutely free.
And you can find out how to get a video and PDF tutorial on using the Checklists for only $2.30. Just scroll to page 6 in the download.
I recently came across the story of Leonid Rogozov, the Russian surgeon who removed his own appendix while overwintering in an Antarctic polar base in 1961.
You can Google his name and find photos of the operation, which I have chosen not to reproduce here in the interests of I just had lunch.
You can also read a fascinating description of the operation in the British Medical Journal.
This isn’t the sort of how-to information that one hopes will be useful some day, but it certainly puts the toil of writing AdWords ads in perspective.
And that, funnily enough, is what I want to talk about today.
I’m a huge believer in business owners taking responsibility for their marketing. They can outsource execution, but should be driving the strategic direction. They can outsource customer outreach, but must intimately understand the customer.
So when I tell you that you are probably the worst person to be writing your own AdWords ads, you are right to look at me quizzically.
But that’s what I’ve decided.
Writing your own marketing messages is in some ways very much like trying to remove your own appendix.
No matter your skill at the operation, you’re still a little too close to the action to be as effective as you might want.
To say nothing of the pain.
I discovered this by accident, during a mastermind group I was leading last year.
One of the participants, let’s call him Doug (even though his real name is Alfred), requested help with his ads. So the rest of us grilled Doug on his product, his ideal customer, his top competitors, etc.
And I must have been getting tired, because I suggested that we all take a few minutes working independently, writing ads and then handing them to Doug.
The results were astonishing.
From spinning his wheels in a Google Rut three inches wide and two miles deep, Doug now had a dozen radically new messages to test.
And many of them were brilliant.
And all of them were inside him, but he couldn’t get them out himself.
Much like that infected Russian appendix.
OK, so I’m not suggesting you just hire someone to write your marketing message for you.
You wouldn’t pay a doctor to insert an appendix, would you?
(This is a crappy and illogical metaphor; I’m aware of that. But I’m on a roll, it seems to me. So on I plow.)
No, what you want is someone who can draw insight and empathy out of you. Who can see with a clearer perspective what your customer cares about. Who can accurately see how you are truly different from your competitors.
You provide the raw material, based on your experience.
Your “marketing surgeon” provides a third-party view and fresh eyes.
Click here for a PDF tutorial on a 7-step exercise that you can do with a friend that will give you tremendous insight into your Ideal Customer.
At Perry Marshall’s exclusive Roundtable meeting in Orlando last month, I led a Checkmate exercise that culminated in members writing ads for each other.
Each participant had six minutes: two to describe their ideal customer, two to answer a specific set of questions from other members, and two to sit back and watch the other folks write new ads for them.
Here’s a short video montage of their reactions to this exercise:
The exercise worked so well because everyone in the room was oriented in Checkmate methodology (that took 20 minutes), everyone understood the power questions that lead to breakthroughs (10 minutes), and everyone was sincerely interested in being of service to each other (that’s thanks to Perry, and everyone’s upbringing – I can’t claim credit there ;)
Buoyed by the success of a brief Camp Checkmate exercise at Perry’s Roundtable, I am taking Camp Checkmate on the road.
But I’m keeping the workshops small, so I can manage the interactions and ensure that everyone leaves with new marketing copy and a polished and streamlined strategic direction.
As in, these workshops will sell out because there’s scarcity built right in.
I finally bit the bullet and hired a copywriter to help me describe Camp Checkmate. As fine a writer as my mother tells me I am, I was just getting in my own way. I wasn’t describing the benefits of Camp Checkmate clearly and powerfully. I was getting too caught up in process description, and not articulating the amazing outcome that everyone who has gone through the process has experienced.
So I’m waiting for the new and improved sales letter, which should be ready to go by March 1.
But that leaves me 3 weeks just sitting here staring at my own appendix, and my fingers are getting twitchy.
So if you’d like to be one of the few, the proud, the Camp Checkmate grads (note to self: look into Camp Checkmate t-shirts, hats and water bottles), then skip the rush when the good sales letter comes out, and reserve your place now.
East Coast Camp: April 1-2, 2010: Durham NC
Midwest Camp: June 10-11, 2010: Chicago IL (with guest appearances by Perry Marshall and Glenn Livingston)
Cost: $1497, or three payments of $532, and you can bring one guest (significant business or life partner) for an extra $95 to cover the cost of food and materials. (Just click the "Camp Checkmate – Colleague" link at the bottom of the shopping cart page.)
Includes: Two full days of Camp Checkmate, full lunch and refreshments, course materials, the AdWords Checkmate Deluxe digital home study course, and one year of the Chess Club, a monthly coaching club for Checkmate grads.
Early bird discount for Gold Key Members, good until Friday February 12, 2010. When you click one of the links below, you'll save $500. As in, Camp Checkmate for just $997, or three payments of $366.
Go here for the single payment plan.
Go here for the three-payment plan.
Once you register, I'll be in touch with all the details, and you'll get immediate electronic access to the complete Checkmate Deluxe package.
Looking forward to seeing you at one of the upcoming Camp Checkmate workshops!
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