Improving an AdWords Keyword Quality Score

AdWords Red for Attention

Today’s AdWords Color Tip: Red for Attention.

Every night when I go to bed, I write a todo list for the following day. I put little things ("Iron and fold the underwear") and big things ("Save the cheerleader, save the world") on the list. I include errands ("Buy more of those things you’re almost out of") and decisions ("Pay Visa bill or move to Siberia"). And the first item on the list is always the same: "Read the list."

You get where I’m going, right? If I don’t read the list, how will I know to read the list? It turns out the most important thing about the list isn’t what’s on it, but that it gets read in the first place.

That’s true of this email as well.

You, wise reader, are reading this email – Relax, I’m not psychic, it’s just a parlor trick – but some other subscriber to my email list is not.

Why? Maybe the subject line didn’t appeal to them. Perhaps they haven’t emptied their inbox since 1997 and can’t bear to log in and see eight years of junk. Maybe they chose to open the boss’s email instead of mine. Whatever.

I could be writing the one secret that will change their life utterly and completely, and it doesn’t matter. Because they aren’t going to read this. Because I couldn’t get their attention.

The primary currency of marketing is attention. No eyes or ears, no sales. And attention is harder and harder to get these days. More stimuli, less time; more hype, less trust; more ADD, less focus.

Speaking of ADD (I used to be a school teacher, so I’ve seen quite a bit of diagnosed Attention Deficits in my day), we’re all ADD online. The medium demands it. How many windows are open on your desktop right now? How long are you willing to wait for a web page to load? Can you imagine calling a movie theater box office to find out the showtimes when you can just type "Movies 27712" into Google and get the complete listings for every local cinema, including reviews and trailers and online ticket sales, within 3 seconds? (I used to veg out so completely during those recordings, that I’d have to listen to the message repeat three or four times to catch the showtimes for the movie I was interested in. Now I get to daydream all I want, and when I come back to earth, the web page with the info I want is still waiting for me.)

The primary task of your ad is to compel attention. As the 11th century Talmudic scholar Rashi might have said were he alive today, "No lookie, no clickie."

Just as stop signs, online error messages, and immediate attention triage tags are red, your ad must wave a red flag in front of your prospect that says, "Stop for a second and consider this."

How do you get their attention? My marketing mentor Ken McCarthy has a very handy three-word response that he strives for in his ads:

"That’s for Me!"

How can you get your prospect to glance at your ad and immediately think, "That’s for me"? By naming them, talking about things that matter to them, and making them hungry for more.

Chapter 6 of AdWords For Dummies includes seven specific headline strategies for grabbing attention. I’m going to reveal three of the strategies here. Want the other four? Then go down to Barnes & Noble, buy your coffee and raisin-nut bar, and turn to page 141. (Or, just buy the book, if that’s not too self-serving a suggestion. http://askhowie.com/afd will take you to the amazon product page.)

Attention Grabbing Strategy #1: Name Them

• Considering a Unicycle
• Mind Maps for Teachers
• Actor’s Disability Insur.

Attention Grabbing Strategy #2: Mirror Their Itch

• Suffering from Gout?
• Rotten-Egg Water Odors?
• Disorganized?

Attention Grabbing Strategy #4: Arouse Curiosity

• Are You Right-Brained?
• Are You a Slacker Mom?
• Copywriting Secret #19

Get the other four attention grabbing headline strategies – and so much more! – in AdWords For Dummies.

Glenn Livingston – Howie Jacobson AdWords Interview

Glenn Livingston and I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday, chewing the fat about AdWords and online marketing in general. We talk about:

• my Official AdWords For Dummies Official AdWords checklist – including Glenn’s improvement
• Glenn’s AdWords journal – how he uses an ongoing word document to get a birds-eye view of long-running campaigns
• Glenn’s extremely clever process for choosing a great ad headline before he even buys a domain name or sets up a web site
• the famous person Glenn sat next to in homeroom
• how to improve your content network results with site-targeting and CPM bidding
• when you should NOT split test your ads

Although Glenn was interviewing me, I spent about half the time asking him stuff. He’s brilliant at breaking down systems into their key parts, and streamlining processes to make them easier, cheaper, and more effective. Talking with Glenn is like reading "Zen and the Art of AdWords Maintenance."

Download the interview – free – from Glenn’s site:

The Glenn Livingston – Howie Jacobson AdWords Interview

Announcing the Official AdWords For Dummies AdWords Checklist

I didn’t feel like doing any real work today, so I created an AdWords For Dummies checklist. it consists of 36 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t (we in the consulting profession like to refer to them as "best practices" and we often charge a lot of money to rub your nose in them).

But as I said, I’m a little too tired to do any nose-rubbing today, so you get to have them for free.

The goal of this checklist, as with most free checklists, is to make you feel really stupid and helpless, so you’ll call me to fix everything for you. Well, forget it. I’m tired, remember?

And do you know why I’m tired? Because I spent 8 months writing the damn Dummies book, that’s why.

So if you get inspired, motivated, or otherwise turned on by the checklist, do yourself a favor and buy AdWords For Dummies. It’s not tired. It’s perky, in fact. Ready to party. It’s wearing a green velvet smoking jacket, a jaunty blue fedora, and a faux-ivory tipped faux-ebony cane.

Here’s the AdWords For Dummies Official Checklist, handsomely converted to PDF for your checking-off pleasure.

Update: The Checklist, all updated and shiny for late 2008, is now included as a bonus with the Look Over My Shoulder (LOMS) AdWords Success Videos.

AdWords and Nursing?

Yesterday I visited my local independent bookstore, the Regulator, down on 9th Street in Durham, hoping to see some copies of AdWords For Dummies on the shelves.

I haven’t been to a bookstore since AdWords For Dummies was released, so I was kind of nervous. Luckily, there were two copies in the store, so I didn’t make a scene. And my 11-year-old daughter dragged me away before I could start asking store patrons if they wanted my autograph.

What makes this experience blog-worthy is the location of the book. As you can see in the photo, it’s prominently displayed next to – Your Career in Nursing.

Now, all issues of quality and content aside, which book looks more visually appealing? It’s the nursing book, right? Because you can see the entire front cover. Me, you just get a spine. Two spines. Right next to iWoz, the book by the Apple founder nobody remembers.

Now, in a chain bookstore that sort of placement would never be accidental. The books that show more skin generally pay for the privilege, and for some reason Wiley was not willing to fork over hundreds of thousands of dollars to get special cardboard displays of AdWords For Dummies in every Borders and Barnes & Noble in the English-speaking world. In this case, I suspect the stocking clerk thought the cover was nicer, or maybe figured that since everyone in Durham is involved in health care one way or another ("Durham, City of Medicine"), the nursing book would be a hotter sell.

You get a similar effect on the Google search results page (SERP, we’ll call it except at the dinner table where that kind of language would be rude.) The organic results grab some text off your page. Google decides what to show. Look at a sample organic result on the keyword adwords consultant:

The headline is fine – probably his title tag. But look at the text Google has chosen. Not very compelling. Probably not the first thing Brian wants you to know about him if you’re looking for a consultant. Now look at a typical paid listing:

Much more targeted message, even though it’s considerably shorter. The moral of the story: your AdWords ad is the spine of your book. Your organic ad (if you can get it and keep on SERP page 1) is like a more or less random page of your book. Make sure your spine sells enough to get the searcher to click and pull your ad off the shelf.

Jott Blog Post

A little personal productivity experiment here. I have a free account with jott.com, which allows me to speak into my cell phone and have my words transcribed into text messages and sent to me, other folks’ email addresses, or my blog in this case. Wanna see/hear it?

Cliffhanger? Keep reading…

Guest Blogger: Sherman Hu’s Facebook Strategies

I’ve been playing around with Facebook at the urging of my friend Sherman Hu, creator of the popular WordPress Tutorials. Here’s my "Facebook for Dummies" question and Sherman’s prompt and helpful reply:

Howie’s Question: Since I joined the 2 groups you invited me to, I’ve been inundated with "friends" requests from people I don’t know. What should I do? How do I think about the social networking phenomenon so I can use it to my advantage without pretending relationships that don’t exist?

Cliffhanger? Keep reading…

Mini-Sites vs. the Massive-Monster-Mega-Site

A question from a subscriber in the speaking/info-products business:

"How do I manage multiple websites (multiple products) and link them together in the most strategic – and profitable/productive – way?"

In the old days (circa Spring 2006), having lots of mini-sites was a good strategy. Register the domain names with different registrars, host them on different servers, link them all to each other, and keep churning them out to create your own happy little web-ring.

Trouble is, mini-sites tend to get the cold shoulder from Google these days. Too much salesy-ness, not enough content, and virtually no "authority."

The Google Slap of summer 2006, along with subsequent Slaps that continue to this day, penalized non-relevant and non-authoritative sites by increasing their minimum bids to up to 100 times the bids of the best sites. Instead of a dime a click, folks were paying ten bucks.

You can keep your mini-sites, but don’t use them for Google landing pages. Use them for two other functions:

1. Testing URLs

If you have product-specific URLs, they might convert better than your main site. For example, www.free-lead-generation-course.com is more descriptive and benefit-laden than askhowie.com). You can use the mini-site URL as long as you forward the page to your "authority site."

2. Experimenting with conversion from traffic sources other than search

You may want to try things that Google doesn’t reward or allow, like pop-ups, flash sites, and other things. Remember, if you send offline traffic to your site, you can do whatever you like on it.

But if you intend to drive search engine traffic (paid and/or organic), then spend the time to turn your main site into an authoritative source of information on your topic. Remember that inbound links are the things that make Google go "ahhh," and create a site that other Web sites will link to as a service to their readers.

Don’t Stop with AdWords

Google AdWords is the best place on the web to begin your advertising adventure. It’s quick and easy to setup, allows for instant split testing, and provides incredibly powerful and detailed feedback to help you optimize the three M’s of marketing: your Market, your Message, and the Media conduit between the two.

But don’t stop there. According to the Associated Press, the popular social networking site Digg has just replaced AdWords with Microsoft’s AdCenter as their advertising vendor. Facebook has also opted for Microsoft, which means you should seriously consider getting an AdCenter account to increase your reach if you currently are having success with Google’s content network.

Also check out up-and-coming Miva.com – check out Dave Taylor’s excellent Attachment Parenting Blog for examples of Miva and AdWords ads on the same site. And there’s the old standby, Yahoo Search, that may one day get its act together and become user friendly.

As wonderful as AdWords is, if it’s your only source of traffic, you’re sitting on a one-legged stool. And one-legged stools have a tendency to topple, and you don’t want to think about where that one leg goes if you’re still sitting on it…

Shield Me Not From Folly

According to Herbert Spencer, English philosopher, political theorist and lead singer for the Social Darwins, "The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."

Nowhere is this more true than planet earth, and AdWords in particular.

19th century department store magnate John Wanamaker is credited with having said, "I know half my advertising is a waste of money. I just don’t know which half."

With AdWords, you can find out to the keyword, to the web page, to the ad, which ones are making you money and which aren’t. You can bid precisely to get the optimal position. You can discover that you shouldn’t advertise on Saturday afternoons, or in Wichita during college football games, or on any searches that contain the word "emanuensis."

You can discover all these things by setting up conversion tracking and analytics, creating and automating reports, and studying them on a regular basis.

Chapter 14 of AdWords For Dummies covers Conversion Tracking and Reports, and Chapter 15 features a wonderful primer on Analytics. (I know it’s wonderful because most of the content was provided by Timothy Seward and his merry band from ROI Revolution.) Until you’re munching on marketing feedback, you’re undoubtedly more of a fool than you need to be.