Here’s an excellent question from a reader:

I purchased AdWords for Dummies and have dutifully read the first 116 pages. I have paused to ask one overarching question I hope you can answer. It appears to me that the primary audience for your book is someone working on a national AdWords campaign – someone who would like to find a niche, design a product around it, and exploit the power of AdWords to dominate that market. What about those of us who have an existing local business and want to peddle our wares? So far it seems like most of the analytics you describe depend on more data than, for example, a [type of professional] in a city of 200,000 people is likely to accrue (before the next ice age).

There are always useful web analytics you can look at. I agree that some types of testing cannot be done in a small market, but others can, and the harder it is and the longer it takes, the more likely that your competitors will not avail themselves of this data.

For example: landing page bounce rate and time on page. Improve those two metrics, and you will almost certainly increase sales and ROI. And you can get those numbers from a very small sample size.

Split test for how far down the page your visitors read, or for how long they stay on the page. You may not have enough traffic to split test for sales, but look for meaningful proxy measures - steps on the way to sales. What page will a hot prospect almost always look at? Split test ads for page views. Eliminate keywords that don’t lead to those page views.

Remember Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? He had a very small sample (one - Andie McDowell’s character), but he had patience and nothing but time on his hands. And so his slow split testing (”… no white chocolate”) eventually paid off.

A reader asks:

How do I test the conversion rate with a new product using Google AdWords?

My answer:

It depends on what the definition of "the" is. As in, what conversion rate are you talking about? In which market?

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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

This one time, in 1978, I tried to get a date for the 8th grade Valentine’s Day Dance at my junior high school. Acting like the marketer I would become, I first selected my target market of girls I was interested in, based mainly on their demonstrated ability to spend twenty minutes in my company without getting grossed out or offended.

Have narrowed my market, I next chose my medium. Face to face was out of the question, as the only way to get one of these girls alone would be to shove her in a janitor’s closet and wait until passing time was over. And obviously I didn’t want gaggles of girls talking about me in school (that’s probably why I wore the paper bag over my head for all those years, come to think of it).

So the medium would be the telephone. One night, about two weeks before the dance, I purloined the corded phone in my parents bedroom, locked myself in my room with a phone book, and prepared to begin my first foray into outbound telemarketing.

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