how to kick start adwords

“Getting Off the Ground with Google” Personal AdWords Coaching Call

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Perry Marshall: Welcome everybody. It’s great to have you. Welcome to Personal

AdWords coaching. We are going to move fast in the next 11 weeks. Eleven weeks can go by fast. I want to encourage everybody, every single person to really keep up with what we are doing because some really amazing things are possible.

I know people don’t sign up for a coaching program just because it sounds like fun although we will make it as fun as we know how to make it. Let’s launch into this. We have a handout. The handout for today is at www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf and it’s all in lower case. All URLs that we give out almost always are going to be lower case. This week we are going to focus on Google but before I do this I kind of want to set this up so that you know where we are going and how this all fits together.

Google for you may be a major source of traffic or it may be a minor source of traffic. For some people it’s gobs and gobs and gobs of traffic. It’s maybe hundreds of thousands of visitors an hour. For other people it’s going to be third, fourth or fifth on the list. The reason that Google is the centerpiece of AdWords coaching is obviously that people who are interested in Google tend to be my customers for obvious reasons but there is a more basic reason than that in that. Google is a source of consistent traffic. Pay per click traffic is unlike any other kind of traffic. It’s not like free searches in traffic which you have no control over. It’s not like e-mail traffic because e-mail traffic comes in big bursts. It’s not like banner ads because you don’t have much control over the context of where the person was before they saw your ad. With Google you have complete control over the context. You get the source of steady traffic which you can then use to fix problems in your sales funnel and make your sales process better and better and better and better. That’s the whole goal of your enterprise. There is this book by Malcolm Gladwell called the Tipping Point and it talks about how when you are trying to sell something or when there is a movement or an idea out there that it gathers momentum and it picks up steam. There is a certain point called the tipping point where all of a sudden it spills over or it boils over and it goes into overdrive and it becomes a massive phenomenon. You could find a tipping point happening in any successful company any rock band, any Hollywood star, any major phenomenon, any social movement, anything like that. There is a tipping point phenomenon where all of a sudden you get to a critical mass and it suddenly becomes much

©2006 Perry S. Marshall & Associates 1

http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/week1.pdf

bigger than it was before. When your business hits that tipping point it’s like entering the jet stream. It’s a really amazing thing when it happens. What we do in personal AdWords coaching is we engineer a tipping point. We get your site and your sales process where it can tip. Again, this is a really remarkable thing when it happens. It can be made to happen. It’s not like starting a rock band or something where you just hope that you are tapping into what people want. You just hope that you get the lucky record contract or whatever. It’s something that you have control of because it happens for logical reasons.

The unlimited traffic technique is another name for this tipping point. What it is, is when your Web site converts visitors to sales slightly better than all of the other Web sites in your market. You get into a position where you can buy all of the traffic, not just some of it. It means that you can outspend your competitors on advertising. It means that your competitors can be your affiliates and they can send you traffic. You can make arrangements with them to buy their traffic that other affiliates make more money promoting your site than anybody else’s. You get more customers, more success stories, more case studies, more buzz in the marketplace, more of everything. When you do that, all kinds of things happen that you did not anticipate. You get positive PR on the Web. You get all kinds of people talking good about your product. By the way, this does not work if you’ve got a bad product. If you’ve got a bad product, all this will do will speed the process that the whole world finds out you’ve got a bad product. You can’t reach the tipping point with a product people don’t want. If you’ve got a good product and people like it, all these things start working for you and pretty soon you become the dominant force in your market. This is so powerful. What Google is and remember that we are at www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf the traffic conversion anvil is Google traffic. You are sending a trickle or a flood or a flow of traffic to your Web site and you use that traffic to figure out what people want, what they will buy, what they will spend money for, what they are excited about, what they do not want, what they are running away from. You design the different paths within your sales funnel to match that. Google becomes the anvil on which you iron out all of this stuff. After you do that you can go to all kinds of other sources of traffic. You can go to other affiliates with a proven sales process. You can go to direct mail or to print advertising with a proven sales process. You can go buy banner ads, go buy Overture. You are doing search engine optimization based on the right keywords, not the wrong ones. When the free search engine visitors come they find



you and they buy because the sales process already works, all of this stuff works together. The third concept that I want to explain here is the 95/5 rule. It’s kind of a variation on the 80/20 rule. The 95/5 rule is that 95% of your traffic will come from 5% of your keywords. You could have 1,000 keywords but 95% of your traffic will come from 50 of them. Ninety of your traffic might actually only come from 20 of them. So, one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they dump all of these keywords into their Google campaigns and they are all mixed together. They are not tracking individual keywords. They are not optimizing the ads for individual keywords. They think that it’s impossible because they think they would have to do it for all 1,000. Not true! You can do it for the top 20 or 30 or 50 or top 10 and you can get 95% of the benefit with only 5% of the work. That’s a really big deal and we will discuss several examples of that. Now, at the handout which is www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf I have a link. Bryan put this together at http://www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/4_ad_groups.pdf with underscores between the four and the ad in the groups. You can click on this link. It says number one a variety of approaches. I want you to click on that link and go to that page. What you see here is that we have an 11 page document. What you see here in this document is a series of Google campaigns with pros and cons in terms of how well they are put together and why they were put together the way they were. We are just going to use these as some great teaching material. The first one here is from Julie Brumlick’s campaign. She’s got a company called Dremu Skin Care and Dremu uses Google as a major source of their traffic. This would be a prime example of a set of keywords where somebody uses peel and stick to put them all in their own separate group. You have this phrase microdermabrasion which is as you can see gets a lot of traffic. We’ve got three versions of this word microdermabrasion in quotes in brackets and in broad match and no other keywords in this group. Why, because that one keyword gets a lot of traffic. Then you will see that there are two ads written for it that are being tested. You can see exactly how many clicks, impressions, click through rates, average cost per click. You can see everything here. Bryan, do you want to pick up here?

Bryan: You bet. Basically, this first example is an example of how to do it right in

a nutshell. As you can see, the number of keywords is very few. Probably the single most important fact is that all of the keywords, namely all one of



http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/4_ad_groups.pdf

them appear in the actual ad. It’s probably the single most important fact about why this particular adgroup works.

As you can see, it gets a very healthy click through rate. It’s getting 3%. It’s hovering just above 3% for 2 of the keywords and 2.7% for one of them. The reason this works is because the keywords show up in the ad. Now, you probably hear us lecturing a lot about how the keywords if at all possible need to show up in the headline. Generally that is true and we usually tell you to do that. This is one exception. Julie’s product has in fact been shown on Oprah’s daily TV show. She uses that and that gets the attention of readers we discovered, a little better than the term microdermabrasion in the headline. We used the Oprah thing in the headline and we tested that against using microdermabrasion in the headline. The Oprah thing pulls better. Even despite that fact, Julie is continuing to test more ads and more versions of the headline that she’s got. You could hardly do a better job than this right here. The important thing is that she is continuing to split test more ads. “As seen on Oprah,” has been the control for quite a while in this ad group. She’s been using that “As seen on Oprah” headline for 6 to 8 months and it’s been beating all of the other attempts, but that’s okay. We’re still trying to write new ads or she’s still trying to write new ads that will hopefully be able to beat that, “As seen on Oprah.” Right now, this one as you can see is not working or it’s not beating the control and that’s okay.

Perry: I want to mention here that again, this is a peel and stick. There are lots

of microdermabrasion and she’s got these other places but because microdermabrasion as one word gets so much traffic, it gets more traffic than any other single phrase she peeled that out of that group. She stuck it in its own group and she’s got an individual set of ads just for that one word.

In most properly constructed campaigns you are going to have about maybe ten or twenty of these where you’ve got some groups that have a lot of keywords. Those keywords don’t get a huge amount of clicks but the ones that get a lot of clicks each get their own group. We’re doing triage here. You probably don’t have time to take your top 500 words and put them in their own groups. In fact, you probably shouldn’t because none of those little groups are going to get enough traffic anyway. They are only going to get a few clicks a month and a group that gets only a few clicks a month shouldn’t be all by itself. It should be lumped with other things so that you get more traffic and faster split tests.


Again, for these really important words you want to peel and stick, take them out of the main group and put them in the subgroup and then work on ads that make those sing. This is a really fundamental concept. We will talk about peel and stick being done in all stages of your funnel. You will do it with landing pages. On your Web site you will do it with sales letters. You will do it with e-mail sequences. You’ll do it with products. You will even do it with making new products. Making new products for a subset of your market is the same as peel and stick. The difference between ordinary marketers and professional marketers is that ordinary marketers just try to sell the same thing to everybody. Real professional marketers recognize that everybody is different. They will take their own market which most people think or assume is all the same and they will realize that they are not all the same. They will divide it in little groups and they will sell individually to those groups. There is one guy in one of my round table groups who sells assistance to people who are recovering from bankruptcy. Well, you could be recovering from chapter seven bankruptcy. You could be recovering from chapter 13 bankruptcy. He finds that if he separates his audience into chapter seven and chapter thirteen and he sends sales material specific to chapter seven or specific to chapter thirteen, he gets much higher response. Even though the things people do to recover from it are basically the same. From his point of view as the person that solves the problem they are the same but to the customer they are different. So he caters to that and it makes a big increase in his business. So, again, peel and stick is the universal thing. Bryan, do you want to talk about the next Google group?

Bryan: You bet. Would it be inappropriate for me to just mention something real

quick? Perry: Yeah, just jump in. Bryan: Julie, one of the options if you want to create a second ad and do split

testing then of course your ad is in the upper left hand corner or it’s in the bottom half of your page. If you want to create a new ad, Google now gives you three options instead of just two. You can create a text ad just like this one. You can create an image ad which is just some kind of graphic.

You can also create a local business ad and I just wanted to mention that. If you use Google local now where you go in Google and you look for locations on a map and you can get a satellite view of something, Google shows ads for businesses depending on what kind of search you do. You


can actually create an ad that will show up when people are searching in local areas. That’s what that local business thing means. The next ad group that we have here is arthritis.

Perry: Let’s mention where we are at. You go to

www.perrymarshall.com/a`dwords/week1.pdf. When you open that there is a hyperlink in that document to four ad groups document so that’s where we are at.

Bryan: Okay, the next adgroup is arthritis. This one can be improved on. In this

particular one, unlike the one before, we have checked a little box that is under the date bars over on the upper right hand side, a little tiny bar that says include deleted items that were active in this date range.

Let’s say you’ve been advertising for a while and you’ve been doing peel and stick. You’ve deleted a few keywords, you’ve been testing some various ads, if you want to see what ads you have run in the past and if you want to know what keywords were running in the past, then you just click this little box and you can see that. So, include deleted items that were active in this date range and that’s what we did here. You don’t see any deleted keywords here but you do see some deleted ads that we’ve run. How does this particular adgroup score in terms of what we teach you to do? Well, I don’t know. We would probably give it somewhere between a B and a C I suppose. The topic is arthritis, a nice happy topic that of course you love to talk about early on a Tuesday morning. Julie’s product of course helps you with some aspects of that. She advertises people are searching on arthritis. What we have discovered is that number one there aren’t any ads about Oprah here. What she’s done is that she’s created ads that use the term arthritis in the headline and then discuss it a little further in the body of the ad. That is the classic approach that you need to take. Make sure that your keywords show up in your headline. Of course in the other group we showed you examples of where sometimes that does not always give you the best click through rate. But here use that arthritis and the headline. In her list she’s got some keywords that get quite a few searches that actually need to be pulled out. The third most clicked on word in the list here is osteoarthritis. She has not done this but she needs to. She needs to take osteoarthritis out of this group, delete it and create a new ad group that has an ad that is specifically about osteoarthritis. Just like you were explaining with the gentleman who deals with bankruptcies, you send a certain kind of mailing to people are doing chapter seven. You would send a different kind of mailing to people were


http://www.perrymarshall.com/a%60dwords/week1.pdf

doing chapter 13. In this case we need some different ads just for osteoarthritis. That’s something that she is going to need to do. Next in line we’ve got knee arthritis, degenerative arthritis and so forth. Depending on how much traffic your keywords get you are going to need to pull some of these out. Definitely osteoarthritis needs a new adgroup of its own and when we write and ad the term osteoarthritis is going to show up in the headline of the ad and maybe possibly a second time in the body text of the ad. Another idea Julie can try here is, you notice that her URL is www.Dreamu.com. One of the first things she can do is go to http://GoDaddy.com and buy some new domain names that are related to the subject of arthritis. She can start testing different variations of her URL that use the word arthritis in them. Arthritisrelief.com, well, that one is probably taken but there are other variations that she can buy and try them, out and see if in her URL she gets more clicks if she has a different URL that is specifically related to arthritis.

Related to that, another thing she can do is try a subdirectory where she’s got a subdirectory. The URL would read Dreamu.com/arthritis. Would that get more clicks than the URL that she’s got now? I’ll bet it would or a subdomain arthritis.dreamu.com. Those are all things that she can do and needs to do.

The first thing I would do with this adgroup is I would pull that

osteoarthritis out of there and put a new adgroup of its own. I guarantee you it’s getting a 4.3% click through rate right now, I guarantee you there is probably a 75% chance that it would get a better click through rate. More traffic just by doing peel and stick arthritis.

Perry: Oh, yeah. Well, I am sure if you had an ad that was written specific to

osteoarthritis instead of getting a .4% click through rate you could get a 2% click through rate. You can peel that out. You can get a 5X improvement in click through rate which means more or less about 5 times the traffic for the same amount of money if you adjust your bids properly.

The ability to target people much more exactly and maybe even send

them to an osteoarthritis landing page if you do that will probably increase the effectiveness by 2X. So you take a 5X and a 2X and by peeling and sticking a keyword in Google and peeling and sticking a landing page in the Web site you would probably get a 10X increase in sales.

Bryan: I just noticed that in this ad we have these ranked according to the

number of clicks they get. If you rank these according to the number of impressions they get, that term osteoarthritis gets second. It’s the number two most searched on term in this whole adgroup.


http://www.dreamu.com/

http://godaddy.com/

Perry: Yes. Bryan: So, it is like the most prime candidate for that. You don’t want to worry

about the keywords at the bottom of your list unless you’ve got a lot of spare time on your hands. This one is like number two. The top one is getting 11,000. This one is getting 8,700 so that is the one you go for.

Perry: Bryan mentioned that you’ve got this little checkbox below the date range

that says: Include deleted items that were active in this date range. If you ever want to know what you were doing last week or last month in what ads, you don’t have to write them down on a piece of paper.

You just click on that box and set your date range wide enough and you

can go down to the bottom and you can see all of the ads that were running during that time. It will show you the deleted ones. It will tell you how many clicks they had and what the click through rate was. Over time as you delete ads and you try new ones those deleted ads start to tell you a story of what worked and what didn’t and why.

Bryan: One little comment on that, people ask us all the time, “Hey if I had an old

ad that has been a control for a couple of months running, say last Thursday I created a new ad to test against it does Google reset the results of my old ad? How do I compare them? Do I set my date range for the last six months?”

What I always do is I keep a Word document or a text file on the side as I

am managing a Google campaign. You don’t have to do this but every time I create a new ad, I just copy the text of that ad into my little text file and make a little date note that says, “Last Thursday on April something, something, I created this ad. Now I’m split testing the old control.

So, if I am managing multiple campaigns and I’ve forgotten which ads I

created when, I can just go back to that text file and I can find out, “Oh, I created this file on Thursday.” What you can do is as you are comparing the performance of that ad against your old control you look at the dates just from last Thursday up to today.

You know, traffic flow tends to change and markets can change and

competitors come and go and that can sometimes affect the click through rates of your ads. If you create a new ad you want to compare it against the old ad just for the dates that both of those were active and split testing against each other. I always do that just by keeping notes in a Word document of the changes I make in my account.

Perry: Do you want to go to the next page Bryan? Why don’t you talk about this? Bryan: This one is actually far from perfect. As you can see, this one is a Learn

Chinese course and once again, the URL that we are looking at is www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/4_ad_groups.pdf.


http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/4_ad_groups.pdf

Perry: Just go to www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf and click on the first link.

Bryan: Okay and these pages are actually numbered. In this PDF we are actually

looking at page six which is the adgroup learn Chinese. You can pick this apart because this is actually my own project, something that I do on the side. Just so you know, this only shows in mainland China and Taiwan.

Perry: Why don’t you stop and talk about that for a minute? That was not an

obvious thing for you at first. Bryan: No, I used to live in China and spent several years learning Chinese and

became sort of functionally, conversationally, fluent in the language. I did that through a process of real trial and error and struggle and so forth. When I came back to the states I decided last year that I needed to write a book for people who are struggling the way I am.

I first started out just by advertising all over the world and the US. I said,

“Hey, take my five day e-mail course and learn some principles for learning Chinese.” Well, most folks who are in the US are not looking for the kind of advice that I am dispensing. My advice is for people who are actually living in the environment.

So, I got a few angry e-mails early on as I am advertising my e-mail

course in the US and eventually discovered that now the best place to start is dispensing my advice just to people who actually live in a Chinese speaking country which pretty much reduces you to mainland China and Taiwan. I’ve set my geographic parameters on this only to show in those places.

If you search on ‘learn Chinese’ in the US or in the UK or in Australia you

will not find my ad but you will if you are living in mainland China or Taiwan. These are the searches here that you get just in those places. As you can see there are quite a bit. There are not as many as people looking for arthritis of course. Nevertheless, this adgroup can be improved upon.

I haven’t done this yet because of the number of searches that we got last

month, but the key idea here in this adgroup is learn Chinese and all of the possible variations on the term learn Chinese. I have these ranked according to bid price. If you ranked them according to impressions they would sort out pretty much the same way. The most searched on keywords on here belong in this adgroup.

You’ll notice that the top two are learn Chinese in brackets and learn

Chinese in quotes. We don’t need to do a peel and stick on those because those already show up in the ad. Peel and stick is for keywords that don’t show up in the ad.

Perry: Generally anyway.



Bryan: Generally, so we have at least our top keywords are a good match. As time goes on and we get more searches I’m going to want to pull some of these other keywords out such as learn Chinese language, how to learn Chinese and pull those out, put them in a new group and try new ads to see if I can’t get better results with those. The list I’ve got here is pretty long. The list of keywords I’ve got is pretty long.

There are some keywords in here that got pretty much no searches in the

month of March. You can see that there are probably a lot of ways that you could improve on this. Right at the moment I’m not split testing two ads though I should be. Shame on me. Slap me on the hand. I just deleted an ad.

If you look down at the ads at the bottom, late in the month of March I

deleted a second ad, want to learn Chinese because it was getting about a 50% lower click through rate than the current one which is my control. I’ve tested a lot of variations on that. What I’m going to do as soon as I get off the call is I’m going to go and write a second ad.

You should always be split testing multiple ads. You should always be

playing the game of beat your control. The control is the ad that’s been working best for you for the length of time. You always want to be trying to beat that.

Perry: All of the peeling and sticking it appears that you should be doing, the

problem with doing too much of it is let me go to the right page here. We go to page six. Let’s take learn Chinese language. Okay? That got 296 impressions and 8 clicks. That’s a 2.7% click through rate which is not bad.

We will talk about this a little later in more detail. It generally takes 20 or 30 clicks on an ad to pick a winner. Any one keyword needs twice that many clicks. Any keyword needs 30 to 60 clicks in order to get enough traffic to test 2 ads. Well, in the case of learn Chinese language with eight clicks in one month it would take six months. If you peeled and stuck Learn Chinese language, it would take six months before you could test two ads against each other and have a winner and a loser. You know what? There are other things you should be doing in the next six months than that. That’s the whole point of the 95/5 rule. Bryan could peel and stick ‘Learn Chinese’ and that would be justified. He’s got 26 clicks on 1 and 28 clicks on the other. Both of those together add up to 54 clicks. With 54 clicks a month you can split test two ads a month. Those get a lot of traffic. He could peel and stick those and then all of the other keywords would still be here and that would be fine but peeling and sticking any more than that is really not helpful. Then you just have ten little groups that each take six months to tell you something. It’s better to


have one group that tells you something every month. Does that make sense?

Howie: Can I jump in here? Perry: Go ahead Howie. Howie: What I noticed that it looks like from this PDF is that it’s being sorted by

current bids. Perry: Yes, it is and speak up a little louder if you would. Howie: It’s being sorted by current bid. Bryan: I usually sort by current impressions. Howie: Right. That’s what I was going to say. If you are trying to figure this out

then Perry’s advice might seem a little esoteric like you’ve really got to drill down to figure out what to do and what not to do. The first thing you want to do is sort by impressions and really pay attention to the top three or four or five top words depending on this screen line of where the bulk of impressions are.

Let’s pretend that this was sorted by impressions which it kind of is. In this

adgroup the first two are the only ones that you care about. Those two constitute 30% plus of all the impressions on that inaudible. Presumably, there is some other keyword that gets 5,000.

That’s my guess because if we scroll down all the way there is one other

keyword that is here that’s getting the bulk of them. Those are the ones you want to focus on.

Bryan: One additional note, at the very end of the keyword list I’ve got negative

keywords here. You always want to do that. I’m not looking for people who want free material. This term ‘congi’ is for people who are studying Japanese and want to learn the Chinese characters that are used in the Japanese language.

Perry: You don’t want them. (laughter) Bryan: I don’t want them. Jin is actually a pop singer and there is an R and B

song called Learn Chinese. (laughter) I don’t want those people. So, that’s what those negative keywords are

there for.


Now, there is another dimension to this that you can’t see on this page. At least with these two ads there is a dimension in split testing that you can’t see. I went and I ran a report. I have this account set up to track conversions. I ran a report to see not just what click through rates these two ads were getting in the month of March but also to see who they were converting to actual opt-ins.

I’m not tracking sales with this particular campaign but I am tracking opt-

ins. What I discovered is that in addition to getting a lower click through rate. The second ad that I just deleted was also converting less. That’s actually the more important number.

So you want to go into report. Click on that. The next page you end up on

says create a report now. You click to create a report and then they give you a drop down menu that gives you a choice of what kind of report you want to run. The second item on the drop down menu is an ad text report. You want to click on that and then you can run a report to see how your two ads are getting not just click through rates but how they are actually converting.

Sometimes you can write an ad that doesn’t get as high a click through

rate but it converts better than the other ads you’ve got. That tends to be the ad that you want to go with. You’ll have to do the math and figure out what kind of difference it will make.

With your two ads you don’t want to just always pay attention to click

through rates. You want to pay attention to conversion rates as well. So, I did that and the ad that I just deleted lost on both counts, clicks and conversions.

Howie: In the microdermabrasion sample, the keyword in quotes gets a lot more

traffic than the other two, especially the third one. My question would be why don’t you want to peel and stick that one term into its own group, the one with quotes, and leave the other two with microdermabrasion in the other group?

Perry: I think that would be a legitimate strategy. I think eventually over time in

fact you may end up doing just that. That’s perfectly reasonable. It got 1,346.

Howie: It’s not going too far with the peel and stick? It’s not getting too specific? Perry: Well, no if you have enough traffic there is never any problem with peel

and sticking more and more and more. You could get it all the way down to, I would peel and stick each one of these three words. Think about it. Microdermabrasion in brackets gets 1,191 searches in a month. That may be enough to peel and stick.

I always think of Google campaigns as being like trees or tree roots. You

plant a little seed in the ground and it comes up. It’s like one little stem and a leaf or two but then it starts to grow. Then it has four leaves and


twenty leaves and then it starts branching out. The branches start going in different directions and there are so many leaves on each branch and so forth.

Well, that is exactly how Google campaigns grow so as long as there is

enough traffic to justify it then you think of okay. A keyword is like a leaf and a group in an ad is like a stem. A campaign is a branch and you might have a landing page for each campaign or you might have a landing page for each group.

Maybe there is a way you can figure out that microdermabrasion in

quotes people are somehow different than microdermabrasion in brackets people and you even change the landing page. But, microdermabrasion in brackets got 191 searches a month which means that you could test five or six ads in a month very easily.

Bryan: You will notice also that microdermabrasion in brackets converts almost

twice as well. Perry: Ooh, yes! Bryan: Microdermabrasion in quotes, you see that on the far right side. It tells

you your conversion rate and your cost per conversion. Perry: That tells you something. My screen wasn’t adjusted. Yes, that’s a big

deal. Bryan: Julie, by the way, is on the call and she is just tickled pink that we are

helping her! Julie: Yes! Bryan: We appreciate you letting us do this Julie. Perry: Yeah. Julie: Perry, could you give an example of phrases that those three different

things would appear in because I don’t quite understand what the difference is if you’ve got only one word as a keyword.

Bryan: That’s one of the great Google mysteries actually. Microdermabrasion in

brackets is just the word by itself. People go online and they type the word by itself.

Perry: You know, what people might not be clear about is what is the difference

between the quotes and the broad match. Julie: That’s what I don’t understand because if it is only one word how can it be

different?


Perry: The difference is misspellings. Microdermabrasion broad match Google will serve up the ad for misspelled versions of microdermabrasion but for quotes it won’t. What that means is that most people spelled it right. It also means that a large minority of them spelled it wrong.

Julie: How did you work that out? Perry: Well, microdermabrasion in quotes, other words are allowed around it but

it does require that they spelled it that way. Microdermabrasion broad match, if they misspelled it Google will still serve it up.

Bryan: What if they spell it as two or three words? Perry: Yes. Julie: Does that mean then that 32,000 times it was misspelled or broken down

into micro derm abrasion? Perry: I’m not sure I understood. Howie, did you understand what she was

asking? Howie: That means that those 32,000 broad matches are misspellings or

alternate spellings. Perry: Yeah, that’s what that means. Howie: Or the exact match or phrase match wasn’t put in so it was put in later so

in this time period there were that many. Perry: Great, so this is telling you 5,906 people typed in microdermabrasion

exactly. They spelled it right. 4,472 people typed it in exactly, spelled it right but they also had another word around it. Then 32,608 had that word in their search but they spelled it differently or something like that.

Julie: Oh, that’s very useful because when I’ve had a single word, not bothered

doing both with the quotes and without quotes. I’ve always thought they were going to be exactly the same.

Perry: Well, they are not and it won’t make a huge amount of difference in your

amount of traffic if you don’t do this. It will make a difference in how much the traffic costs because Google more or less charges you for doing this work for you. They actually discourage people from doing all of this quotes and brackets stuff.

I’ve seen e-mails that they have sent to people saying, “You don’t need to

bid on misspellings. You don’t need to do all of these quotes and brackets. You just put in the one word and we’ll take care of it for you.” That’s like getting valet service and getting charged royally for it. So, yeah, this is why we do this.


This is not very obvious to most people but there is a big difference between these three different versions of the word. Jason is right. You may be very well justified in peeling and sticking these even further. You may find that different ads work better with the misspelled versions of the word or whatever.

Bryan: This is not the only case where Google does this. They also don’t, for

example, have any tools to tell you statistical significance. If you want to find out if the difference is a real difference you’ve got to do it yourself. You’ve got to split test your dot com. Google will say, “We’ll take care of it for you by sun setting your poorly performing ads.”

It’s like saying, “I’ve got this race car and I’m going to let the race car I’m

going to let the race car company choose the driver and everyone in the race is going to have the same quality of driver.”

Perry: Right. Caller: How do you feel about capitalizing on these words? Perry: What, in the keyword list? Caller: Say, take microdermabrasion and do those three versions in the quotes,

the broad match and the brackets. Then do it in all caps. Perry: Search terms are not sensitive to capitals. Caller: That’s what Google says but I’ve seen a difference when I’ve put them in

there. Perry: Really? Caller: That’s exactly opposite to what they will tell you if they call you. Morgan: This is Morgan and I totally agree. One of my top keywords is actually I’ve

got it in lower case and I’ve got it in caps. The one in caps actually gets more clicks.

Perry: Somebody’s got a noise in the background. Could you press six and mute

yourself out if you’ve got any noise? Howie: Perry? Perry: Yes, Howie. Howie: I don’t have personal experience with this, but you know I sell the ad tool

that lowers your bid price and we’ve built it through customer request that people keep on suggesting features. One of the features that a bunch of people asked for near the beginning was one click to capitalize the first letter of every word in the keyword list. So, there are smart people who felt it made a difference so I don’t know.


Perry: Hmm. Caller: I’ve seen a difference in capitals and if you capitalize the first word or if

you use all caps and if you do all of those versions you will see different results.

Perry: Well, let’s see. Are you sure that those differences aren’t because people

are split testing their ads or something? Do you know? Caller: In my test that I’ve done for my own ad campaign it is different. You will

get different results, different click through rates and a different amount of impressions presented.

Perry: Hmm. Well, you learn something new everyday. I will have to try this. Caller: It seems like an easy test to set up. For instance in this one just take one

of the words and split it out whether it’s broad or exact match or whatever. Just do it with all lower case, all caps and title case. See how the three compare.

Barney: I’ll tell you the exact one that I use. This is Barney in Baltimore. I do

electronic repair service work. I’ll put in circuit board repair, circuit board repair with the first letter capitalized and I’ll put circuit board repair in all caps. I’ll get different results.

Perry: Hmm. Barney: That’s exactly opposite from what Google will tell you or what any of the

AdWords instructions and guides tell you. Caller: You know, this time last year when Google was still disabling and putting

keywords on hold if they were not performing my experience was dinking around with capitals and lower case and variations on capitals and lower case would let disabled keywords show actively for at least some period of time. It was as though Google recognized it as a different keyword. Whether that is relevant to this conversation now or not I couldn’t tell you.

Caller: I would like to make an observation and then ask Julie a question. I

noticed that microdermabrasion in brackets not only performed better on the conversion rate but look at where the average position was. It was twice the lower position of the lower two.

Perry: Yes, 9.4 instead of 5. Caller: Julie, what does your product sell for? Julie: Can you hear me? Am I online now? I’m having a little bit of problem. I

appreciate you doing this because our internet service is out here. So, I can’t look at what you are looking at. The microdermabrasion product is $40 the base price and then we have two upsells on that.


Caller: So, when you are running a conversion cost of $27 it is pretty profitable

when your conversion cost is equal to the selling price on the other two ads it is probably not very profitable.

Julie: Right. Our average order is about $80. Caller: Oh, that is helpful. Julie: Is that helpful? Caller: Yes. Caller: Plus it is paying for her if it’s to break even it’s paying for her building her

list. Over time those same people will make orders. Julie: We are trying to keep that average cost down. We normally don’t have to

pay that much to get a referral. So, we are working on that to get some categories that we don’t have to pay so much to get traffic.

Caller: You want to keep as much money as you can. Julie: Yes. We are having trouble on the arthritis ads because we can’t find

cheap enough words with enough traffic. The osteoarthritis is a very good idea but we don’t know what to do when we are in a field where doctors are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a lead.

Perry: Arthritis is a very competitive category, without a doubt. Julie: We are not only competing against other topical ointments, we are

competing against surgeons. Perry: There is a lesson here which is there are a lot of keyword categories

where you would think that selling your $30 or $40 solution would sell all day long and you find that you can’t buy the keywords because people are selling $1,000 or $2,000, $10,000, $50,000 things and they can afford to pay more. The lesson in that is that in some businesses you can’t make it work with just the $30 product.

You should be thinking about is there a way that I can sell a $5,000

product instead or that I can team up with somebody who does where we share the traffic and they get the high dollar stuff and you get the low dollar stuff or vice versa? A lot of times that is the key to making something work.

Caller: This is funny. Hi, Julie. What I would observe here is that it looks like the

arthritis words do cost you about 50% more than the microdermabrasion for the same position.

Julie: Right.


Caller: What I’m noticing is that there is no conversion at all in arthritis and of course that makes it very expensive, much more than 50% when you are not converting. What it makes me think is that if you sent the arthritis people to a separate landing page that was geared toward arthritis and was really simply for the arthritis people that your conversion would really go up.

Julie: We did have a letter written for arthritis, a very good letter. We couldn’t

get enough traffic to it but when we did get traffic to it we had a good conversion. I can’t look right now to see which ad you are looking at. Maybe there is something we need to change back. We did create a landing page. I can’t get online is my problem.

Caller: Right. What we are seeing is one of your arthritis categories and it is

about arthritis relief. It’s got arthritis relief exact match, broad match and a whole bunch of other related terms in it. All of your traffic is on arthritis broad match and arthritis exact match.

There is no conversion and positions are about equal to what they are in

osteoarthritis. They are not that much different. They cost about 50% higher so to me if you were to have a landing page that matched the message in the ad then people when they landed would see what they were expecting and you would have a lot better chance of converting people.

Julie: Would you try clicking on the URL and see if it takes you to an arthritis

landing page? Perry: I don’t think he can. Maybe he can. I don’t know. It depends on how

Bryan made this. Caller: No, it’s not clickable. Caller: It works on mine. Caller: I also notice that Julie has bracketed rheumatoid arthritis has a fair

amount of impressions, 2500 but she had 0 clicks. That ad must not help someone who is looking up rheumatoid arthritis.

Julie: Okay. Beth: Julie? It’s Beth in England. I’m just doing a search now for arthritis to see

if we can see your ads and click through to see what the landing page is. Julie: Okay, great. Bryan: The arthritis one you can click through at least in my browser you can. It

takes you to a letter that says: Total relief from arthritis pain in less than four minutes without drugs, pills or prescriptions.

Caller: Well, that is pretty well matched.


Bryan: Yes, it’s pretty specific. I don’t know what else is going on there. That

would be the obvious thing. Julie: Gee, that is one of Gary Halbert’s minions who wrote that ad for us. (laughter) Caller: What does it say again as far as the headline Bryan? Bryan: Total relief from arthritis pain in less than four minutes without drugs, pills

or a prescription. Caller: That matches even though it’s not the exact words of the ad. It matches

the intent. Bryan: Oh, totally. Yeah. Julie: Any suggestions? Is David on the line? David Boostram? Okay, because

he was playing with this the other day just to see what we could do. Caller: This just shows that Sunny is way off base. (laughter) Julie: It’s not working and I wish that I knew why. Caller: Julie, I also noticed that brackets on rheumatoid arthritis has you in

position 16 so maybe your position is down so low that they never get a chance to see it before they have gone some place else.

Julie: I see. Jillian: This is Jillian in the UK. I can’t see the page but when somebody read the

ad my first thought was that I don’t believe that there is a product that can give you instant relief from arthritis in four minutes. That’s the thing that goes through my mind because my mother suffers from arthritis.

I just sort of think if I could find a product that did that or she could find it

that would be wonderful. I wonder whether that’s a problem? Bryan: Well, that’s a two edged sword. Either people completely disbelieve you

or it sounds so too good to be true that they continue reading. Julie: I believe we have some clinical research on that letter. Jillian, send me

your mother’s address and I will send her some. Jillian: Okay. Caller: Well, Bob Blye addressed that at the AdWords Coaching Conference by

saying that you want a subhead that makes the secondary claim more


believable. So, he says even if it doesn’t really cure joint pain in four minutes, it will blah, blah, blah.

Caller: And her letter follows the headline with the testimonial. Fern: This is Fern from New York. I had the same thought because I do work

that eliminates pain very, very rapidly. I get the same response. I say in 15 minutes to an hour and a half most pain is dramatically reduced or eliminated in all different areas. I have to do a subhead or something that will address that and that makes a real difference in conversion rates.

Caller: Yeah, she’s got a testimonial right under the headline. “It’s the first

remedy to give me substantial amount of relief. It quickly made the arthritis swelling my knees disappear.” This is Betty Blair in Dayton, Ohio.

Brook: This is Brook in Vancouver. I have a question about the format of this

landing page. I see a lot of these landing pages that are really long scrolling pages with a long letter I guess. I think even Perry’s page for this conference was similar to that. I am just curious what the theory behind these is.

Bryan: Well, the idea is that advertising is selling in print. You wouldn’t limit a

salesman to a certain number of words if he was trying to sell someone something in person. You say in print exactly what a salesman would say in person and that usually ends up being long copy versus short copy. We are going to talk about landing pages at a later point on a later call.

Brook: Okay. Bryan: So, we will answer that because that is really a good question. This is

actually something that you want to test. There are times and products where really long copy like she’s got here definitely works. You test it and you prove on paper that it does. There are other times where short copy works.

Brook: Great. Bryan: We are going to show you examples of both. Perry: Could I take one minute and make sure that I understand where your

question is coming from or kind of what you are thinking about as you ask that question?

Brook: Yeah, sure. Perry: Can you elaborate a little bit? Brook: Well, I guess a lot of your landing pages are much shorter and I find

personally that these long, long pages seem kind of gitchy and I kind of relate them to I wouldn’t say a scam but kind of like this certain sort of


online advertising a lot of times doesn’t really have much product backing it or is really a viable offer. Do you know what I mean?

Bryan: It comes off as talking too much. Brook: Yeah, I agree. To me it does but I see it everywhere so I think there must

be something to it so I’m curious what that is and what the theory is that is behind these things.

Perry: Well, I’ll just give you a brief answer. You see it a lot because it works.

One of the things that is always going on in advertising that most people wouldn’t immediately think of or realize is that you’ve only got 5% of the people at most, generally, who are really intensely turned on to what you are saying anyway. You probably have only got 5% at most who are going to buy anything at all. Okay?

No matter what you say so that means that 95% of the people their

opinion doesn’t really matter. So, what happens is that 5% who are turned on will read everything you say or they will at least skim it. The more you say, the more opportunities you have to actually convince them of something. So, what happens then is that if you are selling a product that needs some explanation then the longer explanation generally works better.

Now, at the same time there is an opt-in arson call that is coming up in a

few weeks. We are going to talk about how there is really an optimal amount of text that is gauged to the size of the job that needs to be done. Ninety-five characters in a display URL on a Google ad has been tested by Google and Yahoo and other people and that is pretty much an optimum amount of text to tell somebody whether they should click or not.

Imagine if you searched Google and every single entry was six

paragraphs. Wouldn’t that be silly? On the other hand imagine if you searched Google and every single entry was like 25 characters. It wouldn’t be enough. Well, the 129 characters of a Google ad is the right amount of text for deciding if you want to click on something.

When you get to a landing page and you are going to decide whether to

opt in or get a free report or something like that usually the right amount of text is somewhere between 100 and 300 words. Usually if you are going to get somebody to spend 30, 40 or 50 bucks it’s going to take several pages. If you are going to get them to spend a couple of thousand dollars or more sometimes it will take 20 pages. Really, the amount of text you use is gauged to the size of your sales job.

Caller: Also your test results. Perry: Yes, and your test results will bear that out. I’ve definitely done tests on

landing pages for opt-ins where you make it longer and the response goes down.


Brook: Longer than this page here? Perry: Well, like this arthritis page, this is 40 bucks, Julie, or something like that? Julie: Yes. Perry: If I printed this out this would probably be about six or seven pages. Well,

you need six or seven pages to get 40 bucks out of somebody sometimes especially if they don’t even know what this product is. You don’t need six or seven pages to get somebody to buy a digital camera if they already knew they wanted one, especially if they already knew what kind they wanted.

If they want a digital camera but they don’t know what kind they want,

they very well may read seven pages on epinions.com to find out which camera is best. If it’s an opt-in page and all you are asking for is an e-mail address you probably only need one page. Now, I don’t want to dwell on this too much but this is an important enough topic that I thought it was worth taking a little detour to talk about it. But we will get to this in other sections.

Howie: This is Howie. Can I offer a couple of thoughts here? I’m hearing Glen

Livingston’s voice in my head and thinking about maybe you can’t do the survey that he talked about at the seminar but you can certainly think about if someone types in rheumatoid arthritis versus arthritis, what is their consciousness?

I see this page as serving two purposes. One is that this will serve people

who are desperate. The first thing it says is that you may not believe it but this promise is so big that even if you only believe that maybe there is a 2% chance that it’s true would you invest in it to find out just on the hope? I see that page doing this.

Also, if someone types in rheumatoid arthritis I’m thinking that they are

more of an information seeker than someone who is going to look at a bottle of pills with a price next to it and immediately click. They are going to want to know why and this is very good reason why advertising around blocking the pain receptors as opposed to the initial cause of the pain. So, it’s helping those people as well.

The last thing I would suggest, Julie, is testing the headline where you are

spelling arthritis correctly and seeing if that gives you a bump. Julie: Okay, and can I say one other thing? Perry: Yeah. Julie: We are doing another type of letter now. We have a product that is not

expensive. It’s $30 and it’s a hand lotion. Actually $30 is fairly expensive for a hand lotion, but it’s our cheapest product.


We are writing an ad for it and driving traffic and the only reason we are going to do that is because Biance said it was her favorite hand lotion. Biance gets more clicks than Oprah. I never bothered to advertise that product in an ad of its own before because I thought, “How many people send away for hand lotion?”

You can get hand lotion everywhere and it doesn’t sell for that much. But I

think we are going to have a big success with this just because of the big endorsement. Does that make sense?

Perry: It makes perfect sense. A lot of times your reason for creating your

product is not what you ever would have thought of when you first started out, right?

Julie: In other words, we have had the product for years. It is a very good

product. It is very nicely made, but I didn’t think that hand lotion was a very big item because it is heavy to ship. Most of our products are half an ounce. The hand lotion is about nine ounces. I just thought most people would go and buy hand lotion somewhere.

Because we have a lot of celebrity endorsements for it, particularly

Biance, we thought we would spend $5,000 and get a good ad for it and drive some traffic and see how it’s going to do for us.

Bryan: Biance may be your tipping point. Julie: Right. Perry: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Julie: Okay, so stay tuned and we will let you know whether it works or not. Sunny: This is Sunny again. I just finally got your page to come up. What I’m

noticing is that the sales page is not an opt-in page. I thought it was when you said no conversions. I thought it was an opt-in page.

Julie: Oh, I see. Sunny: Obviously when it’s a sales page your conversions are going to be much,

much lower. Julie: Right. Zero is still not good. Sunny: Well, it’s not good but it’s also not necessarily significant when with sales

pages you actually would only expect a 1% conversion anyway. Julie: Okay. We are still working on that one though because we can’t exactly

pair up with a doctor, Perry, like you were suggesting because they want to do surgery. They don’t want someone to get pain relief from an ointment.


Perry: I’m just making a general suggestion that maybe there was some alternative health center in Albuquerque, New Mexico and they have this $2,000 spa thing or whatever.

Julie: Right. That’s where most of our sales have been coming from is

wholesale from spas. Perry: So, we will talk about this in a later call too but there have been a lot of

markets. There are 1,000 people who buy a $10 product on any given day. There are 100 people that will buy $100 and 10 people that will buy a $1,000 product. So, there is the same amount of money available at each level.

You know, it’s just supply and demand. It’s very elastic so if you are only

getting one of those slices as opposed to two or all three, it totally changes your economics. You may find that the people that bought the $30 or $50 cream or whatever will still go to Albuquerque, New Mexico later. You are in a perfect position to sell them that trip. It becomes this big profit center for you that nobody would ever think of.

That’s just something that everybody should be thinking about.

Sometimes there is this obvious thing that you could go do. It might be pretty easy. Somebody else is already doing it. You just do a promotion or some kind of joint venture.

Dave: Can I give one idea? This is Dave in Minnesota. Perry: Hey, Dave. Dave: One of the things that constantly compete with surgeons is chiropractors.

There are a lot of people that go there for many reasons. Some of them may have arthritis so the people that are going to chiropractors are constantly looking for alternate ways to relieve pain. You could do something with partnering with them to promote your product.

Perry: Absolutely. Caller: What would you think about turning this page into an opt-in page where

the sales letter is pretty much spooned out a week at a time and followed up with autoresponders?

Perry: Well, I think that for that it would generally be a good approach because a

person who has arthritis today is still going to have it tomorrow. That is the fundamental thing. Getting their e-mail address first is a pretty good strategy. It may not always work but it is certainly high on the list.

Rodney: This is Rodney from London, Ontario. Just a couple of questions or

comments I guess. I’m just echoing the other comments on the look of the opt-in page that Julie’s Web site looked very credible. I’ve been checking it out as we’ve been listening. I think that the opt-in page maybe doesn’t


look as credible and just echoing the comment from Brook in Canada. So, just a little comment there.

My other question for you is there an opportunity to draw in your

endorsement from Oprah on your other product into your other products. Can you say, “The maker of such and such, endorsed by Oprah?”

Caller: I just wanted to add the same comment about the other parts of your site

looking more credible than your landing page as well. Julie: Okay, thanks. Dave: This is Dave from Chicago. From looking at this, when I see the headline

with arthritis spelled wrong I would just click off of it right away just because of that error on the front. The second thing is on that landing page you might want to try different color schemes and see how people respond to that as opposed to yellow and light blue.

Perry: Let’s move back to Google stuff. We’ll definitely, at the end we will talk

about landing pages and all of that. We can do that but I want to make sure that everybody gets their money’s worth on the Google end of things.

Ed: I had a question on the Google. Perry: Okay. Ed: This is Ed Hamilton in Maine. Two questions, up to now I’ve been clicking

on the checking the content tag. Supposedly we’ve got a wider audience but we got cremated on one set of phrases.

Bryan: That’s a great breakaway on the next topic. Perry: Yeah, that was exactly what we were going to talk about next. Ed: I was assuming that we want to turn that off for everything. The other

question was the difference between plural and singular. We’ve been doing separate ad groups for the same phrases in plural and singular form. Is that correct?

Perry: I think you should usually. Bryan: Like Howie, I’m hearing Glen Livingston’s soft gently voice in the back of

my head saying, “Yes.” People who search on plural and people who search on singular are likely thinking slightly different things.

Perry: They may even if they are tracking everything you may even find they

have a different likelihood to buy. Even the click through rate could be the same but the likelihood to buy may be different.


Plural and singular are definitely candidates for peel and stick, especially like Jason Poole asked about, “Would you peel and stick the one with quotes? Would you peel and stick the one with brackets?” When you get to that level, singular and plural is definitely, definitely in the running.

Just for everybody’s edification we are

www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf at the first link in there. We are on page ten of the first link in that page.

Caller: The other thing that Glenn said about singular and plural is typically he

said that it can even mean the difference in whether someone is beginning their search process or they are at the end of their search process.

Perry: That’s right. Caller: You can determine what he said. (laughter) Bob: Hi, Perry. This is Bob Parker in Miami. My question is about the display

ads on Julie’s and on the Learn Chinese. You will see that Julie has got the www dot etc. On the Learn Chinese it’s got no www. It’s got the Master ChineseMaster.com

What is it? Compare and contrast it for us and how do you get it to display

without having the leading W’s when they want to confirm it? Bryan: Well, this is just the display URL. Google does not require you to put the

www in front on the display URL. Perry: It can make a difference. I couldn’t tell you that one is better than the

other but eventually you get around to trying both. Bob: It is something that you test. Morgan: I’ve got a question. This is Morgan here. How effective is misspelled

keywords and to the effect that should we put brackets and quotes around misspelled keywords too?

Bryan: In a word, yes. Morgan: Another question is how many misspelled keywords should one have?

How long should one keep these misspelled keywords running if one is getting no clicks on them so that you can actually delete them?

Bryan: Well, if they are not getting any clicks you really don’t even need to delete

them unless they are getting a lot of searches but no clicks. That won’t help your cause any but if no one is searching on them you put misspelled keywords in your list because you hope that your competitors aren’t necessarily bidding on those.



People are definitely searching on them. People misspell arthritis all the

time. So, you bid on arthritis on the hope that those people who do type it in wrong they will see your ad and some of your competitors aren’t smart enough to be bidding on that so they don’t see your competitor’s ad.

Caller: Here is a goal. In a perfect world where you had all the time in the world

you would eventually move to the place where every single one of your keywords was an exact match. Then you would know exactly what people were typing and you would be able to sense or figure out or extrapolate or guess exactly what sort of person that was and you would send them to the perfect ad that would go to the perfect landing page.

In general you want to be moving from broad match to phrase match to

exact match. You can use your Web search log to figure out what people are actually typing. If all of your keywords stay at broad match that is kind of lazy because you are not paying attention to what people are actually typing when they are get to you. You don’t know what they are thinking.

Perry: Right, and Google gets more money. Buck: Hey, this is Buck in Virginia. I’ve got a quick question related to that. I

have been tracking the misspelled that Google is sending to me and I am getting some good conversion on them. I was wondering if you had a best practice for gathering up those misspells. Is it just going through the search engine logs?

Secondly, should we be feeding those misspells back into Google as

keywords that we are targeting? Perry: The answer to both questions is yes. You said something that some

people might not have quite caught which is server logs. This is a little bit of a techie thing and you might need a bit of a programmer minded Webmaster to do this. Somewhere on your Web server, in the bowels of it, there is a log of basically every visitor that has ever come to your Web site. Every search term that has ever been typed in to get to your Web site.

Hey, if you had a Web site for even six months there is a phenomenal

amount of information tucked away in there. You have there a better keyword list than any keyword tool could ever give you. At least if you’ve been buying traffic in even a half ass competent way you’ve got a ton of data. You’ve got misspelling and bizarre little phrases and things.

A techie minded Webmaster could dig those out and give them to you

and you will immediately have a list of five, ten or twenty thousand keywords. You can sort those out and get the list cleaned up. Maybe have an assistant clean it up for you and then start bidding on those. Put them in your Google campaign.


It’s a feedback loop. By the way, everything we talk about is a feedback loop. You put something in. It goes through. Something comes out on the other side. You take it and you change what you did at the beginning to make it better and better and better and better. Traffic has been coming through and your server logs have been quietly accumulating all of these keywords.

You go get those and you go, “Alright, I need to dump a bunch of those

into my Google campaigns.” By the way, if there is any way that you are going to get some five and ten cent clicks by bidding on things that nobody else is bidding on, that’s how you are going to do it right there. You are not going to do it by getting stuff from Word Tracker or Overture because all of that stuff has been picked over. In your server logs is unique stuff.

Sunny: Perry, this is Sunny. Could I share a tool? Perry: Yeah. Sunny: I usually connect with my server logs and have mine and it’s a gritty way

to do it but there is a tool for those of you who can’t access your server logs. If you are like me you might find that you like this tool 3,000% better than your server log. It’s HitsLink.com. They have a free 30 day trial. Even if you are not intending to sign up for it you could use it for 30 days and gather some great keyword data.

It’s called Hitslink.com. I’ve had it now for a year and a half and at one

point I was like, “Well, do I really need this?” I discontinued it and I just really missed it. It’s a really good tool.

Caller: We use that all the time. It’s just saved us so many headaches. Perry: Hitslink is an excellent tool. I would recommend using it or something like

it. Let me give you a little synopsis. All of you guys are going to be getting a set of DVDs sometime in the next week or so. You are going to get the traffic school video that I did with Ken Givens and Don Crowder and Ken McCarthy.

That is a great set of videos. I highly recommend that you sit down and

watch it. It is very fascinating. It’s a great documentation of building a campaign from scratch. Ken talks about HitsLink in that video and he shows what it does.

Basically what it is, it’s a third party service where they generate a piece

of code and put that little piece of code on every one of your Web pages. HitsLink tracks everything that goes on in your Web site and gives you laser vision into what visitors do, where they go, what keywords they type in, which keywords turn into a sale, all of this kind of stuff.

It’s not too different from what Google Analytics gives you except that I

am wary of Google Analytics because I do not want the fox in charge of


the henhouse. You can use Google Analytics. That’s okay, but understand that you’ve got the German shepherds guarding the ham sandwiches. When you are relying on Google not only to sell you your traffic but also to tell you what good you are getting from it. I’m a little distrustful of that.

There is HitsLink. There are other ones too like ClickTracks. You can take

your pick. By the way, none of them are perfect. This kind of intelligence, when you really know what’s going on and you are not guessing anymore, that’s powerful.

Ed: I have one question. This is Ed again. On the HitsLink, I’ve always rather

distrusted using the keywords that I get from that because those people have already come to my site. So, obviously they are keywords that they have already used. Is that an advantage? Am I wrong there?

Caller: This is funny. Do you mind if I answer this Perry? Perry: Go right into it. Caller: You are right in that they are generated by the keywords that you use in

your Google campaign a lot, but it also tracks traffic that comes in from all sources, from JV partners, from articles that you’ve written, from organic search, but even the ones that just come in from Google you are going to pick up a lot. Especially if you are using broad match, exact match, and phrase match, on those broad match terms you are going to see exactly what words they did before and after your term.

You are going to see what exact misspelling is most common. You are

going to see exactly what your people; it’s actually very, very much more valuable because they are your people who have been responsive. The things that they do and the little variations that spin off of it are gold.

Perry: So, if they type in microdermabrasion with a space in the middle of it and

Google’s broad match catches it and they see your ad and they click on your ad. When they click on your ad the term microdermabrasion gets past your server and it goes into your server log.

Now it’s in there, and you can go get that out and now you can bid on it.

Instead of it being caught by Google’s broad match capabilities and charging you 50 cents you can bid exact match and only pay 15 cents next time it happens. Then you get all of these variations that Google would charge premium for.

Now you are no longer charging a premium. Now in fact nobody else is

actually bidding on that exact phrase so you pay less and you have a bigger keyword list. You get few things falling in the cracks and you pay less for that little granular stuff.


Sunny: Remember at the conference how people seemed to be fascinated by the fact that I, Sunny, get one cent clicks? I just thought everybody got them. Well, this is the secret.

(laughter) Caller: This question or comment is that I found HitsLink to be much more useful

because I can get the real time reporting almost instantaneously. The other thing was that I’m still missing a good number of in terms of the keyword traffic. It’s not reporting the things coming through syndication for some reason.

I don’t know if you are going to cover that later. At this point, to make sure

you are trapping the keywords that are coming through the search engines for content or syndicated searches.

Joan: Perry, this is Joan Stewart. Perry: Yes, Joan. You are in Wisconsin, right? Joan: Yes I am. I am good. I am new to all of this so some of these may sound

like stupid questions, so here goes. Perry: Joan, let me just say that nobody’s questions are stupid. I mean look,

we’ve got I don’t know how many people. I think there are only 30 or 40 people on the call, but there is going to be more than twice that many that participate or listen in or whatever. People are all over the map and I want everybody to feel comfortable, okay? Go ahead, Joan.

Joan: Okay, I used to be a newspaper reporter so I’m not shy about asking

stupid questions. Can you give us an example where the click through rate on a campaign is more important than the conversion rate?

Bryan: That’s an excellent question. Perry: Yeah, that’s a good one. Several people may have answers. Let me jump

in with the first and most obvious one. To some extent it is a question of what they are converting to. You could be tracking click through rate, there is conversion rate to opt-ins and there is conversion rate to sales.

If you have a higher click through rate but a lower conversion rate then

maybe the higher click through rate gets you cheaper clicks and it still costs you less money. But, if the cheapness of the clicks and the increase in traffic doesn’t come out in the wash to be a cheaper acquired customer or to have acquired you more customers it doesn’t matter.

So, ultimately click through rates in the grand, grand scheme of things,

click through rates don’t matter. Okay? Joan: Yeah.


Perry: In the grand scheme they don’t matter, however it is also kind of difficult for people to track all of these different things. Realistically we have to break up the sales funnel and the segments and work on each segment as reasonably as we can. I talk about how I go to seminars and I get on conference calls and everything.

I say, “You increase your click through rate by 6X and your opt-in page by

3X and your sales letter by 2X and now you’ve got 6 times 3 times 2 which is 36 so you get a 36X increase in sales.” Okay? Well, that is basically true.

However, let’s all understand that is a gross oversimplification because if I

got six times as many clicks at the beginning that doesn’t mean that I got six times as many buyers. It just means I got six times as many clicks. Okay?

It could be that the person with arthritis who is absolutely desperate would

have bought from anybody. They would have crashed through a brick wall to buy something from me just to get some relief. It wouldn’t even matter how good my sales funnel is, right?

Joan: Yeah. Perry: Then you go down to the list to a less desperate person it takes more

persuasion. Nevertheless, if they don’t click on my ad I don’t even get a chance at them. Furthermore, since Google rewards me for click through rate it’s almost always a good idea to go for a higher click through rate because I just get more people for the same amount of money anyway. Right?

Now, let me pause right there. Am I getting to the meat of your question? Joan: Yes, yes. Perry: Okay, so now they come to an opt-in page. Well, as long as I’ve got

roughly something similar to what they are looking for and I am roughly scratching their itch, I would rather have them on my list than not have them on my list. I want to get them on my e-mail list. If I’m talking about something they want to hear about they need to be on my list.

They may not buy today but the fact is if all of us are building businesses

that really serve our market in a variety of ways, and not just a one trick pony. Then if they don’t want to buy the first thing I’m selling them maybe they will still buy the fourth thing I am selling them in six months from now.

I don’t really know how much that list is worth but what I do know is the

list is the biggest asset of my entire business. As long as it’s a qualified list and as long as we are all speaking the same language, I want to build that list.


In the case of my stuff, maybe they buy my Google book, maybe they don’t. Later on they might go to David Bullock’s little workshop that he’s doing in Las Vegas. Maybe they get on some teleseminar that I’m doing with John Carlton and David Garfinkle or maybe they go buy my White Papers course. Maybe they get on my Nine Great Lies of Sales and Marketers and then they get on my Guerrilla Marketing sales people thing.

Then they end up nine months later buying something from me so I’m

going to get them into my maze and I’m going to sort them out later. Does that help?

Joan: That helps a lot and when I start my next campaign, I’m new to all of this.

I might just go for an opt-in instead of a direct sale. Perry: Well, you are in publicity, right? Joan: Right. Perry: Well, you definitely want to go for an opt-in. Give me just a thumbnail

sketch of what you sell. Joan: I have more than 100 information products including special reports,

electronic transcripts and e-books priced from $10 all the way to $97 with a couple higher priced bundled CD packages of $247. I have found that if I can get people to opt-in to my e-zine which comes out weekly I can sell them.

Perry: Okay. So, you want to build that list. Joan: Right. Perry: We will talk about that when we talk about opt-in arson when we do e-

mails and autoresponders. There is a whole art to what goes on because it’s like in my business most of what goes on is not even discernable from my main Web site. Most of the stuff that I do and most of the stuff that I really make money on is below the surface.

If somebody came to my Web site any time in the last two months they

would not know that I was doing a seminar in Chicago. They would not know I was doing this Coaching program. Actually they should and I should have been updating my Web site and I should have had that plastered all over the place but do you know what? I was too busy.

I was too busy catering to the people that already know me, like me and

trust me to even bother or care whether some casual guy that just showed up on my Web site today knew all the stuff that I do. I had one of my friends tell me, we had been friends for ten years and we know each other on a totally different basis. He was curious about my business stuff because he might be starting a business.


He goes on my Web site and he says, “You know Perry? Your Web site is very confusing because you have all these things that you do. It was like, wow you do this and you’ve got this and you’ve got this and you’ve got this.”

I was thinking, “He doesn’t even know half of it.” Well, see all of that gets

sorted out in e-mail and autoresponders and through an ascension process where first somebody knows about this and then they learn about this and then they learn about this. They sort of climb a ladder.

That’s what you want. If you’ve got 100 products would you agree that in

theory every business in America ought to own your stuff? Joan: Yes. Perry: Isn’t that basically true? Joan: Yes. Perry: Well, there is no way. Let’s say that you could get every business in

America to come to your Web site today. There is no way they could all sort themselves out and figure out what they need. Most of them would just leave and not buy anything, right?

Joan: Correct. Perry: But if you got every business in America on your e-mail list about 10%

would eventually figure out something they need from you and they would buy it. It would probably or at least possibly be the right thing. So, you are going to slowly walk them through their whole thinking.

You are going to teach them how to think like you think. You are going to

teach them to ask the questions that you want them to ask. You are going to see the world the way you see it and you are going to literally indoctrinate them into your way of thinking and they are going to follow your yellow brick road. Now they are on Planet Joan.

Joan: Right, so I would offer for my first campaign a free, seven-day minicourse

and I would do it all with autoresponders. Perry: Right, or something kind of like that. Joan: Alright. Perry: Something where they get something right away but they continue to get

cool stuff from you and they get to know you, like you, trust you. Now, why are we going on this little detour? Because this is the big picture of where we are going with all of this. This is why it’s so easy to get me off of Google and onto these other areas because this is where the money is really made.


I had people at this seminar a couple of weeks ago, not a lot but we had a few people complain but not like, “Wait, I thought this was a Google seminar. I thought we were going to talk about Google all weekend and I thought we were going to go into exhaustive, extensive detail on all of this.”

I thought, “Why would you only want to learn how to spend money?” Look

we’ve got to make money. Google only takes your money. They only give you traffic. We’ve got to take this traffic and do something with it. So, again, I don’t want to dwell on this too long because there is a lot of stuff that we’ve still got to talk about.

I want to go on page ten of this 4_ad_groups PDF and Bryan is going to

talk about it. Somebody was just talking about syndicated traffic and figuring that out. They were also asking about how you track where it’s coming from. Sunny has got something that he can mention with regard to that. Bryan, do you want to jump into this mandarin content page?

Bryan: Yeah, we are on page ten of this PDF with all of these samples with

Google AdWords campaigns on them. This one probably looks really odd to you because you go through the keyword list and there is no rhyme or reason to the keyword list. Actually it’s alphabetical and its zero clicks so why in the world am I showing you this?

This is an adgroup that we have set up to reach content targeted

searches only. The principle is this; Google will allow you to bid on keywords multiple times and in multiple places throughout any account. You can have a keyword in different campaigns, different adgroups all at the same time. The one keyword that will get served the most of all those identical keywords is the one where you are bidding the most money, the one that will show up for your Google searches and so forth.

So, you can separate your Adsense traffic from your targeted traffic from

your regular Google and search traffic. What I’m showing you here is an example of an adgroup or a campaign where I’ve actually done that. I have an identical adgroup to this in another campaign that is getting Google clicks and it’s doing that because I’m bidding more than 13 cents a click on it. If you look at this ad group you see that my max bid is 13 cents.

I have another adgroup and another campaign where I’m actually bidding

more than 13 cents and I have turned off the Adsense traffic. All of my Google traffic when people search on Mandarin goes to that other adgroup, the other campaign. This one I have a lower bid, namely 13 cents a click and I turn content targeted traffic or I’ve turned Adsense traffic on so this is getting no searches on Google but on the content network it’s getting 677 clicks a month.

Perry: Could you talk about the relative quality of this traffic and what it means in

your big picture, Bryan.


Bryan: Well, okay, this is really bizarre for example because the gentleman who brought up the question of content targeted traffic a moment ago, I assume you just need to turn that off don’t you? Well, that depends entirely on your market. I tested this with all of my keywords and all of my different campaigns. If I advertise on the content network will it be profitable or will it be wasted money?

What I found out was that in all of my adgroups Learn Chinese, Chinese

language, in all of these adgroups when I turned on content targeted traffic it was worthless and got me huge amounts of traffic that I had to pay a lot of money for that never turned into conversions and never turned into sales except this one adgroup right here.

For some reason the people on the content network and whatever site

they are coming through when they search on Mandarin on they are looking at pages that are related to the term “Mandarin” and Google served my ad just for this little set of keywords only on the Content Network this is profitable, and it is very profitable for me.

So you can see if you look at my “Content Total Results” in the little grey

space across the middle of the screen, you can see I got 677 clicks. You see over on the right-hand side I had a conversion rate of 22%, almost 23% which is good.

Every opt-in I get only costs me .43 cents which is pretty good

considering I get back sometimes over $2 on average in sales for every opt-in that comes in.

This is wildly profitable and this accounts for 40% of my traffic and 60% of

my sales across the board, believe it or not. You see the example here of how you can actually separate your content

targeted traffic from your regular search traffic. Sometimes it will be profitable and sometimes it won’t.

The gentleman that piped up earlier and asked about this, you know,

you’re just going to have to test it. What you may discover is content targeted traffic brings you huge amounts of good quality traffic on all of your keywords and all of your campaigns across the board. Or you may find that it brings you nothing profitable anywhere at any place in your campaign.

Or, like me, you may discover that only on one or two AdGroups or

maybe just one or two keywords content targeted traffic turns out to be profitable for you.

Perry: Think of content as a completely different source of traffic that is suspect.

Maybe it is good; maybe it is bad; and it is something that you peel and stick. It is something that you track separately.


You do it the way that Bryan described where you have one campaign where it is turned on and another campaign where it is turned off. So you are separating your content traffic from your search engine traffic and you are running it separately.

Now, in general, Google is getting better and better at matching content

sites to advertisers. They’ve got about 20 patents related to their AdSense program and the linguistics and the traffic patterns.

Google pays attention to things like what kind of people go to what kind of

web site; people that are in this kind of web site like to go to this other kind of web site. You are one of those web sites or you are not one of those web sites.

They are getting better and better at this and content traffic can be very

valuable and sometimes there is a ton of it available. But then, here it comes, and you’ve got to start slicing it up and figuring out which of it is good and which of it is bad.

The whole theme of what’s going on here is that you can have all this

traffic coming through and your job is to figure out, “Okay, mixed into this traffic is quality buyers plus a lot of garbage. Let’s build this funnel so it separates the garbage from the quality and that we buy the quality; we reject the garbage; we don’t pay for it,” and on it goes.

That is the job. Again, peel and stick; the concept of peel and stick is how

you do it. Jason: Perry, this is Jason and I just have a quick question for you and Bryan on

this. That is, is there a way to determine which of the keywords, without putting

every one in its own group, is actually bringing in the traffic? Bryan: Yes and no. When I first set up this campaign for content targeted traffic,

these keywords in this list were showing about 10% of the time on Google.

So I had at least a rough idea of which keywords were being served the

most and how they were doing on Google. I eventually concluded, “Well, okay, you know, the term ‘Mandarin’ in brackets is getting the most searches and at least on Google it is converting a certain amount.”

Specifically which keyword is converting best and what kind of cost per

conversion am I paying on the content targeted site, I don’t have any way of knowing that.

Perry: Sunny’s been using a tool that tells you that stuff. It is called what,

www.adsensetruth.com.


http://www.adsensetruth.com/

Sunny: That’s for AdSense, but what I do to get the most information is separate all my campaigns out. I have five campaigns. I do this for my clients, like with consulting clients.

I’ll use my own example. In my own main work I had five campaigns and,

like you guys, I would play with have search on and search off and content on and content off.

Finally what I did, when they started letting you bid on content separately,

I just got this idea of separating out my campaigns completely. I took those five in Google, I call them Google, and I turned off search and content and it was strictly Google.

I duplicated my campaigns; in fact, I triplicated them so instead of five

campaigns I now had 15. The first five are Google only and the next five are search only and the next five are content only.

What that allows me to do is, you mentioned, Perry, what we are doing is

using this traffic to make our sales process better and better. Well now, I have so much more control because I can optimize my content ad to what people in the land of content are interested in.

I get different ads than what I get in the Google area and I also can bid

much lower and I can separate out. Instead of having blinders on, I know how many clicks I get in content; I know how many impressions; I know what the click-through rate is; I know what the cost-per-click is; I know what the conversion rate is.

For just my content ads alone I get all that info where before it was like I

had blinders on and I didn’t know anything. It was like a mix and I thought, “Oh, is the content helping me or not? Well, let me take a guess; let me check my intuition.”

Now I don’t do that anymore. Bryan: Sunny, Jason’s question specifically was in any one of those single

Adgroups that you are advertising on content, is there a way for you to know which keyword is doing what; how many searches it’s getting; how it’s converting compared to the next keyword below it on the same list?

Sunny: No, all the information I’m saying I get instead of having blinders on is

only at the Adgroup level. Once you go into the Adgroup and you look at the keywords themselves, you just get the zeros like on your PDF there.

Bryan: Yeah, and, Jason, that’s been my experience too. Jason: Is there a way to duplicate a campaign so you can set it up for the

Content Network?


Sunny: You do it manually. What I do is open up three separate windows and open up my Google campaign in three different windows all at once. Then I just copy and paste, copy and paste.

What I will do is take the Google and copy it into the search and into the

content and then I’ll take the next one... Jason: You can have two windows open at the same time. Sunny: You can have unlimited numbers open at the same time. Jason: You can have different campaigns open in each one? Sunny: Yeah, uh-huh. That is a lot more efficient. Howie: Perry, in three semi-commercial announcements, by the end of the week I

am expecting to have developed a tool that will, with one click, duplicate Google campaigns.

Perry: Oooh! Bryan: I was just going to ask if Howie had something. Howie: Today’s the 25th and I’m hoping by next... Sunny: And everybody on this list gets a free copy? Caller: At www.AdStockWeb.co.uk we’ve got a tool that does that already as

well. Howie: Well, mine will be better because the money will go to me. Caller: Can somebody tell me the difference between Google only and search

only? Sunny: Yeah, Perry, do you want me to handle that? Perry: Go ahead. Sunny: I learned this technique from Perry that last time I took this coaching

program. All you do is make sure for each keyword, not just on the AdGroup level,

but actually on the keyword level, when you have those two windows open, that your bid in Search is always at least .1 cent lower than your bid in Google.

Caller: When you say “Search,” do you mean AdSense? Sunny: No, I’m talking about AdWords.


Perry: No, you’ve got Google only which is Google, of course. Then you have Search Partners which is Ask Jeeves and AOL and Earthlink and Netscape.

It is in the campaign settings. Again, I probably should have mentioned

this an hour ago, but when you are split testing ads; when you create a new ad it shows on Google right away. But it does not show up on Ask Jeeves right away. It does not show up on syndicated content sites right away.

It only shows up in those places after a Google editor approves it. Well, if

you are mixing Google traffic with any other kind of traffic; if you are mixing Google traffic with Search Partner traffic or Content traffic, you have to be very careful.

The new ad that you write does not show up in those other places until

the Google editor approves it. As soon as he or she approves it, the click-through rate changes and, with you click-through rates, you don’t know whether it is apples to oranges. You don’t know if this ad was actually running in the same circumstances as the other ad.

You only know if you’ve got the three all separated out. And you can

make bad decisions about winning and losing ads because sometimes it was syndicating and sometimes it wasn’t.

The best way to do it is to separate it out just the way Sunny did, so

you’ve got a Google only, you’ve got a Search Partners only and you’ve got a Content only.

Now you can split test to your heart’s content and it doesn’t mess

anything up. That is a really good idea to do that because those are three different kinds of traffic and they behave three kinds of ways and they have three different kinds of click-through rates.

You want to make sure that when you are testing stuff you are always

doing apples to apples. I realize this gets a little bit anal at times, but remember, you only have to

separate all the stuff out for your top ten or twenty keywords anyway. You don’t need a hundred campaigns to do this.

Sunny: What this is, Perry, is peel and stick across campaigns. It really is. It is

just the same as peel and stick. The philosophy there as you expressed is you do it to the ones that give you the most clicks.

Perry: Let me mention that you should bid .1 cent lower on the Search content

than on the Google. Sunny: Separate them out because Google the company will always take the

highest bid. Therefore, if your searches are .1 cent less for each keyword, your Google campaign will always get the high bid.


If you separate it out and the search is .1 cent lower, when someone

searches on Ask Jeeves or whatever, they are going to go in and they will get your actual Search campaign.

If it is a Google search, they will get your Google campaign. It is the only

way you can separate them out. Perry: AdWords does not give you the ability to turn off Google and turn on

Search Partners. That is the thing. So Campaign A has Google only; Campaign B has Google and Search

Network; but Campaign B has lower bid prices. Now the searches go into Google for Google, the searches go into

Search Partners for Search Partners. Then you have a third one with Content Only turned on and you set the bid prices where you want there.

That’s how it works. Bryan: If you want a really, really simple summary of how this works and how to

do it, go to www.perrymarshall.com/bootcamp. There are a number of link on this page you can click on and one of them is “How to Separate AdSense from Google.” It is very simple.

Just go to www.perrymarshall.com/bootcamp, click on the link that says

“How to Separate AdSense from Google,” and you will realize, “Hey, this is not rocket science; I can do this.”

Sunny: There is another advantage to doing it, if I could just mention really

quickly, Perry? Perry: Yeah. Sunny: Out of my 15 campaigns, when I’m at campaign level and I sort by cost-

per-conversion, out of my 15 campaigns four of my lowest cost-per-conversions or my content groups, nine of my top ten are Content and Search groups.

That means what I’m finding is that my Google campaigns are the most

expensive in the sense of the bids, but also in the cost-per-conversion and that my Content is the cheapest cost-per-conversion.

If you don’t separate out, you are paying a premium for any Search and

Content traffic that you do not need to pay. Perry: Right, so let’s kind of pull this all together. This all can sound very

complicated, but really there is a very simple thing we are doing. Let’s say you’ve got a thousand keywords. If you sort those keywords by

impression, almost all the traffic comes from ten of them, okay?


http://www.perrymarshall.com/bootcamp

http://www.perrymarshall.com/bootcamp

So what you are going to do is peel and stick ten. So now you’ve got 11

groups. Does that make sense? You’ve got the top ten and then you’ve got all the rest of the stuff. Or you’ve got the top ten and all the rest of the stuff is only in like three, four or five other groups and that’s it.

So you’ve only got 10 or 15 groups, okay? Now you are going to make

duplicates of all that two more times and you are going to separate Google traffic from Search traffic from Content traffic.

So now you’ve got 30 and even though 30 sounds like a lot, you are only

going to spend most of your time on the top 10 out of the 30. You are going to track conversions separately and you are going to write separate ads for each one of those and you are going to bid separately.

Basically, you are taking all your Google traffic from all the different things

it sends you and breaking it up into like 20 or 30 pieces, which is not a huge amount of work; this is not Hercules here.

By doing that you are now set up so everything you do going forward is

proper. The whole theme here is that you set things up properly the first time and

then everything else gets better and better and better just with simple, easy tweaks.

Now let me add a little nuance to this that only applies to some people. Caller: Do you recommend tracking or recording the referrer that track separately

when it comes from the Content Network or the Search Network or the Google Network?

Perry: Tracking the referrer? Caller: Are you recommending different landing pages for the ads on those three

networks? Perry: Maybe, but not necessarily. Caller: Is it worth adding some kind of referral I.D. so you know whether it is

coming from either the Search Network or the Content Network, etc.? Perry: See, you should be tracking them separately anyway, whether you use

HitsLink or HyperTracker or whatever, however you track. Remember, we’ve basically split this out into about 30 pieces, right?

We’ve broken up your Google account up into 30 pieces, right? So you

track each of the 30 separately whatever you use to track. That means, if you are tracking them separately, you can very easily create separate landing pages if you need to.


You’ve got 30 funnels and they spill into ten landing pages; or maybe 30 funnels spill into six; or maybe 30 spill into three. It would be very easy if you said, “You know what? I don’t really think this landing page matches these people. I figured out what kind of ads they want to click on and everything else.

“So I’m going to build this landing page and I’m going to sort of peel and

stick that funnel and I’m going to run them through this landing page.” Then, oh, your conversion goes up. So great, you won. Again, even

though you got 30, there are only five or ten of them that are going to take up most of your time.

At any point in time there are only three or four things that you need to be

paying attention to that are going to get you to the next leap in performance. This is not about paying attention to 100 things; this is about paying attention to three or four things.

Does that make sense? Caller: Now, we are talking about 30 Adgroups, right? Perry: Well, yeah. There are three campaigns with ten groups in each one. Caller: Gotcha. Perry: Right? So, one other little thing is if you are getting a lot of AdSense

traffic, if you discover that AdSense traffic is a big deal, there is a service that I have not used but has been recommended to me by trustworthy people. That is www.ppseer.com. Bryan has checked this out, I know.

Caller: What’s the name of that again? Perry: The name is www.ppseer.com. It is a service that you use to track your

AdSense traffic. It tells you which sites the traffic comes from that convert. Caller: That referring URL would be recorded in your log anyways, no? Perry: I don’t think so. Sunny: Not correlated to the AdSense, anyway. Perry: Somebody came up with a special tool for specifically saying, “Okay, I’ve

got this AdSense traffic that has come from all these different sites,” and it tells you which sites are actually converting and which ones are not.

Now, the ones that aren’t you put on the exclude list and now you are not

buying traffic from them anymore. Caller: What was the URL again?


http://www.ppseer.com/


Perry: The URL is www.ppseer.com. Caller: I’ve got a question and that is when you say create city anchorage,

should you not have some Google campaign up running first before you go and create your Search campaign and Content campaign?

Perry: Howie, did you understand the question? Howie: Can you repeat it for me? Caller: Yeah, sure. Should one have a successful Google campaign up and

running first with your keywords before one actually starts creating a campaign with the same keywords for the Content and Search?

Bryan: That’s what I would do. Howie: It partly depends upon who the markets are. Whatever your topic is, think

about the type of people who are likely to be looking in the Yellow Pages for it, which is what Search is. Or who would be browsing a newspaper article for a Content web site and be drawn to it?

You can use the Search information to help you market better, but make

sure you don’t figure out what sells to penguins and then take exactly that and try selling to reindeer.

Caller: Gotcha. Caller: Question on the Search content. Isn’t that actually only the top three

positions that go to the Search? If you are not in the first top three, is it included on the Search Network or not?

Perry: If you do a search on Ask Jeeves, AOL or Netscape, you get different

numbers of Google ads syndicating on each one. Sometimes it is three; sometimes it is four; sometimes it is five.

Sometimes it shows the first three at the top of the page, but then there

are six more at the bottom of the page. You can’t really reduce it to something simple.

Sunny: I think the answer is no. In my Search only campaigns, for instance, my

average positions for different Adgroups range anywhere from one to 27. It shows up in the Search positions just like normal; just like in Google or Content.

Caller: So you don’t have to focus on the top three in order to get it included in

the Search Network? Sunny: Right, you don’t. Caller: Okay.



Sunny: They are happy to take your money. Caller: No offense to Howie, but can we get the URL for the campaign copying

tool? Caller: I was going to ask the same thing. Howie: It doesn’t exist yet, so I don’t want to send you... Caller: No, from the other gal. Sorry, Howie. Perry: Ma’am, what was that URL again? Caller: The one in the U.K.? Bryan: It looks like she is not on. Caller: Did Howie cut her off? Caller: No, I’m still here. It is not publicly available at the moment, but you can

contact us for details about that. My address is [email protected].

Caller: What was the domain again? Caller: Adstockweb.com. Perry: Adstockweb.com, kind of like “Ad Stock Market Web.” Caller: Is it a commercial product? Caller: At the moment it is something we use ourselves internally that we

developed and we use it with our consulting as well. Caller: Thank you. Caller: Come on, Howie, pour it on. The race is on, huh? Caller: Can you suggest which keyword search tools are the best to use with? Perry: Like the best search... Caller: Will Wordtracker lower your bid? Which one should you work with to start

the campaign? Perry: I don’t know that any one is the be-all, end-all. I think Wordtracker is a

good start and, of course, Overture is very useful. You can do a lot with those.

Now, if you are in really competitive markets and you are looking for a

way to figure out which keywords; you are trying to find the cracks in the


http://[email protected]/

sidewalk; you are trying to find undercapitalized keywords and little gaps in the market; the best tool I’ve seen for that is AdWord Accelerator.

It is one of the only keyword tools I know of that actually interfaces with

Google’s system to get results rather than using stuff from other search engines.

It allows you to do some very interesting things. It uses the wildcard

technique to help you identify which competitor’s ads are performing the best.

Howie, do you want to make any comments about your keyword tool with

respect to these other ones? Howie: Yeah, mine was developed, this is www.LowerYourBidPrice.com, to not

be intelligent, but to just save you time on the repetitive things that you could do by yourself without needing keywords.

For instance, adding quotes in brackets; putting in wildcards; substitution;

misspelling. It’s grown to include a lot of the intelligent stuff that you can get for free from the Google sandbox and the Overture tool. We have a feed that will give you common misspellings.

But it is not a research tool that is going to give you stuff that you can’t get

anywhere else. It’s not so necessary if you have one campaign, if you are selling a product or a line of products and you set it up once and for the rest it is tweaking.

But people who find it useful who stay with us for a long time are kind of

the Google entrepreneurs who are always looking for a new market to get into. It helps you set up campaigns quickly that you then use intelligence to tweak.

Caller: Do either of you guys have a feel or an opinion on Keyword Elite? That’s

something new that just came out recently. Howie: Nope. Perry: No, there was a period of time where there was a new keyword tool

coming out every week and we’d get all these emails from all these people who wanted us to review it. They’d want us to promote it and all this kind of stuff.

After a few months of that we just stopped paying attention to them and

now, if a good one comes out, we figure we’ll eventually hear how great it is.

We haven’t heard how great that one is yet, so the jury is out. If you want

to try it and let us know, that’s fine. But I’m in no hurry to go christen somebody’s keyword tool as being the next incredible thing.


http://www.loweryourbidprice.com/

Caller: I found that with Wordtracker I couldn’t get enough hits. The keywords I was searching on just didn’t register. They were just zeros, yet they work well as keywords on our site.

I guess we’ve got a bit of a niche industry here. I was disappointed with

Wordtracker. I had more in Overture, actually. What was that other one you mentioned? Do you think that would be

better than Wordtracker for a niche type of market? Perry: You’re speaking of AdWord Accelerator? Yeah, it’s definitely geared

towards niches. It was designed expressly for people doing things like arbitrage and affiliate programs where a lot of times the only way you can make those things work is to find the cracks in the sidewalk where the weeds can grow in the middle.

That’s good and, you know, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that

Google’s own tools have gotten better and better. You are definitely doing yourself a disservice if you don’t at least play with Google’s sandbox tool.

What Google’s tools will not do for you is give you a gazillion minute

variations on things because Google wants you to pay a premium for not having those. They will not give you misspellings; they won’t give you alternate hyphenations and all this kind of thing.

But what they will give you is very exhaustive lists of similar phrases and

if you do a search on economics, let’s say, they will give you words like Alan Greenspan and these different institutes and all this kind of stuff.

It is based on what real people who visit real web sites type in because

Google kind of lumps things together and they see these patterns. So don’t overlook the fact that there are little clusters of smaller, less significant keywords that can be valuable to you.

Caller: Yeah, we do have quite a niche. We book yacht charters and the problem

we found was that phrases that seem to work as keywords in our site just weren’t even coming up on Wordtracker.

Perry: Yeah, well, again, that shows that your server logs, for example,

ultimately give you a much better keyword list than any keyword tool would. It is just because you’re in the feedback loop. You’re collecting the real data.

Bryan, do you want to move on to basically kind of the next phase of

content here? Caller: May I ask a quick question first? Bryan: Go ahead.


Caller: Just regarding that HitsLink, does that actually pick up the Pay Per Click keywords? I use Webtrans and it only picks up organic searches. Does HitLinks definitely pick up Google paid for keywords?

Howie: Yeah. Caller: Thank you. Caller: I have one quick question, too, before we move on. Do you have a feel for

click-through rates as it relates to position one, two, three, four? Perry: Well, yeah. That’s a good segway actually. If you go back to the original

handout, www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/week1.pdf, there is a link to www.perrymarshall.com/google/potash.htm.

When you signed up for coaching, somewhere in one of the emails you

got a link to the Ultra Advanced AdWords Course that I did with Don Crowther and Jason Potash.

If you’re ready for fine tuning and really tweaking your stuff, that would be

a good transcript to read or it would be a good set of MP3s to listen to. If you click on this link here, you get all of the handouts of that teleseminar. When you click on them you are going to be asked for a password, and the password is “AdSense” for all of these things.

Now, one of the links is “Bid Position vs. Sales and ROI.” It is at

www.perrymarshall.com/google/potash.htm and there is a link right there on the handout.

You download this and you type in “AdSense” as the password and you

get a very important chart. For an advanced Google, this is one of the most important things I could show you. This is a real central piece of information here.

Let me open it; give me a second here. Okay, what this shows you is a reasonably accurate approximation of

what happens at different positions on the page, whether you are number one, number two, number three, number four, number ten, number 20, okay?

Here’s how this is put together. This is put together so that everything is

gauged relative to a $1 click for position number one. This chart is saying that if you are paying a buck a click in position number one and you are getting a thousand clicks a day, then here’s how the other positions fair.

In order to pay a buck a click, you would typically be bidding about two

bucks, all right? You get a thousand clicks a day, which means you are spending $1,000 a day, all right?



http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/potash.htm

http://www.perrymarshall.com/google/potash.htm

Then, when you go down, for example, position three you’re bidding .59 cents a click, you are getting 511 clicks a day and you are paying $303.

Well, one of the things that this implies is that your click-through rate is

about half in position number three as it is in position number one, right? Does that make sense?

Now, Google takes some of that into account when they are figuring out

relevancy, but this is how it works. So position number three only costs about a third as much per day as position number one, but it brings you half as much traffic.

So the traffic per click is obviously cheaper, all right? Then you go down

further and further. Your clicks continue to go down, but your spending per day goes down even faster.

So when you get down to position eight, you are only spending $27 a day

for 111 clicks instead of $1,000 a day for a thousand clicks. Now let’s go to the next column, Sales Conversion Factor. Now, let me

explain what this is. Sales Conversion Factor is an indication that the easier you are to find, the more tire kickers are get and the less buyers you get.

So in position number one you get all the happy clickers; the people who

search, they see your link, they click on it, and they click on the first thing they see. They are the least qualified prospects.

Now, on the other hand, if you are in position seven, I’ve got a Sales

Conversion Factor there of 2.0. Now what that means is that if people are hunting around and trying to buy and trying to figure something out and doing their research as they search the internet.

They are twice as likely to buy from you as they came to position seven

as if they clicked on position one. Why? People who go all the way down to position seven are really looking hard for something. People who just click on the first ad they see are not.

So, I take the cost per day, I multiply it by the Sales Conversion Factor

and that is the sales factor. What I was assuming here was that you spend $1,000 a day on traffic and you get $1,000 a day in sales or sales margin, let’s say.

Whereas, if you are in position seven, you spend $64 on traffic and you

get $461 in sales. You get the most traffic at a premium price of position one; you get a lot less traffic at a bargain price of position seven.

Does anybody have a question about this so far? Howie: Perry, I have a question.


Perry: Okay. Howie: Have you ever experimented with running a different ad in position one as

in position seven based on the fact that you are likely to attract a different sort of person with the top position ad?

Perry: I have not actually tested that specific idea although I think it is a good

one. Does anybody have something to say about that? Sunny: I haven’t done that. Caller: I didn’t hear the question. Perry: Howie says since you are getting a different kind of person in position

one, have you ever tested writing a different ad for position one to try to filter out the people you don’t want or trying harder to disqualify a position one?

What, Howie? Howie: Either to disqualify or, if you know that this is the first place they are

looking, you’d want to say something like “We’ll match any other price,” so they don’t go look anywhere else.

Something to attract the initial searcher versus, if you are on page three,

you know they have searched everywhere else first. Perry: I have not tested that, but it is very smart, undoubtedly. Caller: I tried it and Google will not let you do it if you are going to the same URL. Howie: Oh, no, you can’t split test in real time in the same account. But say you

do one week and you know you are in position one, not all tests are perfect, or get a second account and send it to a very similar URL. Just an awareness of the fact that your ad moves up and down the page may require different content for it to be optible.

Caller: This is Joe in Singapore. How do you maintain, say, the seventh position? Perry: Google’s system is not set up so that you stay in the seventh position, per

say. You have to adjust your bid price so that your average position for that keyword is seven and you can do that. It is going to go up and down.

This is not an exact science nor is it a chart. This chart is not gospel truth.

It is a rough approximation of things. As a matter of fact, one of the things that this chart tends to assume is that people are looking for a solution amongst a variety of possible solutions as opposed to a question that has one answer.

In other words, if somebody wants a Sony Mavica 7300D camera, and

they know exactly what they want, then this chart may not apply because


a lot of times people will literally take the first thing they find. If the price is right and it is what they want, they will just take it.

On the other hand, if it is like arthritis or something like that, this chart

does apply because there are lots of ways to deal with arthritis and no one of them is perfect. It is a more research-oriented thing.

This Sales Conversion Factor relates to research-oriented purchases as

opposed to, “Well, I know exactly what I want and I’m just going to go to the first guy that offers it to me,” which may be quite different.

If you are looking for a plumber, your toilet is overflowing, you are

probably going to take the first thing you find. The first plumber that answers his phone is going to come over. So you’ve got to take that into consideration.

Sunny: Perry, in the Edit Campaign Settings, there is currently a feature where

you can enable preferences. Perry: Yes, and that only shows up for some people. Sunny: Some people when they go into their Campaign Settings and they look for

position preference they will find it. Other people, depending on your account, you go into your Campaign Settings and you won’t find it.

Perry: Right, but they are rolling out a tool which allows people to say, “I don’t

want my ad to show up if it is in this range of positions,” or “I do want it to show up in these positions.” They are not holding it at a certain position, but they are making it disappear if it goes above or below.

Yes, that could be pretty useful for some people. Sunny: Or they are tweaking your bid price so you stay within a certain range. Caller: Can I ask a quick question, Perry? Perry: Yeah! Caller: It is along the same lines that the gentleman just asked a second ago. Basically, say I’m in position 6.5 for one of my ads and I’m paying .96

cents a click, do I have to wait until the average position raises up before I can lower my bid to stay at 6.5? Or will it automatically do that? I’m bidding $1.20 per click and it is actually charging me, or the average CPC is .96 cents and I’m at 6.5.

I don’t know when to lower my bid price, basically, or my average bid; my

max CPC. Sunny: Is your question like if your click-through rate is improving at what point

do you...


Caller: Well, it is a 3.7% click-through rate. It hasn’t been a long campaign or

anything. But I’m just wondering when I am supposed to start lowering my bid prices and changing my ads to get the click-through rate up.

Say my click-through rate went up to 10%, just as an example. Well I’m

still bidding $1.20. Does that mean I would jump up to the first position because of my average my max CPC times my click-through rate, but I wouldn’t want to go to number one, I would want to lower my bid price. When do I know when to lower it?

Sunny: Google has a choice. Either they can lower your bid price and keep you in

the same position, or they can keep your bid price the same and put you up higher.

Well, they are going to put you up higher because they want more people

to click on your ad because your ad gets clicks. Caller: Is that how I identify it? I look and see that my average click through rate

is going up so I want to start dropping my bid price. Sunny: That’s what you do, yeah. You lower the bid price after you see your

position is moving up. Caller: Great, thanks. Perry: Let me continue in this handout here. There are a few things I want to

make sure I remember to talk about. Let’s see, I’ve got all these pages. Howie: Did you say that the password is “AdWord?” Perry: The password is “AdSense.” Let me go through these major ideas. I’m not going to spend much time

on this. The second link on this handout says “Almost Perfect,

www.perrymarshall.com/AdWords/writeabook.pdf.” I went over this in the coaching breakout of the seminar a few weeks ago. Because I did that I’m not going to go into the same talk again.

What I went through is a campaign that, in my opinion, is put together just

about perfectly. I explained how it was done and so on. If you click on the second link which is “writeabook.pdf,” you will see a nearly ideal assembly of a Google campaign for a very specific product.

It is a course on how to write a book in 14 days. This group is put together

exactly the way a group should be put together. I will just point out a few things.


http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/writeabook.pdf

First of all, you will see that every single keyword in this group is a minute version of how to write a book; every single one. So the ads are naturally matched to the keywords just about perfectly.

You will see that I’m not running any content through this group. I’m

running the content through another group. If you go down to the very bottom of the page, you will see the ads that have been written and you will see something very interesting.

Regarding the two winning ads, there is only one thing that is different

between these two ads. Who notices what the difference is? Caller: The comma and the title. Perry: There is a comma, and the comma increases the click-through rate from

4.1% to 4.4% and it is not luck. It is for real. It shows you that even the most seemingly trivial thing can make a huge difference.

If you want a case study in how an AdGroup should look, this is it right

here. The way the keywords are organized, you could do peel and stick, for example. There’s a “How to Write a Children’s Book” keyword, and you could peel and stick the entire product.

You could have an ad for how to write a children’s book. You could have

a landing page about how to write a children’s book. You could have a product with a special chapter on how to write a children’s book that is a supplement to the main book.

Basically, you’ve peeled and stuck the entire sales funnel to a slightly

different product, even, and you would definitely get a 2x, 3x, 5x increase in sales for that one keyword just by doing that.

I don’t want to dwell on that too much more. Let’s go to Major Idea

Number Five, “SplitTester.com.” If you want to know if two ads have duked it out long enough to declare a

winner or a loser, you go to www.SplitTester.com, you enter the number of clicks in the click-through rate of each of your two ads, and it will tell you how sure you are that the winning ad is really a winner or not.

Yeah, it is nice to have a rule of thumb like 20 or 30 clicks I got a winner.

But if you really want to know for sure, just use the Split Tester tool. Caller: Question. On that last ad we were looking at, the service for the ad on the

left was 75% and the service for the ad on the right was 23%. Perry: Right. Caller: Can you explain that?


http://www.splittester.com/

Perry: That’s because I had checked the option that says, “Optimize Ad Serving for My Ads.” Bryan...

Bryan: Google has changed that now. They give you an option in your Campaign

Settings to show better ads and more often. Perry: Yes. Caller: Doesn’t that skew the results though? Perry: Well, not really. It just means that winning ads do get shown more often. It

is kind of like automatic versus stick shift. You can use the automatic if you want and it’s not as good for a racecar driver, but it is probably better for the average guy.

I had that turned on and in Google’s formula the one is sufficiently better

than the other that they only show the one 25% of the time. If I was doing stick shift on this, I would not have had that option. They would have run 50/50.

Bryan: It doesn’t skew your results, but if you are losing ad you want those

numbers to come in faster, then you would uncheck the box and you would have Google show them both the same.

Caller: In general, you guys recommend having it turned on? Bryan: I always turn it off. I think Perry has a different opinion. Perry: It depends on how closely you are able to baby-sit your campaigns.

Honestly, not all of us have time to go scrutinize every last thing in our Google campaigns. If you don’t, then leave the thing turned on and let Google sort that out for you.

That’s what I did with this one because, if you pay attention to how long

this ran, this ran for a year. I’m not running it anymore, but I only checked in every couple months. Otherwise I would have written a lot more ads and stuff, but this was a very low priority project.

I was just doing as best I could with hardly any time commitment at all. Caller: Perry, why did the comma have an affect? Perry: Well, if you read it out loud, it becomes clear. “Write a book fast,” or

“Write a book, fast.” Caller: So it wasn’t anything that Google did. It was just the perception of the

person reading the ad. They hesitated at the comma and it gave it a different meaning to them.

Perry: Yeah, it’s not Google at all; it’s entirely the psychology of people and what

they like. That comma adds some rhythm and inflection to the ad. It gives


it more personality. It puts an emphasis on the word “fast,” and people like that. They like that about 8% better.

This is a perfect illustration of the fact that every little thing in your Google

ads makes a difference. Caller: What other special characters will Google accept in their ads other than

periods and commas? Perry: They accept ampersands, trademark symbols, dollar signs, cents signs,

copyright symbols, hyphens, semicolons, parentheses, dashes, and, by the way, I just rattled off this list of thing, but all of those things are useful things that should be in your bag of tricks.

You should have a little checklist like, “Okay, can I use parentheses in

these ads? Can I use double quotes in these ads? Can I use single quotes in these ads? Can I use an apostrophe in my ad? Can I use a semicolon in my ad? Can I use a dash in my ad? Can I use a comma in my ad?”

Does it take brackets? Bryan: I don’t know. Perry: I don’t think they do take brackets, but they might. Sunny: I don’t think so either because it is used as a symbol for exact match. I

think I’ve tried it and I think it doesn’t take it. Perry: But all of those things; the capitalization of any one particular word or

letter; all those things make a difference. These little improvements give you an edge.

Again, if you understand that you’ve probably only got 30 groups in your

whole thing and you are probably paying really serious attention to five or ten of them, you undoubtedly have time to try all these things.

You just kind of put them in your list and you go, “Okay, I’m going to try

this and I’m going to try this,” and little by little over time you are kind of chipping away. You go in every few days or every week and you try more stuff. You delete losers; you create new winners; you try stuff, try stuff and try stuff.

Eventually, you find these sweet spots where things really work. Sunny: Could I add something, Perry? For instance, here a comma might beat a

colon or a space-hyphen-space, but in another campaign on another product, a colon might win. It’s worth it to test them all in each one because different things work differently in different markets and different campaigns.


Perry: Let’s see if there are a few more things that I want to make sure I cover, then I can take some more questions and we will be done.

There are a lot of situations where you can take something in your ad and

just put it in quotes. There are a lot of people who can take the line number one of Google ads and they can put quotes around it and it would instantly get 10% or 20% more clicks just because you did that.

Another big one on my list is verbs. Verbs are powerful. Any good writer

will tell you that verbs are the secret sauce. Verbs are the spices, so you should look at your ads and say, “Okay, there’s a word, there’s a verb. Can I substitute a more colorful verb for that verb?”

For example, if I do a search on the word “fighting,” then I get these ads:

“Pack a power punch,” “Instill fear in your opponents,” “For all serious combat athletes.”

Well, let’s take this word “instill.” Well, you could instill fear, you could

install fear, you could drive fear into your opponents, or you could provoke fear. Think of all the words you could substitute for “instill.”

Or look at “Pack a power punch.” Instead, say “possess a power punch,”

or “deliver a power punch.” Verbs should be on the top of your list of stuff that you try. Let’s keep going here. Domain names are very, very important. Some

people on this call are well aware. If you are kind of new you may not realize how incredibly your domain name affects your click-through rate.

If you go register ten domain names, redirect them all to your site and test

ten different domain names in your ads, between the best ones and the worst ones, if everything in your ad was the same and you only changed the domain name, from the best to the worst you will see a three to one difference.

Some domain names out pull other domain names three to one and most

people pick a domain name, they name their site, they build their site and they never, ever think about it anymore after that. In fact, a different domain name could give them twice as much traffic from wherever they get it.

I’m not going to go through the rest of this handout. It is kind of self-

explanatory. I don’t blame anybody if they want to bail, but if there are a few more questions, I’m happy to take them.

Caller: Perry, this is Joan Stewart again. Perry: Yes, Joan.


Caller: When determining the negative keywords for a campaign, what is the thought process that you go through? I’m sure you don’t just pluck these out of the air. Do you actually do a search for the keywords in Google and see what comes up? And if there’s something on the list that you don’t like, do you just make that a negative keyword?

Perry: Here’s what I do. Howie, Bryan, whoever, jump in, but I go to Overture

and I look at the Overture search tool. I type in “Publicity” in www.Inventory.Overture.com and I get this big long list.

Then I start working down through that list and I specifically look for

negative keywords. Well, let’s do it. Let’s do that very thing right now. I’m going to go to www.Inventory.Overture.com, and this thing is usually a

little slow. Publicity, I type it in and I’m going to wait for the result to come back and let’s go through the list.

Okay, “Publicity: publicity media, publicity stunt, packaged publicity, free

publicity, IMDB publicity,” which is the internet movie database, “publicity agency, publicity photo.”

Let’s take photo. Do you want people searching for publicity photos? Caller: I sure do because I have an eBook on how to take publicity photos. Perry: Okay, let’s say you didn’t or let’s say, number one, you didn’t have a book

about that and, number two, there were all these photographers and people that took those and you figured people looking for that are not a match for you.

Then you’d put “photo” as a negative. Caller: Got it. Thank you. Perry: Okay, or let’s say that you don’t do anything with radio publicity, then you

put “negative radio.” You can go through this list and you’ll find things that should be negative.

That should be a basic part of your keyword research. You are

immediately looking for negatives. Caller: Perry, I have a quick question regarding the wildcard test. I did the

wildcard test for my niche and I noticed my competition is showing up and my ads are not showing up. I am bidding on all three variations: the broad, the exact and the match.

Why would my ad not appear when it is reporting that it is showing up in

an average position of 4.4?


http://www.inventory.overture.com/

http://www.inventory.overture.com/

Perry: That is because it is showing up on some inexact matches but not others. It means your competitor, in general, is getting a high click-through rate that you are on broad matches.

When Google gets a broad match search, their ad is getting clicked on

more often than yours does. That could mean you peel and stick your broad match and you try other

ads. Or you use the wildcard technique to figure out how the other guys figured out the sweet spot of this market and you haven’t.

Caller: There’s no hard and fast trick to start showing up on the wildcards other

than just improving the performance of the ads? Perry: That’s right. But you should look at the winners and you will usually see

definite patterns of what is appealing to people and what is not. You will usually get a pretty clear idea that all the winning ads, or most of them, are saying “x.”

Caller: Great, thanks, Perry. Caller: I’ve got one quick question about changing domain names. We have

quite a few of them. Would you actually put that in the visible part of the ad or just put it in the thing that you actually click to? Would you use your normal name in the visible part?

Bryan: The display. Perry: I’m only talking about the display URL. For this purpose, the display URL

matters more than where they actually go. But if you find that a certain display URL out pulls the other ones two to

one, you should think about using a different URL for your entire web site. Caller: We have different sections of the web site, so I’ve got URLs for different

parts of it. So you would put that in the display part but not the actual link where they go to?

Perry: Not necessarily, right. Caller: So the link that they actually go to has no part in the rating? Perry: No, the person can’t see that, so that has nothing to do with whether they

click or not. Caller: Okay, good. Perry: You are just measuring whether they click in the first place. Caller: Right, then it has to be a domain, obviously, that you own, right?


Perry: Yes, you have to own it and it has to resolve to your web site. Caller: Do you need to have a redirect or can you just put up the URL that you

own but actually direct it to another site? Sunny: They have to resolve, ultimately, to the same domain. Caller: Can somebody briefly explain the wildcard test? Perry: Howie, do you want to take that one? Howie: Let say, for example, you have a generic category that has lots and lots of

specifics in it. For example, you are selling books; you are Amazon.com or you are a music CD site or you are selling ring tones.

You know people are going to be searching not just for generic whatever,

they are going to searching for their favorite authors or their favorite music or their favorite genre.

Let’s say if you are Amazon or eBay, instead of having, “We sell John

Grisham books,” and having John Grisham as a specific keyword, you can then take all the typical things in that category that people would be likely to type. You use a wildcard so that whatever they type it appears as they type it in the headline or in one of the display lines of your ad.

Perry: Okay, you’re talking about keyword insertion. Howie: Is that what the question as about? Perry: Dynamic keyword insertion, there’s a dynamic keyword insertion

instruction in the Potash.htm handout and it will show you how to insert keywords into your ads.

What he is talking about, Howie, is what I call the wildcard technique

which is where you go to Google, and instead of typing “radio publicity,” you type in “radio publicity” followed by some garbage characters.

Can you explain to him why that works and how you do it? Howie: You mean to determine whose ad has a higher click-through rate or has

more relevance? If you type in some garbage characters after the search term, you will find

that generally that will eliminate most of paid listings. My understanding is that the ones that remain have achieved a certain

threshold of click-through rates for the sensical part of what you typed. That is a good way to figure out whose ads are actually converting.

Perry: Right, so if you type in “radio publicity,” you see about 15 ads or

something. If you type in “radio publicity” and a bunch of numbers or


something and then hit Search in Google, you only get six; at least I get six.

Those are the best six out of the 15 that are getting the highest click-

through rates. You immediately know which ads are most popular in this category. It is a very powerful, clever technique.

Howie: If you just do a regular search on the word “publicity,” there are 39 ads.

But if you put “publicity 87631BDG,” or something like that, only one ad shows up. That tells you that ad is by far better than the other 39.

Perry: Yeah, I just did it and I got two. I got “Publicity for Dummies 101” and

“Publicity: Beginners Guide to Publicity, BeginnersGuide.com.” Those are the two highest click-through rate ads for publicity out of 39.

Now, if that isn’t powerful information, I don’t know what is. Howie: What’s interesting is the Publicity for Dummies, which comes up as the

best one, when you do the whole search for the 39, they are in position six. That’s a smart advertiser.

Perry: Yep. I’m telling you what, there’s a ton of incredibly powerful information

that you can glean from the marketplace here and, for most people, it goes right over their heads.

Caller: On that note, somewhere I read that when you find ads like that to copy

them. Bryan: Well, you can learn from them. Perry: I’m not saying specifically that you copy them or not copy them. I don’t

really advocate directly copying in general because I don’t really believe it is smart to go head to head, apples to apples with competition.

I think you always want to differentiate. The question you want to ask

yourself is, “Okay, the fact that this ad is popular tells me what about people who search on this?”

Then you say, “How can I say something different and unique that is also

sufficiently popular that my ad also shows up when somebody does a wildcard technique?”

I think you can gauge your own success as an advertiser using the

wildcard technique. Caller: Are you finished with the last question and can you take another one

now? Perry: Yeah, sure.


Caller: I wonder if you can have any advice for people who’ve got lower number impressions for the search? We’ve got a geographically targeted campaign for web design and we’ve got web design as a search phrase with quotes, without quotes and with brackets.

With brackets over a week we got 217 impressions, 14 click-throughs,

which is 6.4%. Without brackets we got 13 clicks out of 664 impressions which is 1.9%. With quotes we’ve got 6 clicks out of 408 impressions, which is 1.4%.

So we got much lower numbers of impressions. Perry: So in other words, in general, you have a small amount of traffic basically.

Is that what you are saying? Caller: This is a geographically targeted thing. Perry: Does anybody want to jump in on this one? I would say that every keyword, every market online, offline, whichever

way you want to slice it, has a finite size, okay? It is like an oil well. You can get so much out of it and that is all you can get.

Now you can still increase your click-through rates; you can still improve

your sales funnel and you can constantly improve things, but it is a finite size.

Sometimes, what you end up doing is getting your sales process to work

with Google, and then you find that there is ten times more traffic that you can get from email newsletters that other people are sending to your market.

Or there is ten times as much traffic offline as online. You get your

message right online and then you take it offline. You really brainstorm all the possible ways that you can go get traffic. You don’t think of Google as being the center of the universe. Most of the time it is really not, anyway.

Does that help? Caller: I’ve got a small question about the split testing. Perry: Okay. Caller: About split testing when you’ve got small numbers. Perry: You can only test as fast as the traffic comes. Like if the

www.SplitTester.com tool says you are not sure which is the winner, you are just not sure yet.

I always have a few students in every class where they are dealing with

relatively small amounts of traffic and they can only test Google ads so


http://www.splittester.com/

fast; they can only test opt-in pages so fast; they can only test sales letters so fast.

By the time they get to the sales letter, they are only able to test one

every two months. You know what? That’s okay. That is the fact; that’s the way it is.

I have that situation with my marketing system for business to business

customers where that sales letter, that sales process only generates so much traffic. I can’t test any faster than I can test.

That is a reality that you have to live with and you just have to be very

smart about what you do test. This is a very common problem. It is not at all unusual.

Normally, you are getting higher dollar value transactions in those kinds

of markets too. Sunny: Can I add my two cents on that, Perry? Perry: Yes, Sunny. Sunny: That was an excellent answer and what I would say additionally is that we

all face that to some extent. The way Perry explained it, if we have ten top performing groups or keywords or whatever, or 20 or 30, all of our fringe ones would fall into that same category.

So what we do, whether it is all of us having that problem with our fringe

words, or it is you have that problem with almost all of your words, you take your best performing one that has the most traffic or the best performing two or three that have the most traffic, and notice some of the characteristics of those ads and extrapolate them and apply them to your other campaigns.

It is kind of like you are crossing your fingers and hoping, but at least it is

an educated guess because you see something that is working in the heavier traffic ones.

For instance, keyword in the title; that is something that can be applied to

the other groups as well. Does that make any sense? Caller: Yeah, I think so. Perry: I agree, and it puts even more emphasis on the fact that you’ve only got

so much traffic and, obviously, you can test Google ads a lot faster than you can test sales letters. You make sure you are using every opportunity to test a Google ad to tell you what little topics people are interested in; what areas of ideas belong in your sales letters based on the click-through rates that you got on your Google ads.


All the testing that you did on your Google ads, it tells you a relative priority of what people want to know.

Sunny: You know what might be useful, Perry, I don’t know if it would be, but

things that experienced marketers have learned that work; you’ve got Howie and Bryan and you, and you could use me too. You might make a list or a synopsis of things that we’ve learned have worked over time better in general.

Just say, “This is not a be-all or an end-all. It is not proven in your market.

It’s kind of a start list of things to try.” For instance, I’ve found that in my ad, if I start lines with the word “get” or

“use,” I mean if my title says, “Get” and the second line says, “Get,” and the third says, “Get, use, get;” Those two words, “get” and “use,” as first words in an ad line or a title, really seem to perform well in general.

I just thought maybe with your experience and Bryan and Howie’s

experience, that maybe a kind of a cheat sheet starter list might be really helpful to some people just starting out.

Perry: That is certainly why you go buy a copy writing book or something like

that. The reason copy writing books exist is because people can’t test every imaginable thing anyway. You end up going to tried and true formulas.

Now, one of the links on the handout page is the link to

www.Magazines.com where you can look at magazine headlines and magazine covers. www.Magazines.com is very cool. About any popular magazine that is on the newsstand, you can find it at www.Magazines.com.

You click on the picture of the magazine repeatedly and you eventually

get a full-screen scan of the magazine. So the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, you can go look at all the headlines and everything.

Well, I tell you, those guys have the formulas figured out. If you want copy

writing formulas for general consumers, it is hard to beat. You definitely end up relying on your swipe files and relying on copy

writing books and relying on other things that have worked for people, especially when you cannot test everything.

The fact is, you can’t anyway and nobody would ever want to. If you had

to start from scratch and test every single word in your sales letter, it would take you 500 million years before it started working. That’s ridiculous.

So, yeah, you definitely want to stand on the shoulders of giants. Get

help.


http://www.magazines.com/



When we start next week with everybody starting their one-on-one calls, you can talk to us about whatever you want to talk to us about. Undoubtedly, when I get help from people with my copy, I’m always asking them, “Well, how would you do this?”

Sometimes they give me really good ideas. Let’s wrap this up in about two more minutes. Caller: Perry, I’ve got a couple questions. This is Mike in North Carolina. Perry: Mike! Caller: Hi, how are you doing? Perry: Good, glad to have you! Caller: Likewise, thank you. The main question I have is that I just recently added

about ten countries to my campaign and noticed that the clicks jumped up a significant amount.

We’ve already made one significant sale from that. However, I want to

really track that well and I wondered if it is recommended to separate out new campaigns in the same format of the three separate campaigns for different countries or do you have a specific way you track separate countries?

Perry: Yes, I would peel and stick your countries, okay? In theory, that turns 30

groups into like 300 or 60. In reality, maybe that means you turn 30 groups into 50 or 30 groups into 40. You may not break them out in as much granular detail.

But believe me, a country or any geographic area, may be considerable

different. In general, it is a big mistake to select all countries for anything; big mistake.

So for most people selling most things, you’ve got the U.S., Canada,

U.K., and Australia. Then you’ve got this long trail of other countries that follow behind that.

Well, maybe the U.S. and Canada go together or maybe they don’t.

Maybe the U.S. and Canada go together for all your lower priority campaigns, but for your very most expensive, high-traffic keywords you separate them.

Again, the peel and stick concept is applied to your countries as well with

some degree of judgment on your part. Caller: How soon is that campaign duplicating tool going to be available? Bryan: Howie says by the end of the week.


Perry: Now remember, duplicating campaigns is easier than it sounds because

you can edit your keyword list and you can copy the entire keyword list over. Now all you’ve got to do is copy the ads.

It’s not a huge amount of work. Howie: If you go from 30 to 300, it sounds like a lot. Perry: But remember, in theory it is 30 to 300. But in reality, even out of the 30

there are only five or six that bring most of the traffic. So if you are going to do peel and stick on the countries, start with the five or six, not the 30.

You can have all the other stuff lumped into a seventh extra one. Does

that make sense? Caller: That makes sense. That leads me to a question that I’ve seen in our campaign where we’ve

limited the ads and we start seeing, when we look at the logs, all these other countries are clicking-through on these Google ads and I’m not sure how they are getting them when they are supposed to be, say, only shown in the United States. How is somebody in the U.K. getting our ads?

Perry: How do you know you are getting the U.K. visitors? Caller: We use HitsLink, so we will look at the HitsLink log and it will show where

it came from and referring Google AdWords or something like that. Then it will have a UK email address. Caller: I find that too, Perry. It doesn’t happen very often and I just figure that at

least they are English-speaking. Perry: Well, yeah, if it is not a huge problem, I wouldn’t sweat it. But if it is like a

huge amount of traffic, you might want to call Google and see if they can tell you anything.

Caller: He’s right, it’s not much. Caller: Hey, Perry? What’s the difference between the AdWords Accelerator and

AdWords Analyzer? Perry: AdWords Analyzer bases its data off of Overture. AdWords Accelerator

bases it on Google. AdWords Analyzer is more of a general tool and AdWords Accelerator is

more of a drill down into niches kind of tool. Caller: Okay, so it sounds like the Accelerator is the better one to go with?


Bryan: More of a both/and than an either/or. Perry: Again, it has to do with what you want to do. If you want a generalized

keyword tool that gives you a big picture, then AdWords Analyzer is probably what you want.

But if you are trying to do a lot of refinement, you would want AdWords

Accelerator. One of the things I like about AdWords Accelerator is you take a result and you dump it back in the top of its little funnel and you refine it.

Then you get another result and you dump it back in the funnel and you

refine it even more. Again, it is for really fine tuning niche market stuff. Those are two different things. Caller: Perry, this is Joe in Singapore again. You peel and stick and you move

the keywords to a new campaign. Is there any way to transfer the data over to the new campaign?

Perry: No, unfortunately there is not. Caller: Okay, thanks. Caller: What do you think about bidding in the first position for a brand new

keyword to increase the click-through rate and then dropping your bid price?

Perry: Well, if you can afford to do that, you should. What you are buying is data.

If your traffic comes twice as fast, you get smart twice as fast. That might be worth spending four times as much money.

Caller: Then when you drop your bid price, you end up in position four with the

high click-through rate? You should end up paying a lot less for quite a while, don’t you think?

Perry: It tends to help. It doesn’t always work that way, but it generally tends to. Caller: Okay, thanks. Perry: Okay, last question then we are going to let everybody get on with their

day. Caller: Hey, Perry, as far as trackers go, there has been a couple that you

mentioned. HyperTracker was one and the other one that was mentioned. Do you have any recommendations there?

Perry: Well, HyperTracker is good for just a basic, rudimentary split testing tool

that does the job. It’s very simple, but it has some nice little features that make it easy to use.


I’m going to mute you guys out and then we are going to be done

anyway. Okay, the other tools like HitsLink, those are much more sophisticated

and you should buy your tools in relation to how sophisticated you are. I think if you are not doing any testing at all, then you should start out by

testing little, simple things. If you are already a sophisticated tester, then you could go on and use Taguchi and be a sophisticated guy.

But you’ve got to judge your own ability to take this in bite-size steps

because I don’t think you should try to bite off an elephant here. You’ve really got to do things in relation to your skill level.

Howie and Bryan, do you have any last comments before we bail? Bryan: Nothing from me. Howie: Nope, I’m ready to digest all this. Perry: Okay, you guys, it’s been great. We are here to support you. We

appreciate you hanging in there with us. You will be getting updates from Jeremy as to your exact call-in times.

He’s got a huge maze to figure out how to slot everybody. Be patient. If you’ve got any questions, email [email protected] and we’ll take care of you.

You guys have a great day. Callers: Thank you very much.


mailto:[email protected]

Documents

how to kick start adwords