Thursday, January 29, 2004

Building effective Google Adsense and Overture Ads - A Basic Primer.

I still occasionally search engine surf randomly now. It's a good way to find new things and I always enjoy reading the ads that show up in my search engines such as Google and Xao. I am occasionally suprised at how ineffective many of the ads in Adsense and Overture (Overture supplies the ads for Xao). So I thought a short primer on how to really write effective PPC ads is in order. There are four basic Ts as I like to call them.

  • Target
  • Tighten
  • Tantalize
  • Track

Target - This means your ad and ad copy should be narrowly focused on the term you are bidding on and on the product you are trying to sell. So a very tightly target ad on a specific term will do better than a broad ad on general term. Your bid for the specific term will probably be lower than a general term. Broad terms tend to be highly bid on Overture and so you should tighten you terms to the specific product you are selling. Tighten also mean sending users the correct section of your web site where the product is featured. I see many ads in Adsense especially which make this fatal flow. They direct the user to a general section or a category. Let's take a specific example. Keep in mind this example may change over time (especially if people take my advice). Let's search for Kyocera Digital Camera at Google. This is a specific manufacturer of type of camera. Now let's see where the ads are taking the web surfer.

In the first premier spot we have a link to Pricegrabber.com and the appropriate Kyocera brand digital cameras. This is the ONLY premium ad that actually does this. In the second premier spot we have a link Shopper.cnet.com where the first result is not a Kyocera but a Canon. In fact there are NO Kyocera cameras on the page ANYWHERE! Note that the premium spot that cnet is shelling out big dollars for cost them many thousands of dollars. These are dollars being thrown away.

The next three adword ads all resolve to digital camera sections of shopping comparison engines. These shopping comparison engines (namely Bizrate, Shopping.com and Nextag) clearly understand that have a user land on a page where they can actually find the products they are looking for is more useful for users. These shopping engines exist as many merchants have made unfortant design choices which make their sites largely unspiderable. So when selecting electronic commerce software, make sure you chose software that allows clean, clear static URLS for database driven sites. I am gonna write that again because it's so important. CLEAN STATIC LOOKING URLS that users can easily bookmark . I am gonna plug our own open source software here. Xao's e-commerce suite does just that. If anyone tells you different, ignore them - they are simply pushing their brand of software or software they resell. Tracking should also be a standard feature but I will handle that in the tracking section. Other notes to keep in mind, make sure the meta content of the page, especially the title, reflects the product you are selling.

I will handle Tighten in the next post.