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I got a little lazy the other day, while going through an Adwords account that I am managing, and rather than write a new ad to compete with the winner of a split-test… I paused it; and a funny thing happened… the minimum bid ticked down from 3 cents to 2.

The CTR on the winner was 21% and the loser almost 15%, so I was a little surprised that this dropped the minimum by over 30%. So, it go me thinking. Certainly the CTR is high enough to justify a low minimum bid but there have been times when the CTR has been higher than it is now and the minimum bid did not change. So, why now?

I think I figured it out. The winning ad’s copy is a paraphrase of the landing page’s headline. The ad that was paused also reiterated copy from the landing page… but that copy is in an image and appears further down on the page. I think there is something to be learned there.

Although, I have paused the split-test, this is a powerful testimony to what can be accomplished using the technique. The winning ad was put together quickly; written only to serve as the sacrificial lamb to the ad that I had painstakingly composed… or so I thought. Because of it however, we are now enjoying a fifth of the traffic to a keyphrase that when converts can produce revenue deep into the 5 digit range… and paying nearly half of what we initially bid for a click.

With the upcoming change to Google’s display URL policy on redirects, I have been rewriting my PPC ads. I have had a difficult time defeating the click-through rates of the display url: www.geocategory.com, that is re-directing to the website. I got a number of good ideas from a question I asked on Gooruze, including:

Both of these suggestion helped maintain a good quality score and .04 cent minimum bids, but in limited testing I was not able to beat the CTR of the redirected URL. I will continue to experiment with them.

But if at first you don’t succeed… try, try, again. I finally found an ad that has showed some promise and early in the test is defeating the www.geocategory.com set up… and it uses the original domain, which is even better. What I did was add the geography and the telephone number to the 3rd line of the ad. I tried to make it look like an in-column yellow page ad. The 3rd line reads: Fillintheblank County… (123)456-7890. I was surprised that Google allowed telephone numbers in their ads but I now understand why they do… they are good for click-thru rates! Google will allow 3 consecutive periods but not 4… between the geography and the number.

I recently read a well-written article by Search Engine Guide, which outlined the ways one can use the geo-targeting features of Google Adwords. My problem with this article and the other ones on the subject that I have read lately, is that they are now written without the caveats that typically accompanied them a year ago. Most articles written on the subject a year ago… warned: the system is not perfect. I would go further and say… the narrower the region being targeted the more flawed the geo-targeting. Consider this search for Newark NJ in Google Trends:

These results would not give me the warm & fuzzies if I were running a campaign that was geo-targeting Newark.

This is important because the purpose of Geo-targeting is to put your ad in front of a person who is using a generic search query that has local intent. For Example, “Dentist” as opposed to “Dentist Newark NJ.” Studies have shown that half of local queries are entered without the geographic indicator. And Geo-targeting should give you a leg up in trying to capture these sales. The above Google Trends report argues otherwise.

If the IP addresses of searchers shopping online in Newark are in Oakland, NJ and Clifton, NJ; advertisers’ results are going to be adversely effected. Such campaigns would be plagued by low CTRs and/or wasted spend.

Take-Aways for when you’re targeting a small geographic region with adwords (City, County, a few towns etc.):

• Don’t rely on Geo-targeting. Use keywords that include the geography you’re targeting as well.
• Put Geo-targeted ads in a separate ad group, so that there lower CTRs don’t effect your higher performing ads.
• KNOW the addresses of the local Cable/DSL provider in the area where you are going to Geo-target. Many of the cities listed above in the Google Trends report are those where Cablevision is located; or in the case of Madison, NJ… where the IP originates for Verizon DSL customers. My IP is located in Madison, despite me being some 30-40 miles away from there. And Oakland is a small town about 50 miles to the north of Newark; but the IPs of many Cablevision customers originate from that town. The results of a local campaign could change dramatically by just adding or subtracting one of these important but sometimes very small towns.
• TEST!

Some Assumptions I Made Interpreting This Data:

1)People who most frequently use ‘Newark NJ’ as a search term, do so because
they live in or around Newark. 2) And that group would be representative of those who are shopping locally but use the generic search term.
Because we are studying this from the “reverse angle.” Google trends is showing us the location of the IP address for those who type Newark. Geo-targeting in Adwords would return results based on the IP address of a shopper who did not type in Newark. 3) Google uses the same IP tracking in Google Trends as it does in its Adwords system.

I believe those assumptions are true based on the results I’ve seen personally in the geo-targeted advertising that I’ve done, though admittedly a small sample. But the more relevant cities I saw in Google trends for the applicable geography, the higher the CTR of the advertising…. again very very small sample.

For those who are running “tight local campaigns” could you do me a favor? Please use Google Trends and search for a town or 2 in your area
and let us know if you find anything that would make you agree or disagree with what I’ve asserted in this article. Thanks!

Good Additional Reading on Geotargeting:

Geotargeting Adwords by The Merjis Blog

Geotargeting: Core To Local by Chris Silver Smith

This is the first I’ve noticed this… a link in an Adwords ad that allows you to click and a map of the businesses location will drop down… check it out.

When you click on the link it gives a nice map of the location of the business:

Pretty Cool. According to the Adwords’ Blog, to show up it must be a local business ad geo-targeted and have a high enough bid and quality score to be in the top position.

Presumably those writing and selling guides for Adwords are pretty good at it themselves, so let’s have a look and see if they care about the display url:

Notice the keyword is “Adwords guide” and each of these PPC Jedi have gotten the word Adwords into their URL.

It seems these folk think the display url is pretty important. But can it help for a local service business? Let’s go to the video tape…

This painter in Chicago used the url to get them to the top of what for them is probably their most important keyphrase. Notice that all of the advertisers in the coveted top 3 spots have the keyword in their url.

Now, let’s take a look at one of the more competitive phrases in local:

Here again, 3 out of 4 of the top results all contain the keyword in the URL. I particularly like the way it is used in the 3rd result. How the term is used in the url stem (the part after the slash). Perry Marshall uses this technique in his ad above. It allows you to maintain your url brand and still let the searcher know they will be taken to a relevant page. And reminds those setting up the ad to take a searcher to the correct page, rather than just the home page. Google does allow you to shorten the display url if it doesn’t fit. So, for instance, you could shorten:

JoeCoolPainting.com/InteriorPainting.html

to

JoeCoolPainting.com/Interiors

This should also benefit your ad’s Quality Score.

For a local site I also like to see the geographic indicator in the url. It seems to almost follow the convention of the yellow pages with an address as the last line.

Here is an example of how I would write the url for the search query: personal injury lawyer in manhattan

ManhattanLawyer.com/PersonalInjury

Of course, that domain is no longer available; but it gives you an idea of how you want to use the url when writing the 4th line of your ad.

What is a person looking for when they go to a search engine and type in:

‘Painter Paramus NJ’ ?

Because of the geographic indicator, we can probably rule out Van Gogh, Mona Lisa and that stuff. So, it is presumably a house painter. But let’s go further… can we guess their intent? Do they want their whole house painted, the interior painted or the exterior painted? I would bet a majority are looking for either an exterior painter or an interior painter. So, If I guess right, will the searcher be more likely to click on my ad? Which one would you click on if you were looking for an interior painter?

Both mention interior… but in the first ad we created the “appearance of specialization”, which could lead to the searcher having a predisposition to doing business with us. The second ad, that is trying to be everything to everyone, ends up being lost in the crowd.

Let’s try another in the uber competitive Insurance industry.

Now here again, we will not get a response from most of the searchers. If they are over 25 they’re lost… for sure. But how about those between 17-24? That group would need to be handcuffed in order to not click on this ad. And here again by targeting them specifically, we should create in the searcher a predisposition to do business with us, which would lead to higher conversions. And if we get a majority of the clicks from one group, that could push the CTR higher than getting a low number of clicks from everyone.

Testing

To use this concept for your business, just try and guess a specific intent of the search and match it with the copy. Be willing to say no to one group, so that you are the one and only choice for a subgroup.

Obviously, with all of the ads shown you will want to create a landing page specifically for that ad. Please don’t take them to the home page.

Then test the CTR with a simple split-test against the ad you’re currently using.

To test conversion, use this concept in a keyword that has essentially the same intent as another one of your keywords, i.e. Home Painter vs. House Painter, Car Insurance vs. Auto Insurance. And then compare the conversions of the 2 ad groups. You will be measuring your ability to create purchase intent on the search page. Which is pretty cool!

Small Business Commando has a very good post on using targeted copy while expanding keywords to get more traffic

***Note – This post was inspired by the work of Kerry Randall, with whom I once spent 10 minutes on the phone and was inspired. That says a lot about him, doesn’t it… and I continue to be inspired by his writing. Tragically, Kerry died in 2005 at a much too early age. His book, anachronistically titled
Win The Yellow Pages War (not an aff link), is as appropriate and inspiring for local search marketing as it is for Yellow Pages.

CopyBlogger has two awesome posts on writing headlines: 10 sure-fire headlines and later they added 7 more magnetic headlines. I would like to an 18th to the list that can be very effective for many different service businesses. And with a little spin, bloggers too.

You may not need a new…

This was made famous by AAMCO… as in… you may not need a new transmission. But it can be used effectively whenever a repair could avoid a large and unwanted purchase…

Examples:

You may not need a new roof…

You may not need a new furnace…

You may not need a new hot water heater…

Other uses may be in technology where the headline implies a hack, alternative or upgrade could avoid spending money… examples.

You may not need a new IPod…
You many not need a new computer…
You many not need to pay for a SSL Certificate…

I hope you didn’t feel like this post’s headline was overhyped. I used it to show how this headline technique could be used for bloggers as well. And I honestly feel like good copy is often undervalued. So, please read more posts on writing headlines and copy and add copyblogger to your feed if it isn’t there already.

Oh! and this technique could also make for some good copy in your PPC campaigns.

SEM Clubhouse wrote a very good post on Expanded Broad Match being Corrupt Since Aug 20th and I agree when he says “Broad Match was expanded way too much.” I will share with you 2 experiences that convince me he is right and what I plan to do about it.

A couple of weeks ago I did a search on Google that included a geographic indicator and a keyword. I used a county for the geography and to my surprise an ad that I managed and knew for sure did not target that county was returned. I got nervous, how many counties are there in the state? Is this ad coming up in every county in NJ?

No, just the one that neighbors the county targeted. That made me feel like it was calculated by Google, they could, in effect, double the amount of times the ad was served without going to far (pun intended). To be fair, this county never showed up in my analytics. But the whole thing left me feeling a little unsettled.

What I find even more convincing is the result of the query: Red House Painter -

When doing the keyword research for a local house painter earlier in the year, I found a large number of queries for ‘red house painter.’ Hmmmm…. is there a class of painters that will only paint your house red? As it turns out… no. Red House Painter is the name of a rock group and a popular search term. I certainly did not want the ad returned for this query, so I added it as a negative keyword and did one other thing…

I searched the phrase ‘Red House Painter’ in Google and found there were no Painting Contractor ads. Then I did the same search in Yahoo and found many contractors “advertising” for this term. I was left thinking how much smarter Google was in returning relevant ads. But now I find Service Magic, a contractor referral service, is appearing in the Google’s results. So, either Service Magic changed their campaign to target this search term (highly doubtful) or there was a change in Google’s algo. A change that was certainly to the detriment of Service Magic.

The 2 actions local Google advertisers should take:

1) Duplicate your most important broad match search terms using exact match or if you have the time… all of them. This will maintain your CTR and placement for these queries.

2) Put together an exhaustive list of negative keywords for broad matched terms and update it at least seasonally. Include neighboring towns and counties in which you do not want the ad to show.

What I would not do… is abandon broad matched search terms in a local campaign. There are too many variables when you add geography to the search term and I see too many very relevant queries showing up in the analytics that I would not have captured with exact match.

The other thing for you to consider is whether or not this is a “bad thing”. For those who are aware of this and are willing to work harder, you can gain an advantage on your competition.

Scaling the mountain to the coveted #1 spot on Google with PPC can be done in 2 ways; you can pay your way to the top or write your way to the top. The oversimplified formula for ranking is ($bid) x(Click-Thru Rate%), which means Google will rank an ad with a $2 bid and a 1% CTR lower than an ad with a $1 bid with a 3% CTR. So you will get more opportunities and pay less for each with a good ad.

This formula plus an estimated and undisclosed 100 other factors, will determine where your ad shows up for your keyword. The most important of these ‘other’ factors is certainly the copy. And since copy will definitely influence your click-thru rate… it counts double, easily making it the single most important component of your PPC program.

4 Rules For Writing Your Way to The Top of A Local Search on Google

1. Include keywords in the title of the ad (25 characters).

2. Write a 70 character sentence (I like sentences at the top) or 2 phrases less than 35 characters each and try and weave the keywords in logically to the copy. Consider the user first, write good copy and then see if there is a word you can change to the keyword.

3. Include the geography in the ad.

4. The copy you write in the ad is also above the fold on the landing page.

Rewrite the Keyword In Your Headline

Including the keywords in the headline is the easiest thing to do but it’s not always done. I understand that people want to get creative, but this is not the place to do it. Not in a local search anyway. The most you can really do is add an adjective like professional or award winning plus the keyword. Don’t use anything you can’t back up like best or award winning unless you can prove it and do prove it on your landing page. Google monitors such claims. The other thing you may want to do is include the geography here.

Examples of headlines I might use for a Landscaper in Danbury Connecticut for the query Landscaper in Danbury.

Danbury Landscaper or

Professional Landscaper

Very easy right? Not so fast… here is where it gets hard, not hard like calculus, hard like elbow grease. You should set up ads for each keyword a user may type in. So, if the query changes to Landscape Contractor, consider having a different ad with Landscape Contractor as the headline. It just takes some good old fashioned hard work to write the ads for each keyword and Google’s Keyword tool to make sure you are targeting the right keywords. Write separate ads for at least the most common phrases plus your geography. (You geo-targeting, in which case I would not use the geography in the copy… google will put it in for me.)

70 Characters to Motivate

Now that we have the headline, we need to write some copy for the ad, only 70 characters and so much to say. Before we get started, however, we need to check the landing page. Is there anything we can get from the landing page that would make good copy for the ad? There is… ok… good just rewrite it so that it makes sense in the PPC ad format. This is important because any copy that is in your ad should also be on your landing page… if it is not, your potential customer will not trust you or just get irritated. Either way the ad will not convert and your #1 position will be wasted.

If you have no copy on the landing page that works, re-design your website. I don’t mean to over complicate this; but if you cannot find 70 characters on your landing page that will motivate people who are in the market for your service to choose you, you need to re-write the copy on that site. No way around it. Answer these 2 questions and you’ll be fine: Why should I choose you over the competition? and What are the benefits of doing business with you?

You may consider putting geography here if not used in the title, such as ‘Serving Danbury For Over 20 Years’.

So at this point the ad might look something like this:

Professional Landscaper
Landscape Design & Construction
Serving Danbury For Over 20 Years

This ad is a little generic, so I’m not crazy about it; but I was able to logically weave in all the keywords for the query and got Landscape in twice, that will help when Google decides where to rank the ad initially. This ad is likely to be very near the top of the page right away with a competitive bid (ads cannot get placed in the top spots on the left until they are approved- will take a few days). With a good landscape construction job being worth upwards of $15, 000 you should expect to pay a couple of bucks for a click and consider it a bargain.

For ideas on writing even better ads look through the direct mail that comes to your house. Get ideas for headlines, especially from the pieces that are done professionally. Also, look through your val-pak or super coups and see if there are many advertisers from your industry. If there are that indicates that coupons work well for your industry and that an offer might work well in your ppc ad, as well.

You can put discounts in your ad, like $1oo off for new customers, as long as the offer is restated within 2 clicks of the landing page. Than your ad might look something like this:

Professional Landscaper
See Your Landscape Before You Dig
Free Computer Assisted Design

Than on the landing page you’ll want to explain that offer or have a prominent link to a coupon for that offer.

I’m not in love with this second ad but I’m not really worried too much about it. I’ll split-test one against the other and the loser will be gone in a short time anyway. I’ve warmed up to ads real quick that I wasn’t crazy about initially when they started producing double digit click thru rates.

Include Your Geography Somewhere In The Ad

Now I have one last problem with this second ad… there is no geography in it. That will hurt the ad… I need to fix it. I have run into this problem before, with only 3 lines of copy to play with… it’s bound to happen.

I’m going to fix this problem for only $8 by chuggin’ on over to godaddy.com and buying another URL. What URL I buy will depend on my service area. If I only service the city of Danbury I will purchase DanburyLandscaper.com. But if I service the whole county, I will purchase FairfieldCountyLandscaper.com. It’s not quite as good as just Danbury for this query but otherwise I would have to buy more than 60 Urls, so it’s going to have to do. There is a couple of other benefits with purchasing the county url: the ad will crank for county searches in fairfield and it will allow me to put some geography that isn’t redundant into my geo-targeted ads.

The next thing I have to do with this url is 301 redirect it to my site. This sounds complicated but I promise it isn’t. GoDaddy does the work for you. Purchase the domain, then click on Manage Domain>Forward>and you get to this screen:

Simply put the radio button on 301 moved permanently and type your url including http:// into the box.

You must 301 redirect the ad to your site or you could create problems for your site in the organic results.

If you purchased fairfieldcountylandscaper.com, make sure that at the top of the landing page it says… Serving Fairfield County or some such thing for the reasons discussed above. Also don’t be surprised if some of your keywords for the county search, a very popular query, start exceeding 20% after a little split testing.