Posts Tagged ‘Adwords’

Analyzing Adwords Geographic Performance Reports

Monday, May 24th, 2010

I was checking our Visitor stats in Analytics when I noticed that over the last 30 days, Mexico was nr. 2 in my top countries list, accounting for 8% of my visitors.

Mexico? We hardly ever sell to Mexico.

A quick peek at the Ecommerce tab confirmed that: In the same period only 0.37% of my sales came from Mexico. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if all that traffic was organic and thus free. But what if I am paying for those visitors with Adwords?

Sadly, information like that is not readily available from your Adwords interface. You will have to run a Geographic Performance report to get to the data. And even then, it takes some work to turn the data into actionable information.

But, it’s definitely worth doing. For instance, I found that for the past five months, a considerable part of my Adwords spend had been going to Mexico and a couple of other countries (Greece, Spain) that were not resulting in enough sales.

So I highly recommend that you spend some time to analyze your own Geographics Performance report. To help you do it, I have created a step-by-step tutorial on creating and analyzing this important report type. Here we go… More »

The importance of Display URLs in Adwords ads

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

adwordsA few weeks ago, I posted about my new microsites project. In short: I am creating microsites targeted at specific keyword phrases, for both SEO and PPC reasons.

Here’s some of the first effects I am seeing when using a microsite as the target URL and, more importantly, the Display URL of Google ads. More »

Adwords Remarketing – first impressions

Monday, April 12th, 2010

adwordsTwo weeks ago I started experimenting with Adwords Remarketing. As with most new advertising methods, this sure isn’t something that you can just switch on and then expect it to work. It takes time to understand it and then more time to test, tweak, test some more. Here’s an update on my findings so far.
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Selling iPhone apps

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

A couple of months ago, I posted about our first iPhone app Clz Movies. In the meantime, we have released four more: Clz Books, Clz Music, Clz Games and Clz Comics.

Clz Comics app for iPhone

Here’s an update on our experience selling iPhone apps.
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Features vs Benefits in the software world

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

You’ve probably heard this age-old piece of marketing wisdom before:

“Sell benefits, not features”

In general, this is good advice. But in the software world, it is not always the best approach. In some situations, pushing your features will sell better. I encountered a situation like that a while ago.

It all depends on your product, your target audience and your sources of website traffic.
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Pending Review or Under Review?

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Today, I created two new ads in one of my ad groups, to start a new test of two different messages.

For some reason, both got flagged for manual approval, but now look at the Status of both ads:

pending-review-vs-under-review

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New website design, take two

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Last week, I told you about the A/B split test I started, comparing my old website design vs a radical new design. I was planning to let it run for 2 weeks, unless the results after 1 week would be dramatic. Well, they are:

These are the results after 7 days (A is the old design, B is the new design):

  • Downloads: About the same
  • Sign ups: 20 percent more for design B
  • Sales: 19 percent less for design B
  • Profits: 10 percent less for design B
  • Average First Purchase Value: 10 percent higher for B

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New Adwords interface beta – first impressions

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

Google has a new interface for the Adwords system. It is still in beta and you can try it by choosing the “New Interface (beta)” link at the top in your Adwords account.

I have been using the new UI for a week now. Here’s my first impressions:
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Negative Keywords for software ads

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

Are you using negative keywords in your Google ads? You probably are. But are you taking full advantage of this powerful way to cut costs and increase click through rates? I know I sure wasn’t. Of course I was using some obvious negative keywords like: free, freeware, crack and serial. But that was all.

Lately I have been investigating the use of negative keywords (again after listening to Perry’s interview with two dudes from Epiar.com). Currently, I have hundreds of negative keywords in each campaign. How I found them is another story, maybe I will write about that later.

Today I just want to give you a list of negative keywords specific to selling software. Simply add them to all your Adwords campaigns (and Yahoo Ads for that matter) and immediately save money and increase click through rates.
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Still Struggling with the Content Network

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Let me tell you about my experience so far with Google’s Content Network.

Of course, when I started out with Adwords in 2002 I made the same mistake everyone makes: leaving the Content Network switched ON for all campaigns. Which got me lots of impressions of course, many clicks even, some (expensive) sales too.
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