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…

Creating the report

Start with running the report and saving the report data:

• In your Adwords account, choose Reporting, then Reports from the drop-down menu.
• At the top, choose Create a New Report
• Under Report Type, choose Geographic Performance
• Under Settings,
  • Set Level of Detail to Account
  • The View (Unit of Time) setting is fixed to Daily. I would prefer to use the Summary option here, but it is not available for Geographic Reports. Oh well, we can do the aggregation ourselves with Excel or Calc…
  • Choose a Date Range that gives you sufficient data (I’d recommend to select a couple of months of data, maybe even more)

  

• Under Advanced Settings, click Add or Remove Columns, then check choose the following columns:
  • under Attributes: I’d recommend to select just Country/Territory, unless you’re doing local ads.
  • under Performance Statistics, choose Impressions, Clicks and Cost
  • under Conversion Columns, choose Conversions (1-per-click), or if you are tracking your sales and sign ups separately (like I do), then choose the Sales Conv and Sign-up Conv fields instead.

  

• Click “Create Report” at the bottom and wait for it to complete.
• Open the report, then at the top left choose Export Report and click “.csv (for Excel)

  

We now have the raw Geographic Performance data saved on our computer. Let’s open it in Excel or Calc to massage it into something useful.

• Now open the saved CSV file in either Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Note that Adwords report are called CSV (as in COMMA Separated Values), but are actually TAB separated. So make sure you choose Tab as the delimiter when importing.
• (At this point you may want to Save the report in your spreadsheet’s native format, .XSL for Excel or .ODS for Calc.)
• Delete the top 3 rows (REPORT, ACCOUNT and DATE RANGE) and the bottom row (Totals) from the sheet.
• I also like to:
  • Make the header row bold so that it stands out more
  • Rename some of the column headers to something shorter (e.g. Country, Sales, Sign Ups).

This should give you a sheet that looks like this:

Aggregating the data per country using a Pivot Table

As you can see, the Geographic Performance Report gives us performance data per country per day, not very useful. To get a useful summary per country, we need to aggregate the data by country using a Pivot Table (or as OpenOffice Calc calls it, the Data Pilot). Here’s how to do that:

• Select the entire sheet by hitting Ctrl-A (or Cmd-A for us Maccies).
• In Excel, choose Data / PivotTable Report. (or in Calc, use Data / DataPilot / Start).
  
  (the following steps may differ depending on your version of Excel or Calc, but the main thing to get right is the Layout)

• As the destination of the pivot table, choose New Sheet (in Calc, this is under More / Results to).
• For the Layout of the pivot table, drag the Country field to the Row box and drag the Impressions, Clicks, Costs and Conversions fields to the Data box.
• Make sure the Data box now says “Sum of …” for all fields. Double click each field to change it if necessary. (For some reason my Mac Excel defaults to “Count of …”.)
• Leave the Column box empty.

Like so:

After generating, this will result in the following pivot table:

• We selected multiple data fields and by default these appear vertically arranged. However, we want to be able to sort on each of these fields, so we prefer to have them as separate columns. To make that happen, just drag the header of the Data column one cell to the right and drop it on the cell that says Total (in Calc that cell is empty).

  

  And presto, we have an aggregated performance report by Country, with nice totals for Impressions, Clicks, Costs, Number of Sales (and in my case, Number of Sign Ups):

  

Analyzing the data

Now the fun begins. Let’s see where we are making money and, more importantly, where we are losing money.

• First sort the table on the Cost column. This may already provide some eye-openers. For instance, I saw Mexico appearing as the fourth country from the top.
• Now let’s create a column that is a rough estimate of our earnings in each country. Just call it Revenue or something like that. In the first data cell of that column, use a simple formula ito fill it with the Number of Sales times your average sales value (e.g. “=E5*60″). Copy that formula down the entire column (just click in the cell and drag its bottom right corner down).
• Create a 2nd new column called “Margin” and use another formula to fill it with the value of the Revenue column minus the Cost value (for me, that became “=G5-D5″). Again, copy it down for all cells in that column. This Margin column is essential, as it shows us whether we are making money or losing money. Hint: negative values are bad
• To make the negative values stand out more, I use Conditional Formatting (Formats menu) to set the background of values < 0 to red.

The result:

Now take a close look at the countries with a red Margin box, especially the ones near the top and the ones where you are loosing a lot of money. Try sorting on this new Margin column to quickly find the biggest money wasters.

How to use this information?

As promised in the introduction, I have shown you how to turn the raw geographic data into actionable information. But what action should you take?
Should you modify your Campaign settings to remove the “bad” countries and stop advertising there? Or should you try to improve your sales process for those countries? In other words, to fix your negative margins, do you fix the Cost side or the Revenue side?

The easy way out is to remove the countries from your Campaign Settings. But before you do, try to think of the reasons you are not selling well in these countries? For example, if sales in Germany are below par, this could be because you are not offering specific local payment methods that are popular in Germany. Or maybe you need to consider translating your product and/or creating a localized “punkt de” website.

Modifying your Campaign Settings

If you do decide to stop advertising in the “red” countries, either permanently or temporarily (while you optimize your sales process), here’s how to modify your Adwords settings. In Adwords, Location settings are at the Campaign level, so you will have to modify these settings separately for each campaign in your account. But don’t worry, there’s a trick in Adwords Editor that lets you copy country settings between campaigns.

For the first campaign I like to modify the Location settings in the online Adwords interface (the bundles and the map make it a bit easier to find the countries):

• Go to the Campaigns tab in your Adwords account.
• Click the first campaign in the navigation bar on the left.
• On the right, go to the Settings tab.
• Under Locations, click the Edit link.

  

• This will open the “Select a Location” pop-up.

  

• Modify the list of locations here, removing your bad countries. Make sure to verify the list of remaining one under “Selected locations”.
• Click Save.

That’s one down. Now if you want to use the same Location settings for other campaigns, I recommend to use Adwords Editor because it lets you copy/paste the settings from one campaign to another:

• Start Adwords Editor and Get Recent Changes.
• On the right, go to the Campaigns tab.
• Select the campaign for which you already modified your Location settings in the online interface.
• Right click that campaign and from the context-menu, select Copy Campaign Targeting.

  

• Select a campaign that you wish to copy the Location settings to.
• At the bottom, to the right of Location Targeting, choose Paste.

  

• Do the same for the other campaigns that need the same targeting. No need to Copy Campaign Targeting again, just hit the Paste link for all of them.

A word of warning though: it may make sense to have different Location settings per campaign. Considering the targeting of your campaigns and products and decide which countries you want to advertise to in each one. If necessary, re-run the above steps to generate a campaign specific Geographic Performance report.

Your results?

Here’s what happened to my Adwords account after I performed the above steps:
Costs dropped, conversion rates increased…

How did it work out for you? Did you discover locations where you were losing money? What happened to your daily costs after modifying your Location Settings?
I would love to hear about your results, just post below.

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.

Book Database

Microsite: www.bookdatabase.com

Music Database

Microsite: www.musicdatabase.com

DVD Database

Microsite: www.dvd-database.com

Obviously, I still need to work on optimizing these pages for conversions.
But for now, I am quite happy with my improved CTRs.

Message and Destination Page

Quoting from my earlier post about remarketing:

You are targeting people who have already visited your site at least once, you can assume that they already know what your product is about.
Your message should be focussed on getting them back to your site.

This is what I tried first, the direct approach. An image ad with a special $10 discount offer, linking straight to the shop, with the coupon applied:

This resulted in some sales, but not many.
I began to wonder whether this approach was too direct. Are these people ready to buy? I know they visited my site, but maybe their visit was short. Many of them didn’t even download the trial edition yet. So hitting them with an invitation to Buy Now could be too bold, or at least too early.

Interestingly, the ads resulted in only a couple of normal conversions, but many “View-through conversions” (Adwords terminology for “conversions that happened within 30 days after a user saw, but did not click, a display ad”). It looks like the image ads *were* helping to remind visitors to return to my site. And not only that, they were now signing up for the free trial after all.

So maybe a simple reminder of our existence is enough. As a quick test I added my regular Content Network image ads to my remarketing ad groups, linking them to the regular Content Network landing page:

This resulted in higher CTRs and more conversions, both regular and view-through.
Maybe for our stuff I should use remarketing purely as a way to stay top-of-mind, to remind visitors of our product, to reinforce our brand and to create credibility.

At the moment I am testing this “reminder approach”, using an image ad that just states what our product does (“Catalog your comics”), a tag line, our product name and a “Try it Free” button:

Targeting, or: Who to cookie?

Up until today I have been cookying all visitors, separating them into 5 remarketing lists, one for each product. All visitors to my Comic Collector product page get added to the comic collector list, anyone who visits the Movie Collector home gets added to the movie collector list, etc…

After visiting our site, you immediately start seeing our banners. This includes all members of the Collectorz.com team. We are getting our own ads everywhere. Sometimes three on one page, in three different formats.
But that’s not the worst: existing customers are seeing the banners too. This was instantly visible after I emailed all Music Collector customers about our version 9.1 update. The next day I saw a huge jump in the number of impressions of my Music Collector remarketing ad group.

The solution (I hope): cookie more selectively. Today I have added some PHP code to my site that includes the cookying script only for first time visitors, on their first page view. That should improve the targeting of the remarketing lists.

Campaign structure and settings

When I started out two weeks ago, I added the new remarketing ad groups to my existing Content Network campaign. I figured that remarketing was just another way to target the Content Network and thus the same campaign settings would do fine.
Now I am not so sure, for two reasons:

• Site exclusions: In my regular Content Network campaign, I am continuously adding campaign-level site exclusions. Sites that are not targeted enough and/or don’t perform well. But with remarketing, you are targeting specific visitors, regardless of the site they are on. Your remarketing list controls who sees your ads. If you cookie the right people, the targeting is always okay. In other words, you don’t need or want to exclude sites. But if your remarketing ad groups are in the same Content Network campaign, all site exclusions will apply to those ad groups as well. Not a good idea.
• Bidding type: I am currently using CPA bidding for my Content Network campaign. It works well for me, as it lets me control how much I spend per sign up. However, CPA bidding only counts regular conversions, not view-through conversions. But my remarketing ads seems to mainly generate view-through conversions. The result: Adwords gives you less impressions, because it “thinks” the ads are not converting. My guess is that good old CPC bidding may work better.

A separate campaign for remarketing ad groups, with its own settings, seems to be better after all. Changing that today.

Overall, I am happy with my new remarketing toy. Of course, I will keep trying to improve results and will keep reporting em here

Here’s an update on our experience selling iPhone apps.

Sales

I was expecting to sell just enough of them to my existing customers, so that we could cover the costs of development. Then after that maybe get some positive effects from the cool looking screenshots on our website, convert a couple more visitors into buying our stuff.

But overall, sales are higher than I expected, much higher in fact. Here’s a weekly sales graph:

I’ll keep the absolute sales number to myself
But for each of the apps you can see a high sales peak when we announced it to existing customers of the respective Windows software. For the movie, book and music apps, there was a second, smaller bump later, when we updated our Mac software with the necessary iPhone export features. And for each of the apps, those first peaks more than covered the development costs. Which was a nice surprise of course.

But what I am even happier with, is the fact that sales are still strong. After the launch peaks, sales have dropped to a nice steady level. The iPhone apps are now generating a considerable amount of extra monthly profits. Enough in fact to make it worthwhile to invest more development time.

It’s hard to tell whether the availability of iPhone companion apps is actually convincing more new visitors into choosing our software over that of our competitors (hi Max!). Partly because of the inability to track iPhone sales. More about that in the next paragraph.
But my idea is that it gives our website an more “up to date” feel. Even if you don’t own an iPhone, you may be impressed by the fact that our company can do this kind of stuff

Tracking

As you know, I love tracking everything. And in this regard, selling iPhone apps is a nightmare.
Apple gives me nothing to work with, I don’t even get instant sales notifications. I have to login to the horrible iTunes Connect system to download my sales stats manually. Initially I did this every day, downloading the CSV reports, importing them in Google Docs, summing the counts to get a nice graph per app. But this was so much hassle that I am now doing that per week only.

But what’s even worse: Apple doesn’t give me any customer information. Just overall sales numbers per day/week/month and per region. So I have no idea who purchased my apps. And I have no way to link iPhone sales to existing customer data.

This means I can’t follow up by email with tips or news about updates. And it makes it impossible to send targeted, segmented email campaigns. E.g. for a new campaign to sell the Clz Movies app, I am forced to just email all Movie Collector users again. I have no way to exclude the ones that already purchased my iPhone app. That just sucks.

Marketing

Two of my favorite ways to sell stuff are Google Adwords, Discount Coupons and Upselling during checkout. But for selling iPhone apps, I’m out of luck on all three.

Adwords lets me bid on terms containing the word “iphone”, like “iphone dvd organizer”, but I cannot use the word iPhone in my ad because of trademark violations. This makes it hard to write high CTR ad copy.
(I read somewhere that if you contact Apple they may give you permission to use their trademarked words. I haven’t looked into this yet.)

Apple’s App Store does not have a discount coupon system. Which is a shame, cause I would love to do temporary promotions for my iPhone apps to specific segments of my customer base. Of course I can temporarily lower the price of my apps, but then everybody gets the lower price. Could be a fun experiment too, but I’d prefer to use coupons. Just gives me more control.

iPhone apps can only be purchased through the App Store on the iPhone or iPod touch itself or through iTunes. It is not possible to sell them yourself, in your own online shop. IMO this is one of the reasons of the success of iPhone apps: having a simple one-stop-shop for all iPhone software, just enter your iTunes password to buy stuff.

However, it also means that I cannot bundle the iPhone apps with my regular software. I mean, how cool would it be to if I could just offer a “Movie Collector plus Clz Movies” bundle offer in my own shop? Or what about having the Clz Movies app as an upsell on my Upsell page. A $10 iPhone companion app would be the perfect upsell…
I am doing the best I can to make all my customers and new visitors aware of the mobile apps, but if they want them, they need to make a separate purchase in the App Store.
Why not allow me to sell some kind of vouchers that my customers can then use to download the iPhone apps? How hard can it be?

Customer Feedback

In general, our users love the iPhone apps. We already have many favorable reviews in the App Store. And we received some great suggestions and feature requests. We are implementing most of those in the upcoming 1.1 updates.
Not all though… some users would like to see the iPhone apps grow into full iPhone editions of our Windows/Mac software, including editing features. But that’s not where I want to take these apps, at least not at the moment. They have been designed as mobile viewer apps, as companion apps for the Windows editions. Adding editing capabilities would complicate everything (both code and UI) and I don’t expect any extra sales from it.

We did get some complaints about the $9.99 price tag. A lot of iPhone apps are cheap, ranging from $4.99 for popular games like Peggle, to $0.99 for small gadgets, to free gimmicky apps.
However, judging from the sales, $9.99 seems to be a good price. Maybe we would sell a couple more if the price was, say, $4.99. But I am sure that we would be making a lot less money

Finally, an interesting effect I am seeing is that users of other mobile devices (Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android, etc…) are quite upset with us doing iPhone apps only. Some of them really feel discriminated and accuse of of being Apple zealots. We have seen weird discussions on our forum, with Blackberry users bashing the iPhone’s features, bringing up sales numbers of mobile devices, ultimately demanding that we create Blackberry apps too, because there’s more Blackberry devices around than iPhones…
I tried explaining that the App Store has sold more software than all other mobile devices together and therefore it makes more sense to create iPhone apps. But of course, that didn’t help much

What’s next?

So will we ever create similar apps for Blackberry or Android? Windows Mobile maybe? Mmm, don’t think so. I don’t think the extra development costs will ever be earned back. And what’s more important, we do already offer an alternative solution for other mobile device with our Movie Collector Connect web application. Connect editions for books, music, games and comics are in the works.

I’d rather invest more time in improving the iPhone apps, try to sell some more of those. Which is what we are doing now. We are working on 1.1 updates for all five apps, improving the user interface and performance, adding some more fields and a couple of missing features.

“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.

Product

Let’s say you are launching a completely new type of product, a smart piece of software that solves a problem that is not being solved by any other program. Then yes, you will need to describe the software in terms of benefits. Explaining which problem it solves, describing the benefits of using the software and why it is so great to have that particular problem solved.

But for most of us, the software we sell is not that unique. You probably have several competitors who make the same type of program. Examples: Text editors, FTP clients, file managers, image editors, etc…
You may even be up against the big guys, creating your own email client, MP3 player or file compression software.

In that case, there is less need to describe the benefits of using the software (if at all), especially if you can assume that most of your visitors are aware of the competing products (which of course also depends on your audience and your traffic sources).
If your average visitor knows about the other programs, you want to push the features that set you apart (because of course your software is better). If you are competing against one or more well-known competitors in your market, you can go as far as creating a feature comparison table between your program and those alternatives.

Target Audience

If your audience is tech-savvy, then selling in terms of features can work better too. These visitors don’t need to be told about the benefits, they already know them or can easily deduct them from the features list.

And then there’s the ultimate tech-savvy audience: developers.
Are you creating developer tools? Then an honest and to-the-point feature list may be the best way to sell your software. These guys may even be allergic to benefit-style bullets

Computer-savvy / internet-savvy users are also more likely to be aware of alternatives and your competitors. They have probably done several Google searches already, found several options and are now visiting your site to determine how well you compare.

Traffic Sources

Which automatically brings us to the third factor: the sources of your traffic. Where do your visitors come from?

If they arrive at your website after a laser focused Google search, clicking on your Google ad, then you can safely assume that they know exactly what they want and why they want it. They don’t need to have the benefits explained to them. And Google has probably given them a nice list of your competitors too.
So for that type of visitors, focus on explaining why your features make your product the right tool for the job.

On the other hand, if you have a lot of traffic that is less targeted (e.g. from Google’s Content Network, from banner ads, organic search engine listings) then you may have some benefit-explaining to do.

For example, let’s say an ad for my DVD cataloging software shows up on IMDb through the Content Network. IMDb’s visitors are interested in movies, so they are somewhat targeted. But they may have never considered cataloging their DVDs on their computer.
So if those visitors click my ad and arrive on my Movie Collector product page, I need to explain to them why they would need (or at least want) to create a personal DVD database. E.g. to prevent duplicate purchases, to make sure they don’t loose sight of loaned DVDs.
And I can’t suffice with telling them that my software automatically downloads all DVD details and cover images (which is the main feature). Instead I will need to push the benefit of being able to catalog your entire DVD collection in just a few hours, without typing.

Now the above two traffic sources are two extremes. In practice, it isn’t this clear-cut.

Looking at keyword-driven search engine traffic, visitor types are usually different depending on the keyword.
Some keywords bring highly targeted visitors that need feature lists. Other keywords brings visitors that are still in an early phase of their search and you may draw them in by telling them about the benefits of your solution.

Let’s take a look at a Movie Collector example again. Consider two searchers, one searching Google for “dvd database software”, the other typing “movie collection” into the search box. I use Adwords to bid on both keywords, with separate ads of course. Now these visitors are two completely different kinds of animals.

If someone searches for “dvd database software” and hits my site, do I need to bother him with the benefits of having his DVDs cataloged in a database? Of course not, he knows that he wants and why he wants it. He just needs to know that my product is the best software to do the job. A feature list will do just that.

A “movie collection” visitor is different. He probably owns a lot of movies, collects them even, but he has not yet realized that cataloging his collection would solve his problem. In fact, he may not be aware that he has a “problem” yet. So let’s tell him about his problems first, then present the solution with all its benefits

Sell features or sell benefits?

Now what should we do, sell features or sell benefits?

Easy: just do both.

Create two landing pages for each product. One explaining the benefits of your solution, one clearly listing its features. Then send your traffic to one or the other based on the traffic source and the keyword.

Not all traffic can be funneled to the ideal page, but your Adwords traffic can.
That is, if you have your Content Network and Search Network nicely separated into different campaigns and if you have your keywords grouped into focused ad groups with their own landing pages. But of course you have…

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

Of course, I clicked the little question mark thingies for help.
Here’s the description of both Status values:

Pending review
We haven’t yet verified that your ad follows all of our advertising policies. Your ad is eligible to run on Google search pages but your ad won’t run on our search partners or on content network placements until we review and approve it.

Under review
When your ad is “Under review,” it’s not running anywhere. Additional investigation is required before we’re able to approve or disapprove this ad.

Ah, that clears it up then….

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

The bad…

The number of sales are down. Not good. Maybe moving the download/buy panel lower on the page wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Profits are down too, but interestingly enough not by as much as the number of sales. Interesting.

The good…

The Average First Purchase Value is up. Which explains the relatively low drop in profits.
Not sure why though, maybe because the new buy boxes explain the difference between the bundles and the scanners better, so that more people opt for a more expensive package?

The number of sign ups for the free trial are up too. That’s great.
Why? Maybe because the new look and the handsome bald guy top-left lowered the bounce rate? (I see no direct evidence of that in my website stats though).
Or because of the clear bold red “Click here for FREE trial” link under the main screenshot?

It is worrying that the increased number of sign-ups does not seem to translate into sales. At least, not within 7 days.
(On average, our customers buy within two days after their visit, though I am seeing slower conversions lately. Maybe the financial crisis is causing this?)

So… what to do?

Overall, it seems that the lower number of sales is killing the results of the B version now. So let’s try to get those up by making the buy boxes more “in-your-face”.

Today I started a new A/B test where B has the main “call for action” boxes on the top right again ( A is still the old design). The rest of the new look is kept as is, including the design of the download/buy boxes themselves.
I am sad that the testimonials at the top right had to go. I liked those there…

Anyway, here’s the new B design. Waddaya think, will this one beat the old layout?

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

First, here a couple of things I really like about the new UI:

• Graphs on each page: Makes it a lot easier to spot trends in clicks, impressions, CTRs, etc…
• Navigation bar on the left: Quicker navigation between campaigns and ad groups
• In place editing: edit bids, keywords, ad group names etc… without going to a different page (and back)
• New “See Search Terms” feature: This gives you Search Query information straight from the Keywords tab. Great for finding negative keywords.
• New “Networks” Tab shows “Automatic placements” for the Content Network. Remember my post about Keyword Targeting vs Placement Targeting for the Content Network? I mentioned that one of the annoyances of Keyword Targeting was that you had to run Placement Reports to find out where your ads are actually being shown. Not anymore. You can now find this information directly within your ad group, on the Networks tab. You can select sites right there and choose “Exclude”. Great!

Of course, I also had some annoyances:

• Missing Next/Previous links: In the “old” UI I always use the the little Next/Previous links to navigate from one ad group to the next. The nice thing is that these follow the order you had your ads in at the Campaign page. These links are gone now. True, you can now use the nav bar on the left, but strangely enough the ad groups are always ordered by name there…
• Less usable on lo-res screens: I am doing most of my Adwords work on my little MacBook which has a 1280 x 800 screen resolution. The new UI causes more scrolling, even some horizontal scrolling here and there. It’s a little better when I had the nav panel on the left, but still not ideal.
• Missing Edit Keywords box: The new UI doesn’t seem to have the Edit Keywords box that lets you edit your list directly in a simple text editor box. I am always using this to copy / paste my entire list into external keyword tools and back. I am really going to miss that one.
• Settings not remembered: In several places, the UI doesn’t seem to remember my settings, like sort orders, graph settings, etc… I am sure this will be fixed before the public launch though.

At the moment, I find myself switching back to the old UI to do particular tasks. But as soon as the new UI goes live, I won’t be able to. I guess we will just have to hope that the above annoyances will be fixed before then.

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.

Freeware

First, you probably don’t want visitors looking for free stuff. Of course, if your software is great, you can probably convince some of em to buy, but in general it isn’t worth paying money for that kind of visitors. So here’s my list of anti-freeloader negatives:

free
freeware
gratis
kostenlos
gratuit
“public domain”
“open source”

Cracks

Then, there’s another type of “bad” visitors: people looking for cracked or pirated software. You definitely don’t want to pay for their clicks, as your chances of converting to sales are next to nothing. Here’s how I prevent my ads from being shown to pirates:

crack
cracks
cracked
crackz
key
key gen
keygen
keygens
key gens
key generator
key gens
keygenz
“registration key”
“license key”
pirated
pirate
patch
patches
rapidshare
rapid share
serial
serials
serialz
wares
warez
unlock
unlocking
hack
hacked
hacks
password
torrent
torrents
torrentz
bittorrent

Platforms

If you are selling Windows software only, you don’t want visits from users specifically looking for Mac software. Luckily, Mac users tend to append “mac” or “apple” to their searches when looking for software, it helps them weed out Windows apps from their results. So, let’s help them by removing our ads too. And while we’re at it, why not avoid clicks from linux nerds too. Add these as negatives to your campaigns:

mac
macintosh
apple
osx
“os x”
linux
freebsd
unix

If you sell Mac software only, then things are more difficult. Those arrogant Windows users simply refuse to add “windows” to their software searches. Adding negatives like “windows”, “win” and “microsoft” may kill a few impressions, but you will still get loads of clicks from Windows users. Clicks that cost you money but will never result in sales. The only thing you can do is make it absolutely clear from your ad that your software is Mac only, e.g. add “Mac Only” to your ad body. Our mac-only competitors at Delicious Monster even have it in their ad headline: “Fun Mac Library Software”.

Web apps and mobile apps

This is getting more popular lately, people specifically searching for a web-based or mobile solution. If you don’t have a web-based or mobile version of your software, I suggest you create one as soon as possible and then start converting those clicks. Of course, that may take “some” time
In the meantime, get rid of those hip “web two point oh” folks using these negative keywords:

online
“on line”
webbased
web based
web
internet
net
iphone
mobile
pda

Programmers

You probably know one or two personally The type of computer user who doesn’t buy software because he prefers to just program it himself. Admirable of course, but the problem with these guys is that they search Google looking for sample code, open source projects, etc… Let’s not show our ads to them. Add these as negatives:

c++
delphi
php
flash
xml
visual basic
ajax
vb
api
excel
java
code
source
template
templates
model
example
sample
xls
xsl
sheet
schema
project

Selling database apps like we do? Then you may want to add these too:

access
“ms access”
mdb
filemaker
fox
spreadsheet
mysql
dbase
sql

Too broad

If you are advertising for software, then you are probably using the words “software” and “program” in many of your keywords. Which is fine, but if you are using broad matching you run the risk of Google showing your ads on searching for just “software” or “programs”. This will only happen when you have high click through rates, but still, you want to avoid those at all costs.
But how to negate those impressions? Adding “software” as a negative keyword is not a good idea, because people using the word “software” combined with your main keywords probably are your best prospects. The trick here is to add exact match negative keywords:

[software]
[program]
[programs]
[shareware]

Competitor brands and product names

This is a tricky one. Searchers typing a competing product name into Google are typically hard to convert, as they already have a specific product or website in mind (and it’s not yours). On the other hand, these folks are more or less exactly your target audience, as they are looking for your type of product.

Now… what to do…. do we add competitor brands as negative keywords or do we advertise on them, adding them as “positive” keywords?
Well, I do both. I have added them as negative keywords to my regular campaigns and I have created a separate campaign where I specifically advertise on them.
This lets me set separate ads and separate bids (lower ones) for those keywords, keeping my regular campaigns clean.

One warning though: be careful with using competitor brand names in your ad copy. Often this is not a problem, but if the brand is trademarked and registered at Google, your ad may get disabled for trademark violations.

So there it is, my list of generic software related negative keywords. I recommend to add them at the campaign level, just open a campaign, use the link at the top for adding/editing negative keywords, then just copy/past the keywords in. If you do decide to add them at the ad level, don’t forget to add minus signs!

Finally, if you have ideas for other negative keywords specific to the software business, please post them below.

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.

But reading up on Adwords I learned that one should always have separate campaigns for Search and Content Network.

So I did exactly that. I switched off the Content Network for my campaigns and created separate campaigns targeted at just the Content Network. I created some ad groups with my main keywords (the same ones I was using on the search network).
Click through rates for my regular campaigns went way up, so that’s a good thing. But on the content targeted campaigns I got impressions (loads of em), costly clicks too, but almost no sales at all.

So I paused the campaigns and just gave up on the Content Network.

A few years later, when Google introduced site-targeting, I figured I’d try my luck again. So I manually selected some sites I thought would be targeted for our Movie Collector software. A couple of DVD review sites, online DVD shops, home theater sites, etc… This time results were a little better.
I got some sales, but the cost per conversion was way too high, mainly because I had to bid high to even show up on those sites. Conversion rates were terrible, up to the point of paying $100 to get one $40 sale. Not what I had in mind, so I gave up again.

However, a few weeks ago I listened to Perry Marshall’s “Adwords Expert Series”, a series of interviews with Adwords experts. One of these experts was Shelly Ellis, an expert on Content Targeting.

And Perry’s interview with Shelly contained some interesting eye-openers. Here’s what I learned:

• Ad groups for the Content Network should have a tightly focused theme, using only a couple of keywords (5 to 10).
• The keywords should be used to target the theme of the sites you want to be shown on. Often these are completely different from your search network keywords.
• Make sure your ad matches the audience of the sites and your landing pages matches the ad and the audience.
• You can use Placement Reports to see where your ads are showing.
• Use Site Exclusions to remove sites that have low click through rates, or worse, high click-through rates but no conversions.
• It is possible to use negative keywords to prevent being shown on “bad” sites.
• Often, the content network may result in “indirect” sales. E.g. people see your ad, maybe multiple times, and then visit your site later by searching Google on your brand name. (which may make it difficult to track results)

So I’m at it again. I have created new campaigns, one for each of our programs, each having several tight ad groups with only a few keywords.
For Movie Collector I am trying to target DVD / Blu-Ray review sites, using just “dvd, dvds, blu-ray, bluray, etc…” as keywords.
For Game Collector I am also targeting review sites, with even tighter ad groups, one per game console (wii, ps3, xbox 360, etc…).

And I am already exclusing lots of sites that are not relevant or just plain bad sites (sites offering cracked software for instance).
The problem is that for Game Collector and Comic Collector, my ads are showing up on over one thousand sites. There’s no way I can manually check em all. I will have to include or exclude them based on performance (clicks, conversion) and it may take a while before I have enough data to do that. In the meantime, I may be loosing money, but hey, information is expensive…

Or use negative keywords to try and exclude them. So far, no success with that yet. For instance, I added “themes”, “hacks” and “wallpapers” as negative keywords to my Game Collector Content campaign and my ads are still showing up on useless “PSP theme” sites.

So far, I am not making money on the content network yet.
Results are promising though. Getting millions of impressions, thousand of clicks and some sign-ups even. But for some reason, the sign-ups don’t convert to sales. At all… Which I find strange. People are interested enough to sign up for our free trial but then none of em buy (FYI: for our search network ads 25% of sign ups end up buying).

But this time, I am not giving up. I will continue to tweak and tune.

I will keep you posted about my progress.