Business Spotlight: WordWatch.com

February 1, 2012 0 Comments

Creating and managing an effective Google Adwords account can be a daunting task. There are so many items to think about when trying to maximize your spend, while increasing your conversions. Once of the hardest task for most websites that run adwords campaigns is how to effectively manage bids. Google Adwords allows advertisers to change their keyword bids to adjust their position in search results. Their is a science to creating a bid strategy that will not only work, but not break the bank as well. One of the top issues that we hear from adwords advertisers is that they are paying too much for clicks and cannot effectively manage all of their keyword bids manually. This is where WordWatch.com comes in.

Word Watch is an Adwords management software company that gives the bidding power back to the advertisers. They have developed a great automated bidding software that will look at many variables with your adwords account and bid each keyword effectively based on maximizing clicks or maximizing conversions. Their software is easy to use, but is powerful enough to handle large amounts of keywords, while keeping in line with any budget restraints.

Word Watch not only effectively manages your Adwords cost, but provides you with missed opportunities. The software will monitor search query reports in order to add advantageous keywords to your campaigns. This takes the burden off of the advertiser to continually add new keywords to make sure they are targeting the correct customers. Not only will Word Watch add new and quality keywords, but they will also turn bad keywords into negatives. This will make sure that you are not spending money on keywords that will not convert on your site. Although Word Watch is feature packed and easy to use, they provide the software for a very competitive fee based on different plans.

Word Watch is so confident with their software and its ability that they offer a free plan. You can have their software manage one campaign within one Google Adwords account that contains the maximum number of keywords. This plan would be great for companies that want to test out marketing their brand on Google. All of the other plans that Word Watch offers come with one month free. They do this to allow time for their software to make the necessary changes and review the account to make sure it is maximizing your clicks or conversions based on the dedicated budget. This time frame will provide great insight for any advertiser on how Word Watch’s software will perform. If you are in need to a Google Adwords boost, then check out WordWatch.com for great Adwords management software.

Getting Around the Google Adwords Editor Fatal Posting Error

October 21, 2010 6 Comments

With the new version of Google adwords editor 8.0.1 out, there has been some talk of people with large accounts getting a fatal error or timing out when posting changes. These changes usually consist of a large amount of text ads being changed or added. Sometimes the posts go through, but most of the time the fatal error occurs. At this time, Google is saying that they are not aware of a problem. Since I and many of my closet friends work with large retailers Google accounts, we see this problem everyday. There is one solution that can work until Google admits and fixes the fatal error issue. The fix is a relatively simple one, but will increase the amount of time it takes to post large amounts of changes or additions.

Below are the step that will allow you to change the way Adwords Editor posts changes to an account. This method will actually decrease the batch size of the changes, which tends to assist with getting everything through without seeing the lovely fatal error.

1.) Find the adwords_editor.exe file (this is usually located in C:\Program Files\Google\Google AdWords Editor\ in “My Computer”)

2.) Right-click on the EXE file to create a shortcut

3.) Place the shortcut on your desktop or wherever you would like to access the file

4.) Right-click on the shortcut and select Properties

5.) After the dialog box opens, add ” -updatebatchsize 500″ at the end. This will go in after the quotes around the file path without the quotes we placed above. Make sure there is a space before the hyphen.

6.) Click Apply, then Ok.

7.) Enjoy no longer seeing the dreaded fatal error

In step 5, you can change the “500″ to any number between 100 and 1000. The smaller the batch size, the easier it is on Editor, but the longer it takes to post all changes. You can change it when you wish to find the optimal number without causing the fatal error to happen. This is an easy change to make and will now cause adwords editor to post in batch sizes that is specific within the target. Make sure that you launch adwords with the shortcut you created or it will not work properly. Please let us know if you have any issues with it, but since we made the change, we have not seen the fatal error or had a session time out.

Adwords Coupon Contest

July 16, 2010 0 Comments

I have some genuine Adwords coupons for new accounts and was thinking about a contest for bloggers to receive a coupon or two. Each coupon is worth $100 and only for new Adwords accounts. If you are looking for a new way to advertise and don’t currently do it via Adwords, then maybe this contest is for you.

Here are the Rules…..

Have a blog
Create a blog post about why you started your website or blog. I want some honest answers here about why you really started your blog or website. If I see a simple answer of making money, then you will not be selected for the prizes.
Link to this post and mention the contest
You can have multiple blog post, but they have to be on different blogs. Each blog post is an entry.
Come back here and post a comment with a link to your post. This is how you will be counted. I don’t want to deal with trackbacks, so just come back and post a comment with a link to your contest post.
Contest Ends on Friday, July 23rd.

On Sunday, July 25th, I will be picking 3 blog posts at random to be the winners, so three $100 adwords coupon winners. You will be contacted via the email that you left with your comment. If you do not provide a good email in your comment, then you cannot accept the prize.

I will be having more contest such as these, so if you want to know about them, then Subscribe to my blog via RSS!

This contest is pretty simple and very rewarding. I want everyone to remember why they actually started their blog/website because with all the stresses of running it, we sometimes forget why we started it in the first place.

How to Setup your Google Adwords Account

July 15, 2010 5 Comments

Paid Search is a great addition to your online marketing arsenal and should not be overlooked. Many online businesses do not look into it because of the expense, but it can be well worth the time and expense if you set up your account properly. Many small businesses that I talk to just jump into setting up their account and add outlandish keywords that will bring cost and never convert. I am going to show you the simple way to setup your account that will make it cost effective and hopefully will bring you a better click-through rate and hopefully a better conversion rate. Please make sure you have some type of analytics software installed on your site, Google Analytics will work just fine.

If you do not have a Google Adwords Account, sign up for one today!

Once you sign up for a Google Adwords account, it is time to start looking into setting it up properly and in the most effective manner. One of the worst decisions one can make is to just stick all your keywords into one campaign and ad group and see how it does. There is no way to track the results, so don’t do it. Let’s get started.

Campaign Creation

Each campaign that you setup will need daily budgets, so it is wise that you know your full budget for this program before you start creating them. You can change your daily budgets at any time if you do not have the budget numbers at this time. Setup the location of your campaign based on where you can ship your items to, so if you are in the US and can ship them all over the US, then choose this. Choose the network targeting that will best fit your needs. Google Provides a few choices between Search, Search Network, Both, and Content Network. It would probably be wise to just do both Search and Search Network because it will give you the best range. Do not setup a content campaign at this time as they are more work and usually less rewarding.

It is a good practice to create campaigns based off of the categories on your site. For example, if you run an electronics site and you have categories such as Accessories, Car Audio, Home Audio, Portable Electronics, Computers, and Photography, you should create campaigns for each of these categories. If you have a good brand name a a steady stream of traffic, then you can think about setting up a brand campaign as well. This is a campaign that only deals with your website brand name. You can also place promos in this campaign if you run them. Once you setup all the campaigns, we will move on to the Ad Groups.

Ad Group Creation

Ad Groups need to have different and compelling ads or creatives. Each ad group should be different based off of the subcategories of your site. Based off the example that we gave, your ad groups for the Car Audio campaign could be Speakers, Subwoofers, CD Players, Amplifiers, and Accessories. This will allow you to create a more targeted ad with better performing keywords. This provides you with the most control. You will need a max CPC rate for each ad group. This will be used if you do not put any CPC’s in for the keywords. Usually when creating ads for your ad groups, try to create about 3 for each ad group. This allows you to test different creatives and different call to actions. These are important things for each ad group. Once you find the best performing ad then you can pause the others if you wish.

Keyword Creation

Keywords are the most important part of your advertising. These are the words or phrases that you want to target in order to bring in traffic to your site. You do not want to be too broad, but also not so specific. The only time you want to be specific is when you have adgroups developed around specific products. Only companies that sell products that are recognizable by consumers should do this, like electronics. When creating keywords, you should have already done your research to see what keywords perform the best and what people are actually searching for. You can use the Google Keyword Tool to assist you with this. Try to pick keywords that have good traffic, but are not so popular that you will run out of money the first day of advertising. Stay away from terms like ipod, ipad, iphone, etc. If you have products for these items, then I would use different matches for these keywords.

Google allows you to create keywords with different match types. The most common is Broad. This means that if any part of your keyword ends up in a users query, then your ad could show up. Phrase match means that your keyword phrase has to be a part of the users query in order to be shown. Exact means that they user has to type in your exact keyword in order to see your ad. Broad usually receives the most traffic, Phrase next, and then exact. If you use ipod in your keyword, then I would use phrase or exact. This will minimize your costs.

For each ad group, you should create around 25-30 keywords with different variations. You can obviously create more, but you do not want to get out of hand. With a lot of keywords, it will be harder to handle the bidding and control the costs. If you take the time to really develop quality keywords, then you can see better performance in your account. The rule of thumb is quality, not quantity. There are many places that say if you have a lot of keywords, then you will get a lot of traffic. If you have quality keywords and use the correct match type, you can get the same amount of traffic with a lot less work.

These are the basics steps to setup your Google account. You may be able to find a nice coupon to setup your account and get $100 in advertising for free. These coupons are out there, but can be hard to find. We will cover tips later on how to create good creatives (ads) as well as more tips on how to create keywords that will convert. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know and we will be happy to assist.

PPC VS. SEO For New Sites

December 22, 2009 2 Comments

The debate between using SEO and PPC for your website marketing is always going to happen and probably will never subside. The main issue that some people have is that they either use PPC or SEO to drive most of their traffic. There are people on each side of the argument saying the PPC is more cost effective or SEO is. We are going to jump in here with what we feel will work for sites that are new to the internet and are just trying to figure out how to begin their long journey in finding traffic.

The issue that new sites have is that they do not have the power to get indexed into search engines easily without a few quality inbound links with quality content. Even if they do finally get indexed, it doesn’t mean that they automatically end up number one in google or the other search engines. This takes time and frankly a lot of skill to achieve. Most people think that once you achieve a good position, they have it and they can work on something else. Wrong….you have to work harder to maintain the top position once you get it.

One way that webmasters do is to start marketing their site with PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. This type of advertising is quick and easy to setup, especially in Google with their Adwords advertising platform. New sites can start getting targeted traffic within a few hours of starting an account. One of the good things about PPC is that you have the power to control where you show up in the search results in the paid advertising section. Also, most PPC platforms have good reporting tools that can quantify your results. It helps to have PPC running on a new site because you can see how your conversion rate is and where customers fall off on your site. This will help with future development of your site.

SEO is a powerful tool that can keep you getting traffic over time without recurring a click cost for every visitor. The money that is used to develop your SEO can be quantified down to cost per click, but some sites find it much less depending on how they do their SEO. Some firms keep their SEO efforts in house and others outsource it to companies. The main issue with SEO is that the results are not immediate and sometimes can take a long time to be apparent. This does not mean that you should not do it, just that you should never stop doing it. Webmaster and site owners should continually tweak and optimize their site in order to gain positions in the top search engines, thus getting more visitors. SEO is a tough task and you have to do it correctly in order to succeed. If you choose a SEO company to do it for you, please make sure they are reputable and have achieved results themselves.

While we like both methods for traffic gathering, some prefer one over the other. If you have a new site and you are looking for traffic that is targeted and will convert, it would be wise that you implement both strategies simultaneously to gain success. You can start a PPC campaign quickly along side with your SEO. Once you start getting data from your paid search campaigns, you can tweak your SEO to gain the top of the best performing keywords for your site. The main thing that you have to remember is that you need to have a good analytics package in order to quality your results. Without analytics, you will not know how well your doing and where you can improve. Our advice is plain and simple for new sites, work both SEO and PPC into your mix and you should be happy with the results.

iMark Interactive