Dear Peronel

Welcome to Ad-Lib, the newsletter for people who want to learn more about marketing on the Internet.

This month – controlling your Google Ad campaign costs; SEO – is it a black art or a science?

And finally, more statistics about how we use the internet.

Regards

AdWords Advice - Don’t Spend More Than the Click is Worth

Before you set up your Google Ad campaign, you need to decide on a budget for your initial three months. Less time than this will not really provide reliable statistics on which to base long term advertising decisions.

Work out your average order value and how much you are prepared to spend to win one order.

What do you expect your conversion rate to be i.e. how many clicks (visitors to your website) do you need to get one order? When you know that, you can calculate the maximum cost per click you can pay and still make a profit.

If you’ve only just started selling online, you may have to estimate (or guess) some of these figures. But as you build up data on the number of visitors to your website and the value of sales from your site, your estimates will become more and more reliable.

Until then, you need to establish an acceptable budget that you are willing to risk on the test, and keep a regular eye on your campaign costs.

There are three variables for a successful campaign

Daily budget
Maximum cost per click
Relevancy of the copy in your ad and relevancy of the content on the website page where your visitor lands (these affect costs because Google measures and rewards your performance by relevancy – the more relevant, the higher the ad position for a given cost)

Top Tip - limit your cost per click, not your daily budget. You can always put the campaign on hold or change the daily budget later if you are spending too fast. But if your daily budget is set too low, Google will limit how often it shows your Ads.

Internet Marketing Tips

SEO is NOT a black art and if your SEO expert tries to suggest it is – get rid of them! Find another one who is willing to explain in plain English what they are doing and why.

So if it's not a black art, what is SEO (or search engine optimisation to give its full name)?

SEO is the term used to describe a set of techniques for preparing a website to increase its chances of being ranked near the top of the standard search results when a search is undertaken using Google or other search engines. The process will include

Modifying the design, content and use of HTML tags as well as the actual content of your site
Establishing a network of links with other sites in related business areas
Online PR, e.g. writing articles, blogging, contributing to online forums. These activities will also tend to increase the number of links to your site

And all done in accordance with the latest search engine scoring formulae.

At the moment, Google gives about 20% weighting to the first point above, and about 80% weighting to the second and third combined.

What makes it difficult to do well is that successful SEO is not about one big thing done well, but many, many small things done (reasonably) well. And it takes time – if you do everything right, it could still take 6 months to see your website moving up to the first Google search results page.

On top of that, Google changes its search engine scoring formulae from time to time, so it isn’t a one time job either.

But it isn’t a black art! It can all be explained in simple, understandable English

Is there any particular aspect of SEO that has really got you baffled? If you let me know what it is, I’ll cover the most popular topic in one of my next newsletters.

Did you know?

44% of all adult users have added information to the internet in some form.

26% have rated a person, product or service online
8m users have created a blog
58% of users had read a blog in 2004. (This was up from 27% of users in 2003)

77% of UK consumers use information from blogs and customer reviews to influence their purchasing decisions

Do you give customers the opportunity to comment or to rate your service on your website? Perhaps you could ask users to rate your FAQs to find out which are most useful?