A Few Days in Monterey
A friend came to visit last weekend so my friend and I took him down to Monterey, Ca. He’s from Spain and this was his first visit to California, let alone the states. It was a pretty action packed adventure. After heading to the Boom Boom Room in San Francisco for some live funk music, we drove down to Monterey to stay with a friend down there. She took us to a small cafe to see this crazy musician who plays the cello like a madman, Tornado Rider. Holy cow, that was crazy.
The next day, we hit up Pebble Beach and Big Sur’s Pfeiffer Beach. We actually had decent weather for January. On Monday we scored some passes to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. If you have never been, this is a must go place if you are anywhere near San Francisco visiting. It’s a great aquarium. I took over 250 photos that day – yikes! I only posted a handful of the best ones over on my Canon s95 Photo Blog.
It was a great weekend!
2 Quick Ways to Optimize AdWords
Here are two great tips for optimizing Google AdWords campaigns. Many small businesses who use AdWords also manage them on their own. Problem is, they’re usually they are too busy maintaining operations to truly dive into the world of optimizing their AdWord account, a task which can be a full time job in its own right. Unless you hire a Google AdWords Specialist, you’re on your own. So in that spirit, here are two of my favorite quick tips to optimize your AdWord campaigns: Identifying and eliminating negative keywords, and using dynamic keyword insertion in ad copy.
1) Identify and Eliminate Negative Keywords
Eliminating keywords that are NOT relevant to your product or service is one of the most basic principles to optimizing AdWord campaigns. Without paying attention to the actual search terms visitors use, you run the risk throwing money at unqualified leads.
For example, if you sell only “regular coffee,” you wouldn’t want to come up in search results when people are searching for “decaf coffee.” No, that would cost you money if anyone clicked your ads. You would need to add “decaf” as a negative keyword, likely as a broad match term.
Fortunately, Google AdWords makes it simple to view actual search terms and easily add them to your negative keywords.
- Select an Ad Group or Campaign you want to focus on.
- Click the “Keyword” tab at the top.
- Below the main chart, select “See Search Terms” (All or Selected).
- Scroll through the list to get an idea of what people are actually searching for when they click your ad. (If you don’t see many results, try expanding the date range).
- From here you can add any keywords to your negative keyword list. Note, that by default it adds them as exact matches, so you may want to add a specific keyword as a broad match term, or a phrase match.
2) Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion in the Ad Copy
Ads that mirror the actual search term tend to get much higher Click Through Rates than ads that have static ad copy, therefore you should learn to use dynamic keyword insertion in several of your ads. Dynamic keyword insertion will change the title in your ad copy to the actual search term used.
For example, say you have two ads in your ‘Bulk Coffee’ ad group; one with the title “Purchase Bulk Coffee” and the other “Wholesale Bulk Coffee.” In your keyword list you have keyword combinations, such as: “bulk coffee”, “wholesale coffee”, “purchase bulk coffee”, “buy bulk coffee.” A tightly focused group of keywords relevant to your ads, but with dynamic keyword insertion you can make the actual search terms appear in the ad title, so that if someone searches for “buy bulk coffee” the actual ad with say “Buy Bulk Coffee,” and not just “Bulk Coffee.” As a bonus, your ad title will appear in bold, because it matches the exact search term, making it more visible.
Dynamic Keyword insertion is pretty easy to use. Simply use brackets along with “Keyword:” and a default title, “{Keyword:some default title here}”. The default title inside the brackets are just in case the users search term is too long for dynamic insertion.
{Keyword:Bulk Coffee}
Between these two quick AdWords optimizing tips, you can expect more qualified leads coming to your site by eliminating negative search terms that aren’t relevant to what you are marketing. And you’ll increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) by making your ad stand out by using dynamic keyword insertion, which will lead to a better quality score and thus a lower Cost Per Click (CPC). If it’s too much consider hiring an AdWords Specialist, such as myself.
