Make’em click!
I originally thought that the main thing you need to worry about with pay per click (PPC) advertising is how to understand which keywords and creative copies bring you quality visitors that eventually convert. You could then keep these quality keywords and even increase maximum bids for them, and dump all the others that do not perform. That’s why we’ve even created our own conversion tracking software.
My latest experience with Google AdWords shows that I was wrong wrong wrong. As it turns out the main problem that you face when starting your first PPC campaign is how to make people click on your adverts at all. That’s right, you don’t have to worry about keywords performance or conversion rates, because you need to make these damn people click at first! No click = no love = no point to measure conversion.
Not so broad
The next thing that came as a surprise to me were “broad matches”. This is a term that Google uses to describe keywords that you can specify in you ad campaign:
If you include general keyword or keyword phrases — such as tennis shoes — in your keyword list, your ads will appear when a user’s query contains tennis and shoes, in any order, and possibly along with other terms. Your ads will also automatically show for expanded matches, including plurals and relevant variations.
The description above is from Google’s own FAQ. What they don’t tell you is that broad matches do not always work as, well.. broad matches. For example, if I will enter “conversion tracking” in the list of keywords, my ad will appear when someone is searching for “conversion tracking”, but nothing is displayed when someone is searching for “conversion tracking software”!
I couldn’t believe this at first, I thought I was doing something wrong. But it appears that this is a normal Google’s behavior. There is an Ads Diagnostic Tool that shows to you the reason why your ad is not displayed for some keywords, so for “conversion tracking software” I got the following response:
Ad not shown. Reason: The clickthrough rate (CTR) for this keyword does not meet the minimum performance requirement.
Yeah, well, whatever (more information about this at webmasterworld.com).
The funny thing is — I can always specify “conversion tracking software” as a new keyword for my ad group and then my ad would display for this keywords too. So what the hell are they talking about with this message about low clickthrough rate for this keyword? I don’t get it.
No redirects allowed on Overture
Finally, as it turns out in Overture redirects are not allowed as target URLs for the ads. They don’t have a specific rule that says this, but they insist that the “Back” button in the visitor’s browser should take the visitor back to the search results after he or she clicks on my ad. Apparently redirect URLs break the “Back” button? Why Google accepts them then?
Anyway, all of my 20 or so new listing on Overture got rejected almost immediately after submission with a remark that the URL is bad. So it seems that it is not possible to use split tests with Overture at all, since redirect URL is a requirement with any split test. Oh well…
Much later: I was wrong. Overture does accept redirect URLs. Read details in the comments.