Real World Computing

4. Repeat the keywords in the body of your ad. In the bookseller example, if they typed "Gordon Ramsay's book" then your ad should include all of those keywords at least once. Google AdWords allows you to put placeholders into your ad so that, for example, the title of the ad could be "[author]'s book". I wouldn't recommend this for your most popular titles, though, since it doesn't permit the sort of customisation that makes for a successful ad, and may create an impression of laziness to searchers. It's worth doing where you have thousands of low-volume products, however, as it's still better than a wholly generic ad.

Repeating the keywords has two effects: it makes the ad look more relevant to Google and therefore appear higher in the results list, and it also increases the "click-through rate" - the percentage of people who click on the ad - because it catches a potential customer's eye. They've just typed those very words and are likely to be scanning the page for them. It's often worthwhile having a unique URL for each advert or group of ads, which could be nothing more than a specific landing page or an entirely different URL from the main site. Google is happy for you to do this if you've set up redirection properly, and it makes it more likely a user will click on the ad with the added benefit of repeating the keywords again and thus raising the ad into a higher position.

5. Last, and perhaps most important, test, test and test again. You can get your advertising campaign broadly right by following these basic tips, but it won't be effective until you refine it. You should make use of Google Analytics, which is a free service that provides a whole host of data about your visitors. A small fragment of JavaScript is placed in each page on the website so Analytics is able to track and store information about your visitors and their behaviour. It can be hooked up with your payment pages to allow AdWords to tell you what percentage of the visitors who clicked on an ad went on to pay.

AdWords itself has a number of features to help you optimise your ads. The most powerful technique is known as "split testing", which is where you create a variation of an existing ad and then track how that performs against the original. You can set up AdWords to present each ad an equal number of times and to then tell you what the click-through rate is for each, along with the cost per conversion. My advice is to test one thing at a time. For example, you might duplicate an existing ad and change just one thing about it: the title, a word or two in the body, or the link URL. Then let it run for just long enough - exactly how long depends on whether your business has a weekly cycle but, in any case, there must be enough click-throughs for the data to become meaningful. If the new ad performs better than the old one, dump the original and create a new split-test by duplicating the new one and making another change. Repeat ad infinitum (if you'll excuse the pun).

There are two gotchas that I want to warn you about. First, it isn't necessarily best to be in the top spot in the listings. You may find that the percentage of visitors who actually buy will increase when your ad appears in position three or four rather than one. This is because people who are simply browsing rather than buying will choose the top two or three ads to view but won't often buy. If someone is going to buy, they'll often check half-a-dozen possibles to make sure they're getting value. The traffic to your site will go down, but the profits will go up if you get a higher proportion of buyers, and your advertising costs reduce.

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