Google Ad Planner and Publisher Center

Google provides a tool to help you examine the content network over at:

•   https://www.google.com/adplanner/planning

It allows you to get data about all of their partner sites for ad placements:

They also make it easy to find sites with the right demographics of exactly who you're targeting:

Recently, Google announced that they now allow you, as the publisher, to enter your data to uncover sites that meet your specific needs.  It makes the tool more accurate.  Read more about it here:

• http://groups.google.com/group/inside-adwords/browse_thread/thread/a3b6273dba137f93/91f8bc173504e92d?show_docid=91f8bc173504e92d&pli=1 

5 Major AdWords Mistakes

You often hear a lot about how you should do AdWords for maximum results.  However, you often don't hear as much from the perspective of what you shouldn't do.  

That's why today we're going to cover 5 major Adwords mistakes:

1.  Having too many keywords without zeroing-in on your most important ones first.  You see, every keyword has its own meaning.  The person who types in "AdWords Marketing" into Google may have a better understanding of it than the person who misspells it and types in "AdWord Marketing."  The only difference is an "s."  Both phrases indicate the same thing, but only one spells the name of the service the right way.  The user who gets it right has proven some type of understanding.  He or she may be more savvy than the one misspells it.

Do you then see why adding thousands of keywords might be a problem?  When you have tons of keywords, it's easy to overlook small differences between your keywords.

Instead, you can identify your top 5, 10 or few dozen most important keywords.  Then, spend time focusing on getting the most from them -- from optimized ads, landing pages, and more.

 

2.  Not working on boosting click-thru-rates.  You should be constantly working to provide more relevant ads that attract the right attention and get clicked on.  Don't just have one ad or a couple of generic ads that are never improved.  Split test your ads to find what works and what doesn't

3.  Ignoring quality score.  Low quality scores send your costs-per-click soaring.  High quality scores save you a bundle and allow you to dominate.  Continually work on boosting click-thru-rates, create relevant ads, tight ad groups, and on-target landing pages.

4.  Not organizing your keywords into small tight ad groups.  It can be tempting just to throw all of your keywords into one massive ad group even when you know it's harmful.  However, the right structure alone can make the difference between a winning or losing campaign.  Work to isolate your best keywords and have very small ad groups, even 1 per keyword.

5.  Not tracking or monitoring your campaign.  AdWords makes it so easy to track how your keywords, ads, and campaigns are doing.  It can be 100% trackable and accountable advertising.  The only catch is that you've got to take a few minutes to install the conversion and analytics tracking code.  But, once you do, you get invaluable data that can make and save you a fortune.

Tracking Phone Calls.

There are some occasions when the goal of your website is to get folks to call you.  When this happens, you don't know where they came from.

How are you supposed to track this kind of action?

First, you should consider collecting contact information as a lead online.  When you have their address, name, phone number, email address, then you can follow-up to increase your chances of getting the sale.  A live person doesn't have to do all of the selling.

Of course, this may not always be your approach.  Here's what you can do instead:

The easiest way is to set the page where your phone number is as a goal in Google Analytics.  If a visitor makes it to your contact page, then you set this action as a goal. You may even create an "Order page" where the phone number isn't revealed, until visitors get there.

This may then be far from accurate.  However, it gives you an idea of how many visitors are making it to this step.  If your call volume is then relatively low (it's not coming from tons of different sources), you can then compare it to the number of people making it to your contact page.

For more exact numbers, you can track your phone calls yourself.  There are several ways to do this:

• Ask where the customer found you.  This method is not perfect because the customer may forget or they don't know exactly. Having a list to choose from is better (though possibly still inaccurate).
• Tell the visitor to ask for "John" or "Susan" when they call or to give a coupon code.  The person's name or coupon code then corresponds to the traffic source.  For this to work, you would need to create a new contact page for each traffic source.
• Get a new phone number or extension just for AdWords traffic.  Again, you'd need a new contact page just for AdWords or each ad group.

Finally, there are paid services that help you track your phone response.  Check-out an article that reviews two such services at:

• http://searchenginewatch.com/3632778 

There are plenty of other services if you look on Google as well.  

Also, see a service that is supposed to integrate with Analytics:

• http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/02/two-cool-integrations-telephone-leads.html