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By Andrew Goodman, 7/25/2005
(Page 4 of 4)
Note to McDonald’s
In any case, big brand advertisers with deep pockets now
have more latitude to run thematic ads to keep people informed
of their main “talking points,” important in the
long-run war of position. Those who aren’t running on
a pure direct-marketing model (and many big offline advertisers
aren’t) will soon start checking out the untapped keyword
inventory. Subway.com still garners the #1 organic search
position for the single-word query “salads,” for
example. What, besides not having thought of it, is stopping
McDonald’s from bidding on that keyword so they can
remind people that they now have a wide range of salads? If
it’s the problem of being disabled, problem solved.
McD’s can bid 74 cents (or whatever it takes) to be
guaranteed a spot near the top of the page. They could enjoy
a long-term brand lift specifically on their “we now
have salads” talking point, at a cost significantly
lower than producing and airing TV commercials. As a byproduct
of such a campaign, they could also throw in some kind of
direct-marketing component so that actual responses could
be measured, and compared on a cost-per-acquisition basis
with other lead generation media (or even across different
keywords, so they know what a fair bid is, more or less).
Note to Ford
And what if you’re selling cars that are branded as
safer (if you’re Volvo or some other manufacturer that
can legitimately claim superior performance on crash tests)?
What are you doing not tapping into the massive numbers of
people who see a TV show about crash tests, then turn around
and get up and type “crash test” into Google?
It’ll cost pennies a click, and you can possibly induce
those people to give you their contact info and have you send
them a glossy brochure replete with safety info about the
Volvo. What did the click cost? Pennies! If every 100th clicker
requests more information, then what did the lead cost? Five
or ten dollars? No matter what you try in this game, you might
come up against unexpected CTR-killers. Advertising for “fast
car” might overlap with pop-culture queries about the
lyrics to a Tracy Chapman song. Advertising related to crash
tests might overlap with pop-culture queries about the band
Crash Test Dummies. In the past, that meant you’d better
be handy with phrase matching and negative matches, too. (-dummies,
anyone?) But with the new quality-based minimums, inattention
to certain details will merely be costly (not fatal to your
keywords’ active status).
Takeaway
Take away the following: don’t be so arrogant that
you believe everyone will want what you have, no matter what
they’re typing into Google, no matter what urgent needs
might have led them to type in a particular search phrase.
Look for loopholes as the exception and potential goldmines,
of course… but overall, focus on doing well with your
bread-and-butter keywords, and keep searching for other high-CTR
keywords. Be precise, specific, and granular. Test and re-test
your ads based on the kinds of messages your best customers
might like to read. Fire your worst customers. And don’t
target non-prospects.
Joe, my stats professor, taught me an important lesson: sometimes
the most important insights come from the simplest reports.
If God speaks to you in Crosstabs, online customers are surely
speaking to you in CTR’s.
Andrew Goodman is Editor-at-Large of Traffick.com, Principal
and Founder of Page
Zero Media, and author of Winning
Results with Google AdWords (McGraw-Hill, 2005).
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