Whilst the final adjustments are being made to the site, our resident PPC expert, Andy Harris from Custwin, felt it worthwhile to express some of his frustrations with using Google Adwords. Its really useful information to know so we thought it would be worth sharing it with you:
It’s well-known that Google would love advertisers to use very generic keyword phrases when setting up campaigns. Quite simply, the more people competing for obvious phrases, the easier it is to push up click prices and there’s much less potential for advertisers to prove that Google aren’t playing fair. These conspiracy theories arise due to very little transparency and advertisers have no idea whether advertisers above or below them in the results listings are paying more or less per click and the gaps between just one position can be huge in terms of click costs (contrary to the old 1p difference).
It’s also long been thought that Google discourage advertisers from using numerous variations of keyword phrases when setting up campaigns. Quite simply, if Google decide that a phrase isn’t ‘good enough’ then they’ll make it inactive, quite often as soon as you create a campaign. Suppose you want to use a phrase such as ‘SAP R/3 Logistics Execution Forum’ - now, that’s a very specific phrase that has no meaning to most people but to certain groups of people, that means something and as an advertiser I’d want an advert to appear when someone types that phrase. However, Google, as always, plays God and decides to disable that phrase as soon as it’s created, saying that it doesn’t match its quality criteria.
Disabling of such niche phrases is more common when creating huge campaigns with thousands of phrases in them. Admittedly, many of those phrases may not be typed much, if ever, but as an advertiser, if I want my advert to be visible when someone types such phrases, then surely that’s my prerogative?! I’ve seen several cases where owners of companies want to have their name set up in Google but the system rejects them saying that their name isn’t of high enough quality - total insanity when it should be the advertiser that has choice. What appears to happen when creating a large campaign is that, after some time, the Google system will effectively say "hello, someone’s creating lots of niche phrases that won’t get typed much, and therefore don’t have much competition so we have to offer them for cheap costs per click". As a cynic that works with Adwords on a daily basis I believe the system then says: "I know, let’s penalise them now and make them think that they have to use more generic phrases so we can make more money from those".
Some would say: "But have you got enough monthly budget and click cost allowance set up for the phrases?". The answer to that is: Yes. Anyone can run this experiment - try creating a campaign that initially has a huge budget allowance and huge cost per click allowance - fill it with very niche phrases, thousands of them, and you’ll see that after a time of setting up, the Google system starts to disallow phrases. If budget is ok then the only blocking factor would be the ‘Google quality score’, another phrase that to me means ‘Google discouraging people from using niche phrases’.
Bit by bit, Google appear to be penalising advertisers that innovate with their keyword phrases, preferring instead to push people down the route of paying for more expensive phrases. This is an extremely short-sighted approach, and is certainly something that Google would deny they’re doing. The majority of businesses in the world are small businesses who don’t have deep pockets and those that innovate can gain huge amounts of business from Google for little cost. It’s not uncommon for clients to gain 1,000 visitors to a website in a month for just 100 investment in clicks but unfortunately, it seems Google are trying to stop this happening, which creates a smaller number of keyword phrases that can effectively be bid on and makes Google unattractive to small businesses. In time, small businesses will start dropping out of using Google Adwords and will start using other systems that (hopefully) will have a fairer system.
Having said all this, Google is still a good system but it’s far too dominant. It has huge holes in the way that it works (or doesn’t), which, as a PPC expert, I see much more easily than advertisers who are just getting to grips with PPC. My view is that it’s time that Google had a more open dialogue with people in the industry and started to develop a sytem that will continue to be mutually successful for the longer term instead of going down the path of pushing up click prices and sending small advertisers elsewhere. I have no doubts in my mind that if they carry on this path, there will be lots of reports about Google’s reduced market share within the next couple of years.
Ok - I have uploaded all the images for Van Gogh to www.artrevision.com. Check out the gallery page here.
P.S. I love this painting the most (see below - it’s called ‘Starry Night Over The Rhone’). If I was to order a painting from Yolande this would be it!
- Fred
Thanks Andy. Some great points.
I’ll go through them one by one:
1) I’ve chosen Van Gogh as our artist of choice. For a couple of reasons: firstly, he is the most popular searched artist for reproductions according to our keyword analysis; and secondly, Yolande has just painted a cracking reproduction of a Van Gogh Classic: Cafe Terrace at Night (left).
2) I’ve sent a list of painting through to you in an excel document and at the same time sent images of each of those painting through to Fred to add to the site. You were quite right to say visitors would want to see the artwork they are looking for so I’ll make sure Fred adds this feature to the Art Revision site. Obviously with a nice call to action :-)
Famous Work by Van Gogh:
The Potato Eaters
Bedroom in Arles
Cafe Terrace at Night
The Red Vineyard
The Night Caf
The Yellow House
Falling Autumn Leaves
L’alle des Alyscamps
Still Life: Vase with Twelve Sunflowers
Starry Night Over the Rhone
The Starry Night
Irises
Portrait de l’artiste sans barbe
The Church at Auvers
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
Self Portrait With Straw Hat
Other work by Van Gogh:
A Wheatfield with Cypresses
Branches l’ammandier en fleur
Case Ad Auvers
Entrance to the Public Garden in Arles
First Steps
Fishing Boats On The Beach, Saintes-Maries-De-La-Mer
Garden with Flowers
La Siesta
Les Alyscamps
Long Grass with Butterflies
Oat Field with Mountains
Oleanders
Olive Orchard
Poppies
Postman Roulin
Roses
Seascape at Saintes-Maries
Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers
The Harvest, Arles
The Mulberry Tree
The Olive Trees
Trees And Undergrowth
Un Pecheur au Printemps
3) I can understand your point about appearing to have done nothing between 2002 and 2006. I think we were trying to give the impression that we had been going for a while. What I’ve done is sneakily changed the date :-)
4) I’ll need to get Fred to check the pricing of delivery when he gets back form Holiday and we will add that straight away.
5) We solely want to target the South african market first due to export complications. We’ll then spread our wings later. I understand that we’ll get less impressions and clicks but I’d rather live with that for now. The campaign will therefore need to be in Rand rather than pounds.
6) I like the idea of a quick boost of traffic but I’d rather iron out the changes you’ve suggested first as conversion of that traffic is vital in any pay per click campaign.
Let me know if you need anything else
- Mike
From Andy:
OK, now I’ve looked at the site, I need something more from you before I can get cracking.
What I need is a complete list of paintings for one of the artists (or as complete as possible). Ideally, this artist would also have had replicas made that are highly visible on the site (e.g. Gauguin) so that people (in the PPC demo) can see that paintings have already been done for that artist. I got a bit confused on the site because I felt as if I could click on an artists name (e.g. Gauguin) and I’d see pictures of all their art (originals) - then I could decide whether I wanted a reproduction. Yes, I’d likely know about the picture I wanted reproduced but if someone typed in a phrase such as ‘Gauguin reproduction’ then they’d want to see all the pictures available to choose from.
At the very least, even if they’re not listed on the site, I still need a list of paintings by one artist so that I can set up the PPC accordingly. It WOULD be much stronger though if those original paintings were portrayed on the site - especially if I could link directly into the page for each artist and from that page there would be calls to action. “Ah, I can see lots of Degas pictures here - now, how do I get a reproduction and what does it cost? Ah, I click on this nice call to action here”.
Slight issue - all examples are 2006 except that Renoir - I know it’s there to depict the first painting but the 5 year gap then implies that nothing was done inbetween, which implies that if someone wanted a painting reproduction that there could be delays from order to gaining their picture. If it was me, I’d take that Renoir off the main portfolio page so that it then shouts out “look how many have been produced in the past year!”. This gives people more reason to buy.
Delivery - nice bit of text but it would also be wise to give an indication of pricing of delivery (although it’s small compared to the picture costs), plus some reassurance about what happens if a picture got damaged in transit (i.e. there needs to be some sort of insurance) - potential clients may not buy apicture if they think that thousands would be down the drain if it got damaged en route and there was no insurance in place.
PPC focus - ok, I’m going to focus on one artist, and you’ve got a choice:
1. Target the campaign just within S.A. at 100 for the month - this would result in slower impressions and clicks but the “S.A” currency etc. on the site would convert better.
2. Target the campaign internationally at 100 for the month - lots of impressions and clicks and almost the fastest way to build traffic. Cons are that people may be put off by the S.A emphasis of the site.
3. Target the campaign within S.A. or internationally at a higher rate but only run it for a week - i.e. we allow 400 for the month but pause the campaign after a week, once 100 has been spent (if it has). This allows you to get results faster because Google thinks you’ll keep the campaign up all month when you won’t. This way the second posting to Heavy Chef could be about a week after the initial one.
Another question - shall I put ‘from’ pricing in the adverts in PPC and would I use Rand or ? Think about the focus of the campaign (local or international). My feeling is that if you took option 3 above and focused on S.A. only at an allowance of 400 for the month, you MAY have had enough clicks in a week to go through 100. This would allow us to put Rand in the advert which achieves two goals:
1.Local people see local currency
2. People see indicative pricing so hopefully won’t click if they immediately see the minimum R2500 is out of their price range (so saving click costs).
From a “PPC testing” perspective, this would make most sense - keep it local and very targeted to then judge what you’ve gained from the clicks, learn by the experience and then adapt the campaign further. We know for sure that if you stick with Rand on the adverts but make it international there’ll be confusion because people won’t know that Rand converts downwards like that - therefore many people wouldn’t click if they see figures such as R2500, thinking it’d translate to thousands in English etc. That’s a tricky one!
What would likely work best is to learn by the first PPC push, expand the campaign to all artists (in S.A. only) and then consider the next steps.
Plenty for you to feed back on there Mike - especially choosing an artist and coming up with their list of paintings I can optimise for. Over to you!
Two months after starting the "Pay per click for web profitablity" category on the blog we finally get around to actually doing the pay per click campaign:-)
The site (www.artrevision.com for those that have forgotten) sells hand painted replicas of famous works of art. You choose the artist and their work and the highly talented Yolande will paint the replica to order.
For the first step of the campaign I took a very similar approach to the way I would go about an SEO campaign: Research the keywords. In fact Nicola (my lovely wife) was at a loose end this afternoon so I asked her to do it.
When we had all the data my first instinct was to look at it from an SEO point of view. Where were the gaps we could exploit and what were the popular or niche words that people searched, yet had little competition online.
But with PPC it is slightly different. Yes you need to know what people are searching for and what the competition is like, but the added factor of "cost per click" is vital. At this point I thought it best to send the results through to Andy (from UK PPC firm Custwin - www.custwin.co.uk) and see where he takes it. So now I’m ready to sit and learn whilst I watch a master at work. (No pressure there Andy :-)
Initially we’ve set a small budget of 100 (R1400) for the month and will focus on maybe one particular artist. The low budget is always an approach we recommend with most of our web marketing. Start small and build up - watch what works and what doesn’t. That way you can adjust anything from the site to the text to the images to the ads, etc, etc - until a good return on investment is reached, then you can invest more knowing the return will be worthwhile. Remember: pay per click is about creating profitable websites, not going bust quickly.
After much squeezing in hours and working overtime, we have finally managed to get our house in order at World Wide Creative. As they say, a gardeners garden is always untended, we have been slightly ashamed by our own yard.
So, with a flourish and much clinking of glasses, we give you the new World Wide Creative website.
Please take a look and give us your feedback. I will refrain from any leading comments or motivation until weve heard from you, venerable readers. The only thing that I will venture (before someone writes an essay about how cool Flash is) is that the site is deliberately without any Flash or image effects. Were huge fans of Flash, but decided that the site required clean, non-distracted lines.
Mike is going to go through it with a magnifying glass, so the site is still officially Beta and we are still awaiting on some more testimonials from our clients, so some of the comments on the portfolio are dummy text. Other than that, please let us know if you spot any typos or glitches.
- Fred
Mike and I are back to work again this week. Its Friday and Im knackered already. I had big plans to do a massive blast at the ArtRevision.com site Pay-per-click campaign, but after a week of normal work / slog and a bunch of eager emails from my venerable business partner, Im calling it a day. In fact, Im calling it 10 days.
10 days is the amount of time I have decided to spend in the little seaside village of Hermanus, around 1 hr outside of Cape Town. While I’m away, Mike and Andy are going to get the ball rolling, and since were really serious about making ArtRevision.com a success, well post regular updates on the progress of online sales.
The good news is: it can only get better. We have officially got a standing start. Not one painting has been sold from the site since it was made live 2 months ago.
Hey, Amazon started with only one book sold. From humble beginnings…
- Fred
Mike
Fred
Paul
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