Why Not Put Your Dormant Little Website to Work, Part II

Last week we talked about the possibilities of utilizing AdWords to get some leads flowing to your sites – without going broke.

First, let me say that there are definitely lots of ways to obtain leads while going broke! For example, you could pay up for the primary keywords (KWs) in your neck of the woods, like “Atlanta Real Estate,” and “Atlanta Homes,” and other such high volume competitive keywords.

Let’s say you use brute force (cash) and set up a very basic AdWords campaign to put you in the top three positions for these primary KWs, and you passed these clicks to your home page. For the terms above, this will cost you $3 per click through (CT) and will mow through a $200 monthly budget in 66 CTs. This will take about 1-4 hours and get 66 unfocused-curious-tire-kicking-gomers to your home page. This will in effect, net you a $200 donation to Google, thank you very little. By the time you land a client, you could of paid cash and just bought someone a house and given it to them. Still not a sale.

So AdWords is indeed lame then, right? It can be, that’s for sure! But let’s look at how to set up a really effictive AdWord campaign.

Here’s what you do: you set up an AdWords account consisting of many campaigns. Each individual campaign using as many as possible, very specific long-tail KWs. Each group of KWs points to their own matching Ad, and each Ad points to its own matching landing page.

Note: forget the content network, turn it off, people searching for paint are not looking to buy a house. Some may be but this is called untargeted traffic and we’re not interested.

Again, you create a campaign consisting of, lets say 100 long tail KWs, one AD and one landing page. Then you build 50 of these. If you were selling products, this could be 50 products. For real estate, I chose neighborhoods.

By the way, this scenario will also net you an account with a very good Quality Score and will enable you to compete with the brute force advertisers for pennies per CT. Because while AdWords is an auction with Ad placement going to the highest bidder, it’s also graded on a curve called Quality Score.

Design your entire AdWords campaign for Quality Score

According to Google, here’s the definition of Quality Score:
The AdWords system calculates a ‘Quality Score’ for each of your keywords. It looks at a variety of factors to measure how relevant your keyword is to your ad text and to a user’s search query. A keyword’s Quality Score updates frequently and is closely related to its performance. In general, a high Quality Score means that your keyword will trigger ads in a higher position and at a lower cost-per-click (CPC

This means that the higher your Quality Score, the less it costs you to compete to display your Ad. For example, if you have a Quality Score of ten and your competition has a Quality Score of  two, then “Atlanta Real Estate” costs you $0.16 per CT and costs your competition $3 per CT. Pretty cool, eh? For now, we are still ignoring those primary KWs, but this is a nice side effect. Instead, we are after all the traffic generated from the hundreds of long tail KWs. This traffic is Super Targeted.

Let’s take a deeper look using my site as an example, since it’s working and it utilizes all of the above. Take a look at my site: Atlanta Real Estate Info. Look at that column of neighborhoods down the right side. Guess what those are….landing pages. Click one, check its URL, its Title Tag, the Text on the page; they are all matching or closely related.

Now you can’t immediately see this, but there are 50 unique AdWords Ads that point to each of these 50 landing pages. The text on each Ad also matches the respective landing page text. And finally, driving each Ad is a list of 20-100 long tail KWs that also have similar and matching KWs and phrases.

So Google looks at this and says, the KWs match the Ads, which matches the URLs, which matches the Title Tags, which matches the on-page content. Quality Score HIGH.

Besides all this matching content, the other big factor that goes into Quality Score is the predictability of your business to Google. Google wants the performance of Adword campaigns to be predictable for them. So if you have 2000 long tail KWs spread across 50 campaigns, it’s much better than just one KW in one campaign. Think of it like this, as a manufacturer would you rather do business with one reseller carrying just one of your products, or would you rather do business with 50 vendors carrying all your products?

How does this work in the real world?

Let’s analyze one of my specific campaigns.

• Campaign: Chattahoochee River Club
• 37 Keywords used in this campaign: Chattahoochee River Club, Chattahoochee River Club Homes, Chattahoochee River Club Georgia, etc.,etc.
• Keyword match set to broad match, Content Network OFF.
• Google Ad reads: See All Homes in Chattahoochee River Club, (see picture of Ad)
• Landing page Title: Atlanta Real Estate | Chattahoochee River Club
• Landing Page URL: www.AtlantaRealEstateInfo/ChattahoocheeRiverClub.php
• Text on Landing Page: follows the theme, take a look- Chattahoochee River Club.

If a Google searcher makes it all the way to this landing page, there’s a high probability they are wanting to search homes, so they click the big button in the middle.

Now, you repeat this entire scenario for as many neighborhoods, counties, or towns as you want to, the more the better.

Here are some metrics from my account in the last thirty days:

• Average CPC $0.20
• Clicks 541     (541 highly targeted visitors)
• Registered Leads 121
• Impressions 83,377
• Click Through Rate (CTR) 0.65%
• Total Cost $110
• I sometimes get some of the big primary KWs for $0.18 per CT

In the future, I would like to double my Registered Leads and I have some ideas about that. I would also like my CTR to roughly double as well and this comes down to writing more effective/compelling Ads.

In summary, design your next AdWord campaign with the sole purpose of achieving a high Quality Score. This will cause you to do everything right and you will wake your site up and start getting some leads!

Thoughts?