Here’s a quick brain dump of some of my Advanced Adwords Tips.
I’ll be writing a separate post for each to flesh them out in detail.
I hope they help!

1. Fail Fast – One out of every ten business ideas succeeds.  The trick to having more success then is to try more ideas.  Which means you need to fail the ones that aren’t working quickly so that you can find something that works.
2. Always Be Testing – Believe no-one, even your own previous theories.  What worked for someone else may or may not work for you.  It could be that you implemented it differently from how they did, or that the market is different, or that the vertical is different.  It could even be that Google’s algorithm has changed so what worked previously may not work for you again.
3. Build The Perfect Search Campaign – This consists of exact match keywords.  Exact match keywords are what people typed into the line in the search engine (unless it is a search partner, which may use a different search query than the user typed in).  Phrase and broad keywords are sets of search terms that people type into the line.  The stats for phrase and broad keywords are therefore averages of lots of different search terms.  To get maximum visibility, use exact match.  To get more exact match keywords to add to your account, perform keyword research, or use the search query report and look at what search terms people used when your phrase and broad keywords were triggered.
4. Improve Your Impression Share – If everything else stays the same and you double your impression share, then you have doubled your traffic and hopefully your revenues and profit too.  The best bit is that your impression share typically increases if you increase your CTR (without increasing your bid prices), and/or if you create a more targeted campaign.  This means it is a virtuous circle whereby you get higher clicks per 100 impressions (the definition of a higher CTR), which Google rewards with a lower CPC (and higher Profit Margin), and then Google rewards us with a higher impression share and therefore even more traffic.
5. Consider Using Modified Broad instead of Phrase and Broad – Modified Broad is more targeted than broad since it does not pull in synonyms, but is less restrictive than phrase since you do not have to guess the order of the words in the keyword.  To make life simpler, consider using only exact match and modified broad.  Exact match keywords are your goal, with modified broad as your net to catch more exact match keywords.  A good way of using modified broad and exact match is to split them into two separate campaigns.  Then put negatives of the exact match keywords into the modified broad campaign.  This will force the exact match traffic into the exact match campaign.  If you had a phrase campaign too then this methodology gets confusing and messy.
6. Divide and Conquer – Using exact match keywords allows you to divide your broad and phrase match sets of keywords into individual segments.  Each exact match keyword (search term) has a different cost.  Having them all grouped under a phrase or broad match hides the individual data so you cannot see or optimise each search term.  In the same way, consider dividing an exact match keyword by IP address (e.g. [payday loans] showing throughout the US, could be divided into 51 different state campaigns each showing [payday loans] but with a state targeted ad creative.  This will show you the price and traffic volumes of [payday loans] in different locations).
7. Consider Splitting Google Search and Search Partners Traffic – Yes there will be an overlap, but you might find most of your Google Search traffic heads towards your Google Search campaign and you have effectively divided your Google Search and Search Partners traffic.  Another benefit to this technique is that you can use the Search Query Report for the Google Search campaign and be 100% sure that each of the search terms identified are actual queries that users typed into the Google search engine.
8. Consider Splitting Computers and Laptops and Mobile Devices Traffic -These could have different traffic behaviours, both in terms of price and volumes, but also in terms of conversion rates.  Greater visibility and greater control may assist if you split the campaigns.  They can be optimised separately.
9. Definitely Split Search and Display Traffic – This is such as basic optimisation step we should not even need to talk about it!  Search and Display are like chalk and cheese… they look the same, but are completely different.
10. Give It Time! – Don’t keep tinkering with things.  You need enough data to make a decision.  Also, the Google algorithm takes a while to reach a decision on what quality score to give you, what CPC to charge you, and how you measure up against your competition.  Try not to tinker too often, and beware “creeping elegance”, which is the 80/20 rule used in reverse (you did the 80% of the work on Monday, and now are going to creep the performance up slowly from Tuesday to Friday… you would be better starting another four similar projects and getting them 80% done in one day apiece).
11. Treat Campaigns Like Fine Wine – They should mature with age!  Not only do they “bed in” to find their eventual level, but you should be growing and nurturing your campaign over time.  This means that you are spending a significant proportion of your time growing your account and not just in bid adjustments.  Accounts can grow outwards by getting more coverage for keywords and verticals that you do not currently have, and they can grow downwards by you drilling into a niche and extracting more traffic, more revenues, and more profits.
12. Drill Down – Sometimes when you are busy expanding your campaigns outwards by adding in new keywords and verticals (increasing your coverage), you may pass over an oil well.  It could be worth trying to drill down by going long tail or using other tricks to extract more traffic, revenues, and profit.   Basically, if it looks promising you should consider pausing your expansion outwards and drill deeper.
13. Consider One Keyword Per Campaign – You can have 100 campaigns in each account.  If a keyword is more than 1% of your impressions, clicks, or cost, why not put it into a campaign all on its own?  That way you can monitor the impression share of that keyword.
14. Consider One Keyword Per Adgroup – This is as great for optimising for Adwords.  It might make it harder to report on, and to optimise if your account grows in size because you have more Adgroups.  It is a tradeoff that you will have to decide on, but consider that an adgroup optimised for Adwords should have a lower CPC and a higher Profit Margin and should require less management than a less well optimised adgroup.
15. Split Test Ad Copy – If there is enough traffic to justify spending the time on the test, then you should consider creating a new ad to beat the CTR of your current ad.  Make sure you Rotate Ads Evenly if you want this to be a valid test.  Do not delete old ads, but keep them there so you can see how you gradually increased your CTR using different Ad Copy.  If you are worried about losing traffic by creating an new ad, then maybe send a fraction of your traffic to the new ad.  You can do this by creating, say, nine copies of your current ad, and one new ad.  That way 10% of your traffic should go through the new ad.
16. Rotate Ads Evenly – If you want to split-test your Ads, then make sure you do not have the campaign setting to be such that Google shows the Ad it believes is more “optimised”.  Don’t believe their algorithm, plus don’t give up control of your split testing.  You want to always know what copy works better, and have an idea why.  If you let Google choose, then you will not know by how much better your new ad works.  Note: don’t just change your campaign settings if things have been running a while… optimised ads may indeed be the better performing ones, and you don’t want to suddenly have the other poorly performing ads showing.
17. Know That Google Keeps Information From Us – They tell us that there is a quality score at the adgroup, campaign, account, and domain level, but they do not tell us what it is.  We can calculate them using weighted averages, but it is interesting that they do not do this for us.  Google also do not display the historical quality score of a keyword.  You can look at all the other metrics for a keyword over a historical period, but the quality score that you see is the quality score that Google currently has in the system for that keyword.  This is not an accident, but a decision Google made and had to program into their interface and reports.  This should makes you wonder what advantages you can gain over your competitors if you recorded your keyword quality score over time.  Another metric that they have at one level of detail but not at another is the impression share.  It would be nice to know what share of voice we have for a particular keyword in a campaign, but Google only shows us the Impression Share at campaign level.  For very important keywords, Consider One Keyword Per Campaign, otherwise consider using the campaign impression share as an indicator of the impression share for each keyword in the campaign.  It is a rough guide, but can help you estimate the number of searches that were made that your keyword could have triggered ads for.
18. View Every Threat as an Opportunity – If Google changes its algorithm and we experience a “Google Slap”, (or even if Google introduces new functionality), there is a window of opportunity where we can benefit by exploiting the fact that our competitors have not reacted yet.  We should be agile and react quickly to exploit these opportunities when they occur.

Many businesses spend a lot of time and effort building a website and then leave it at that, but at the end of the day you don’t need a website, you need more sales.

Once you have your website you’ll often discover that no-one finds it unless you tell them the website address, and so you don’t get the phone calls and sales leads that you were hoping for.

You realise that you can’t compete if you can’t be found, so you then try and get your website visible and optimise it for a search phrase such as “kildare electrician shower installation” only to find that no-one ever uses that search phrase.

Profit by Giving People What They Want

You should do things the other way round.  You should find out what people are looking for first, and then build a website to give it to them.

You should build “online sales funnels” to divert people who are searching online for your products and services to a website that leads them to fulfilling your goal.

Your strategy should allow you to have an online presence as quickly and cheaply as possible, and allow you start getting traffic immediately.  At the same time you should be regularly analysing your website usage and search trends so that you can tailor your offering to where the most demand is.

It’s all about boxing clever.  Don’t spend all your time and energy building out website pages for things no-one is looking for… concentrate on the low hanging fruit, get profitable, then start working your way through the rest of the market until you’re the dominant business.

If you’re getting all the online traffic then you just have to work out how to make money out of it.

If your business idea is going to fail because of lack of demand then you want to FAIL FAST and move on quickly. Spending longer than you need to on an idea that isn’t going to work is a huge waste of your time, energy, money, self confidence, and potential.

Be Found By The People Looking For You

You can put people into different categories:

1. People who need your products/services, but don’t know it.
2. People who know they need your products/services, but still don’t want them.
3. People who want your products/service, but aren’t actively looking for them at this moment in time.
4. People who are actively looking for your products/services, right now!

By far the easiest people to sell to are the ones who are actively looking for your products or services. If you can pick this low hanging fruit and get profitable from this category then you can look at selling to the other categories later on.

It would be criminal to start a costly exercise to educate those people who need your products/services but don’t know about them, when there could be a lot of people actually searching for you that no-one else is serving!

Your Plan In A Nutshell

1. Find out what people are looking for.
2. Find out how to give it to them.
3. Find out if you can make a profit doing it.
4. Create and implement a plan to act upon this knowledge.

Getting Started On The Right Foot

1. Got to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

2. Make sure the region is set to Ireland if you’re target market is Ireland.

3. Enter a phrase that someone might use to find your services/products (“dog grooming” for the case of someone thinking of setting up a dog grooming business).

4. Google will tell you how many searches there were in Ireland that had the words in that phrase on the line, and for similar phrases.

I’ve just done it and the results for Sep-09 are:

dog grooming 9900
grooming dog 9900
dog groomers 1000
dog grooming courses 1000
dog groomer 720
dog grooming ireland 590
dogs grooming 590
mobile dog grooming 480
dog grooming equipment 260
dog grooming course 210
dog grooming supplies 210
dog grooming in ireland 140
a dog grooming 110
dog grooming jobs 110
grooming a dog 110
dog grooming clippers 91
dog grooming services 91
mobile dog groomers 91
professional dog grooming 91
dog grooming business 73
dog grooming parlour 73
dog grooming salon 73
dog grooming table 73
etc

5. Determine which are the best phrases to indicate people are actually looking for you, and have a reasonable volume of searches (don’t get too excited about volumes… remember it’s for the whole of Ireland).

6. Put those search phrases into Google yourself and see what pops up. Are there lots of Sponsored Links (on the right hand side)? If there are then people are probably making money from those Ads. If there isn’t but there is a high search volume then maybe it’s ripe for you to go in there and be the first to have Ads up.

7. Check out your main competition (the ones with Ads in the top positions over a few weeks). Reverse engineer their sales funnels for free by pretending you’re a shopper and visit their website and see how they lead you into becoming a customer.

8. If you think there is enough traffic out there and you can compete with (or better) the competition create a simple 4-5 page website such as [YourCounty]DogGrooming.com.

The 4-5 pages would be:
Home | Products/Services | Testimonials (optional) | About Us | Contact Us

A simple one I’ve done for a client is www.dublin-electrical.com
Nothing fancy, but it works.

9. Create a Google Adwords campaign to run only for people who type in the search phrases you identified within the geographic region you cover (with Google Adwords you could set it to being your county or within, say, 75km of your location). Don’t forget that people travel to work during the day and could be searching during their lunch break, so factor that into the geography you want your Ads to be displayed in.

10. Analyse the traffic stats over a month and see how many times your Ads are triggered. Hopefully you’ll also be getting a few sales leads too.

11. After a month use this info to help decide whether you have a viable business idea.  If there is a lot of demand on Google then maybe there’s something in it, if there isn’t then maybe there is still something in it, but you’re going to have to work harder to get those sales.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of sales pitches recently, and there are always some clients who think that you cost too much or that they would rather do it themselves, especially once you show them technically how to do things.

As my business coach Blaise Brosnan says, knowing “what to do” is far more important than knowing “how to do things”.

Be Seen To Add Value Not Costs

I’ve been struggling with how to deal with these types of clients as I thought it was a problem with the way I was pitching, but Blaise summed it up for us a few weeks ago: “find clients who put a value on what you do, rather than see you as a cost”

Blaise also advised us to think about whether a client is likely to become one of the 20% that will account for 80% of our revenue, or one of the 80% that will account for 20% of your revenue.

Are there some potential clients who show early on that they will be the horse that you can lead to water but won’t drink? Will you be spending more time on them that could be better spent with a client who is a pleasure to deal with?

The 80/20 rule works the other way too. 20% of your clients will take up 80% of your time, and it’s up to us to make sure that it’s the same 20% that is giving us 80% of the revenue.

The 50/5 Rule

Something extraordinary about the 80/20 rule is that if you applied it again then about 5% of your clients will account for about 50% of your revenue.

Here’s the logic:

• If a company has an income of 100k from 100 clients, then their top 20 clients likely accounts for 80k of that income.
• Applying 80/20 again would imply that the top 20% of those top 20 clients will account for 80% of that 80k turnover.
• i.e. their top 4 clients accounts for 64k of their turnover.
• Round that down a bit and we could say that the top 5% of their clients likely accounts for 50% of their revenue… and we end up with the “50/5 rule”.

I’ve seen this hold true for a number of clients of my own. A few years ago a franchise in the U.S. sent me 5 years of their sales transactions for their 70 franchisees stores. I worked out that the top 4% of their clients accounted for 41% of their sales.

So our fictional company with 100 clients could try and increase their income by 100% by finding another 100 clients. Alternatively they could identify the common characteristics of the clients that make up their “50/5″ segment and find 10 more of those clients.  This will increase their income by 100% as well, but they”ve now got 110 clients to manage and not 200, and they only had to get 10 new clients and not 100.

Your own top 5% of customers could be called your “hyper-responsive” customers. Once they find you they buy everything off your shelf. The reason they are hyper-responsive is that they know the market the best, and realise when they find you that you’re exactly what they need. You have all the necessary market entry points, but you have the special points of difference that they have been searching for for ages, and have now found.

Sometimes Its Good To Say No

So don’t feel guilty about saying no and pushing back. Sometimes a client will just drain you of your time, energy, and motivation and you’d be better off ditching them and spending more time on your top 5% of clients.

Warren Buffet is reputed to have said that his company never takes over a company where he personally doesn’t get on with the everyone on the board. He’s going to have to spend a good portion of his life with them, so he might as well make it something he enjoys.

Successful businesses profit by giving people what they want, and Search Engine Marketing can help you find out what people want, how to give it to them, and all whilst getting you more sales leads!

Be Found By The People Already Looking For You

One of the major advantages of Search Engine Marketing is that it enables you to be found by the people who are already looking for you.  It is always much easier to sell to these people since they are already motivated enough to look for a solution to their problem, and they are actively doing it right now.

If someone enters “Dublin electrician” into the Google search engine then we know that they are looking for an electrician.  An electrician in Dublin that can get this searcher to his website stands a good chance of making a sale.

Gather Market Intelligence at the Same Time

If our Dublin electrician has Ads for each of his services that are triggered when a relevant search is performed, then he can determine which service has the most demand based on the number of times each Ad is shown.

Our Dublin electrician can even determine if “Qualified” or “Reliable” is a bigger concern for his customers by testing whether an Ad titled “Qualified Dublin Electrician” brings more visitors to his website than an Ad titled “Reliable Dublin  Electrician”.

By uncovering his customers concerns and then addressing them throughout his sales process our electrician can help to increase the likelihood that a visitor to his website will pick up the phone and give him a call.

Gain A Sustainable Competitive Advantage

The market intelligence that can be gained using Search Engine Marketing is invaluable for businesses agile enough to act upon it.

Not only can they construct better sales funnels that bring them more sales, but they can see changes in market conditions before their competitors, and amend these sales funnels or create new ones to take advantage of this knowledge.

Search Engine Marketing is one of the quickest and most cost effective ways to find out what services and products people are actively looking for, and enabling you to be found by them.

A benefit of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is that it can be broken down and implemented in short and distinct steps.

My Search Engine Marketing Plan

1. Keyword research to help determine which keywords (search phrases) are likely candidates to get website traffic.

2. Competitor analysis to help determine the best plan to enter the market.

3. Creation of a prototype website to send initial traffic to.

4. Implemention of an initial pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to determine volumes of search traffic, competition on keywords, and likely costs per click and lead.

5. Identification of keywords to focus on when entering the market to help make the best use of resources to achieve business objectives.

6. Website content development for the identified keywords to help attract more visitors to the website and increases conversions of visits to sales.

7. Search engine optimisation (SEO) of landing pages for the keywords identified to attract organic traffic as well.

8. Graphical makeover of the website to help increase conversions of visits to sales.

9. Ongoing relationship marketing (newsletters, etc) to help increase conversions of buyers into repeat customers and referrers.

10. Ongoing monitoring, analysis, and support to help ensure that the constructed sales funnels continue to work successfully, and are adapted to changing business requirements and opportunities.

11. Additional steps to help a business grow can be implemented depending upon business requirements and the particular market.