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Overture VS Google AdWords
di Jill Whalen, originale in
www.searchengineguide.com
I manage Overture and Google AdWords campaigns
for a college. I spend $6,000/mo in Google AdWords and $4,000/mo in Overture,
and I am perplexed as to why the Overture campaign is working better. We
track the campaigns on the basis of online forms from their respective
landing pages, and Overture brings in twice as many form inquiries.
I've managed Google AdWords campaigns successfully before for other
companies and I thought that since Google has a larger share of the search
engine market, they should be bringing in better response. Is Google
slipping in their performance and ability to deliver? (Both campaigns are
extremely similar as to keywords and match choices.)
Thanks,
Karen
Jill's Response
Since I'm not really a PPC kinda person, I decided to enlist the help of my
friend and High Rankings PPC forum moderator, Ed Kohler (Haystack), to
answer Karen's question. Ed is the president of
Haystack In A Needle, a Web
marketing company based in Minneapolis, MN offering pay-per-click campaign
management and search engine optimization services.
Take it away, Ed! - Jill
Ed Kohler's Response
Interesting issue, Karen. Since your Overture campaign is generating twice
as many leads as your AdWords campaign, and is doing so at only 2/3 of the
cost, it sounds like your Overture campaign is actually working three times
better than AdWords. In my experience, the results from Overture campaigns
vs. AdWords will vary from one campaign to the next, but not enough to
justify the disparity you're experiencing. This leads me to believe that
your situation is more likely due to the campaign settings within your
AdWords account. I'll break down some of the major differences below, and
hope this helps identify the lurking variable(s).
I'll work from the assumption that you're pleased with the results generated
by your Overture campaign and would like to figure out how to configure your
AdWords campaign to match Overture's. I'm also going to assume that a
visitor to your site from an AdWords-powered pay-per-click result is likely
just as qualified as one from an Overture result. This may not be entirely
the case, but I don't think it accounts for the variance in ad performance
you are experiencing.
Differences Between Google Adwords and Overture
1. Geotargeting: If your AdWords campaign's location targeting is set
wide open, you may be paying for traffic with a very low chance of
converting to leads. Double-check this in your campaign settings. Overture's
ads will appear almost entirely to a US and Canadian audience. If your
AdWords account is set to a wider audience than that, consider tightening it
up. You may also want to consider creating an additional campaign targeting
just your home state. While the traffic will be significantly lower for this
campaign, the conversions should be considerably higher.
2. Language Targeting: Your Overture campaign will display ads almost
entirely to an English-speaking audience. If your AdWords account is set to
display ads to a broader audience, consider tightening the focus in your
campaign settings.
3. Ad Syndication: What percentage of your traffic is coming through
content targeting compared to search engines on AdWords? While clicks from
content-targeted ads can and do convert to leads or sales for businesses, a
person clicking through from an ad on a web site is not as qualified as a
person who is actively searching for the services or products your business
offers. I've found that this varies considerably from one industry to
another. For example, if ads for an online hardware store are syndicated
onto a do-it-yourself web site, the ads are likely targeting motivated
customers. However, since you represent a college, your ads may be running
alongside newspaper articles regarding education funding or other
educational topics that are only loosely related to your marketing goals.
Consider turning off content targeting for a test period or comparing your
conversions rates from search- vs. content-targeted ads. You may not miss
that traffic.
4. Matching Variance: It sounds like you have a feel for the various
matching options used by Google and Overture. While they are quite similar
in name, they will provide somewhat different results. This is most
prominent with exact and broad matching, where AdWords' broad matching is a
bit broader and exact matching is more exact.
- Exact Matching: Google's and Overture's matching options vary considerably,
especially when it comes to term-stemming. For example, if you exact-match a
phrase on Google (put the phrases in [brackets]), your ad will only show to
searchers typing that exact phrase into a search engine. However, Overture's
version of exact matching (their default style of matching) will also match
your term to phrases beyond the exact match using their Match Driver feature.
This includes matching your ad to common misspellings, plural and singular
versions of the term, and the use of the term in conjunction with common
words like "the" and "of." Also, Overture's "enhanced matching" feature will
match your ads to terms where the searcher's words appear in your title and
description but weren't necessarily bid on by you.
If you take a closer look at your converting search phrases, it's possible
that you'll find your best converting terms to be the plural version of your
terms. Assuming you did your keyword research using Overture's Search Term
Suggestion Tool (which rolls up the plural and singular terms into the
singular version), then used that set of phrases to set up your Google
Adwords account, you may have inadvertently skipped some of the better
converting versions of your important search phrases.
- Broad Match Variance: Overture's definition of broad matching is matching
the individual words in a search phrase to searches containing all of the
words in any order and anywhere within the searcher's given search phrase.
For example, a broad-matched ad on the term "LED lighting" could appear when
someone searches for "lighting for my home LED lights." (For more info:
http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/fa/faq_mt.jhtml.)
AdWords will provide the same match as Overture does in the above example,
but will go a step further with their expanded matching feature. Expanded
matching will cause your ad to also display on terms Google considers to be
synonyms, related phrases, and plurals. (For more info:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6136.)
It's certainly possible that Google doesn't know your business and your
prospective customers as well as you do, so consider tightening up your
campaign by using phrase and exact matches. If you'd like to keep some terms
wide open, consider only doing so with search phrases containing at least
three words to prevent your ads from being overly matched.
Additionally, with Overture and Google, if you're using anything other than
exact matching, it's important to include negative keywords (Google's term;
Overture calls them Excluded Words) to prevent your ads from matching on
irrelevant or poorly converting terms.
5. Competitive Bid Influence: Google's choice to use broad matching
as the default matching option (listing your search phrases without "quotes"
or [brackets]) has caused frustration for newbies, but has also had a
painful effect on experienced pay-per-click advertisers. While you may have
worked hard to research hundreds or even thousands of redundant search
phrases relevant to your web site, newbies may be setting up new campaigns
where they've inadvertently broad-matched themselves into competition with
your ads. This can drive up your per-click cost on some terms where you may
have little to no competition on Overture. Not much can be done about this,
but it's something worth noting.
6. Landing Page Choices: Overture's system forces you to create a
specific ad for each search phrase you place in their system. By default,
this often leads to higher ad quality because advertisers are more likely to
write unique ads for each search term. It also increases the odds of
advertisers to send visitors to the most appropriate landing page on their
site for specific keywords. For example, your college offers a variety of
different programs for students. When someone searches for a specific
program you offer, you'll generally see higher conversions if you send that
visitor to the appropriate program page rather than the homepage, forcing
them to dig for the same content. There are two ways to address this in
AdWords. Create additional Ad Groups with a tighter grouping of search
phrases, or assign unique URLs at the search-phrase level. (For more info:
https://adwords.google.com/select/powerpost.html.) A combination of both
strategies will provide the highest performance along with the most detailed
tracking data for stats analysis.
Working through each of the above variables should help uncover
opportunities for improving the conversion rates of your AdWords campaign.
Good luck!
Ed Kohler
Haystack In A Needle
http://www.HaystackInANeedle.com/
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