Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

Now and again I try out adwords, mainly to advertise the listings sites or rather to advertise for owners to list on them.

It’s been ages since I spruced up the campaigns so I thought I’d have a shot at it again today.

One thing to remember is that you only want relevant clicks on your ads. How many times have we all come across an adsense ad that was on a site that seemed totally inappropriate to the content? That’s because the person placing that advert hadn’t thought enough about exactly what keywords they should be aiming to use and probably thinks that it’s great that they’re getting loads of page impressions but they’re getting very few clicks.

In fact, the best approach is to have very tightly defined keywords, get very few page impressions but get very high click through because your advert is displayed where it should be. Not an easy task for sure, but one way to tackle the problem is to consider all the factors that go into placing your advert and why someone would click it.

Consider an example: a self-catering property in Brittany, France.

1. The language. If your ad is in English then you need to select that as an adwords option.

2. What country? OK, our property is in France, and the advert is in English but there are a lot of English readers out there so we could list the UK, Ireland, France as a first cut but it’s probably also worthwhile adding in all the countries bordering France. In practice the use of English will exclude non-English speakers but you could add the rest of the richer European countries on the basis that English speakers in them might want to go on holiday in France.

3. What keywords? This is where many people fall down. Yes, your property is in France but you don’t want people clicking on your ad if they’re looking for a place in Provence so you need to include Brittany as one of the keywords. This isn’t quite so easy though as it means that you need to add phrases like “gite brittany france”, “france brittany gite”, and so on. It’s best to include the keywords in quotes as this will limit the irrelevant page impressions and clicks but note that you need to put in all possible variations.

4. What about the ad? This needs to say what you’re offering. Now, that might sound silly but many ads don’t or rather attract irrelevant clicks because they aren’t clear about what they’re offering. Remember that the people seeing your ad won’t know what keywords triggered it so you’ll need to say something like “Brittany gite with pool”. The ad needs to be readable too which often isn’t easy as there isn’t much room for the text.

5. Where should it go? Whilst you could just go to your homepage, it’s best to run up a special adwords page that follows through with the sale information. Not only will a more direct sales page be more effective but you’ll also see more clearly in your stats which clicks came via adwords.

6. What about the budget? This is a difficult one. For example, there are a lot of gites advertising using adwords so the more general phrases have high bids. Remember too that you generally need 100 clicks to make a sale so if you’re charging $1000 a week then paying $1 a click means that 10% of your income will go in adwords costs. Also, no matter how careful you’ve been, you may get heaps of irrelevant clicks through some oversight so you should always test a new ad with a low budget.

Finally, don’t forget that the longer the phrase you use, the lower you need to bid. Long phrases mean low numbers of page impressions but higher click-through from them and lower costs for you. What you don’t want is lots of irrelevant clicks as that just costs you money.

I came across an interesting site a few days ago which has set me thinking about my own listings sites.

What this site does is build mini websites for accommodation properties and then enters those properties in a property listing. It’s interesting because my own sites operate from the other end so to speak. They’re listing sites that build mini websites for the properties that list on them.

That different starting point has created numerous differences in emphasis between my site and theirs but I suspect that if you were to compare both in a few years time there’d be little to distinguish between them. I’m currently beavering away to soup up the mini websites that I create for the properties and no doubt they’re beavering away to soup up the performance of their listing service.

If nothing else, they’ve provided me with enough ideas to keep me busy for the rest of the year!

You might not think it, but it makes a substantial difference because google and other search engines use geotargetting.

This is fine if your website is country-specific (eg .co.uk) but not so good if you’re using a non-geographic domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) as many people do these days because then they will assume that your target market is the country in which your site is hosted. For example, if you own a holiday property in England and rent it mainly to the English then your target market is the UK. However, if you have a .com hosted in America you may not even appear in searches done by people in the UK using google.com or google.co.uk.

It’s not always obvious where your hosting service actually is as many are rebranded. The easiest way to find out is to go to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scroll down to “IP Location”.

What if it’s in the wrong place? Surely it won’t matter that much?

Well, when we moved our sites from American hosting to UK hosting the traffic went up THIRTY fold so, yes, it does matter quite a lot.

Many people see a site with high pagerank (PR) and assume that the site also has high traffic.

They’re wrong to make that assumption: there is little correlation between PR and traffic.

Take a simple example: I registered a domain just over a month ago. It acquired PR2 a couple of days ago yet the only traffic that it has had has been from the google spider! There have been no real people visiting the site at all.

That applies all the way up too. Many blogs taking sponsored posts are finding that their high PR doesn’t equate to a high RealRank (RR) as calculated by PPP. The reason is really obvious when you look at some of the blogs: they may well have thousands of links to their site (hence the high PR) but have no content that would interest anyone so the traffic that they get is minimal and so too is their RR.

Ironically, advertisers are only starting to realise this and change how they allocate sponsored opportunities to use RR (ie actual traffic) instead of PR. They may not get as much PR passed to them from a low PR site but many such sites have very significant traffic indeed. A lot of those low-ish PR sites are written by people who want to be read; they’ve not promoted their site in the conventional way through massive link building programmes but rather just kept writing interesting stuff that slowly but surely builds a readership.

If nothing else, google’s crackdown on sponsored posts has highlighted just how useless PR was as a measure of the “importance” of a blog.

One of the oddities of blogging is that it’s very easy to change the overall look of a blog without affecting the content at all.

Now, on the whole outside the regular readership most people arrive on a blog by way of a search engine of some sort. Some are blog specific, some are generic like google but either way they don’t see the site until they click on the search result ie it doesn’t really matter what the blog looks like as far as these people are concerned.

It’s different once they get to the site of course and if you want to keep them as regular readers you’ll need a look that’s appealing to them. Oh, and some interesting content of course.

Anyway, now that I’ve spruced up the template for Foreign Perspectives, I’ve picked up several new subscribers which is one plus point for the new template.