Foreign Perspectives

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.