How well are you perfoming in the Google Challenge?

Any resemblance to your Google Challenge attempt?

(from Conversation Marketing)

You know your internet marketing campaign is screwed when:

• Your boss refers to the campaign as "a learning experience".
• You get fewer visitors than you have percentage points in your bounce rate.
• Your team looks at you blankly when you say "SEO Copywriting".
• You don't have any analytics tools in place. Just give up.
• You're proud of the fact that you grabbed the top organic search position for your own brand name.
• You think quality score is something given to meat.
• Frank, the developer down the hall who's doing your project in between his other priorities, says "Oh, THAT PROJECT" when you check on his progress.
• You get 15% clickthrough on your PPC ads, and a 10% bounce rate, but you don't sell anything.
• Your boss/client keeps forwarding you blogs posts they found from 1999 about SEO and the keywords META tag.
• "Budget? Oh, we have enough to run for about 3-4 weeks. We have to get a positive ROI by then."
• You suddenly understand what makes some folks flee the country.
• You lie to your family and tell them you're helping sell diet supplements.
• A single conversion is cause for celebration.
• No one at your company knows what a customer is worth.
• No one at your company likes your customers.
• No one at your company likes anyone else at your company.
• You haven't launched a landing page after 2 weeks, because the art department keeps moving the logo around.
• The CEO keeps going in and tweaking your Adwords campaign (I'm a CEO. I do this. I'm a horrible person.).
• Your super-secure login for your e-commerce system is 'password'.
• 24 hours after you launch the campaign, your boss is asking you how it's doing. I'm not talking about a landing page, people. I'm talking about the entirecampaign.
• You're rereading Atlas Shrugged.
• You've realized this was not a good time to go on a diet.
• You're burning through your prescription at twice the normal rate.
• Someone uses the word 'synergy' in a status meeting more than 3 times.
• You're spending more time reporting statistics than you are testing new headlines.
• You haven't tested any new headlines.
• You haven't tested anything.
• You've nodded at every single one of these.

Adwords Keyword Insertion

While preparing for the Google Challenge last week I started wondering how come so many companies manage to have tailor-made ads for each individual keyword you type in. I bet there are some complex tools out there to automate the process, but for the common guys like us Dynamic Keyword Insertion is actually an easy way to do it.

Here is how it works. Say you're selling phone chargers. Instead of having an ad showing "Great Phone Chargers" you would be better off showing "Great  Motorola Chargers" when people search for Motorola, or "Great Nokia Chargers" when people search for "Nokia" and so on. But if you were to create a single Ad Group for each different keyword/ad combination you could go nuts! 

That's where Keyword Insertion plays a role. Here is how your Ad should look like at AdWords:

Great {KeyWord:Phone Chargers}
Selection of {Keyword:Phone Chargers}
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw={keyword:nil}

Then you should set up your keywords as "Motorola Chargers", "Nokia Chargers" and any other brand of charger you wish. 

If someone searches for "LG Chargers" Google will automatically make your Ad look like this:

Great LG Chargers
Selection of LG Chargers
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw=lg%20chargers

This is quite a good way of saving work and producing more effective Ads. You can find a detailed tutorial at Google AdWords Help.

I guess the trick behind it is how to manage the "dynamic" ads relevance. The best way of dealing with it is by preparing landing pages that will react to the keywords chosen (as suggested by the URL in the example above, where the keyword is passed along to the landing page as a query). 

Anyhow, I will go ahead and convince my group to start using it! Will you?

More interesting eye-tracking stuff from Google

Check out the official google blog for more of those interesting eye-tracking studdies.