Background: We're a small, local cleaning service (home & office) in business for 8 yrs. We serve S.E. Massachusetts only.
Website?'s: Just finished a "Flash" web site (in-house, did it ourselves due to budget constraints), divided evenly between pages for residential, commercial, contact, services, etc...etc..., please check it out and advise: <link removed> Do we really need to make all those new pages geared to each keyword, city served, etc.. as suggested in other posts? Also, links (in or out) to relative sites? Even if it ends up being 100+ pages?
Keywords & PPC's: Starting SEP, using PPC mostly with Google AdWords so far, and eventually Overture, Looksmart, Findwhat and Goclick. We have a monthly spend budget of about $150-$200 total for all PPC's. So far, we have about 160 keywords, divided evenly between house cleaning and office cleaning in our two AdWords campaigns (1 for local and 1 for regional), divided between 2 ad-groups each (1 for residential and 1 for commercial cleaning). Each Ad- group has about 14-17 different Ads, revolving around "hottest" keywords for our industry, with at least 1 "hot" keyword in title and at least 1 other "hot" keyword in Ad text. Each Ad group also has 1 image Ad. Of all keywords used, 4-6 are "HOT" and only 2 have been placed on "trial" so far, and those are both in 1 ad-group. We've had Local campaign up for almost 4 weeks, and Regional for 2 weeks. CTR hovers around 1-30% depending on keyword, Ad Text, etc...Sound good so far? Any other ideas?
Price Optimzer: Went from about 100-200 impressions a day with 3-4 clicks down to 10-30 impressions a day with 1 click (if we're lucky). Was Price Optimizer worth setting? Should we shut it off?
Local vs. National: As stated above, we only have Ads in Local and Regional so far. Obviously, we want to gain as much of a target market as possible. With Google being limited by some IP's not showing (subsequently, G using National Ads), as well as AOL doing National Ads only, would a National Ad in addition to Local & Regional be worth the hassle? If so, would National Ads require current keywords to have Zip Code and/or cities being added both before and then after each keyword phrase, with these new Keyword phrases being placed in "quotes", as a phrase match? Or, how? Also, if National is suggested, what's the easiest way to do that "grouping" or "marrying" of keywords to reflect adding the zip codes and/or cities in front then in back of phrase? I HATE Excel and am NOT Excel literate at all, however have tried the CONCATENATE formula with success, but ends up being more work/clicks to finalize than to just copy & paste words and their additions (i.e., adding zip codes, cities, etc...). Also, along with all of this about National, should State and State abbreviations be added in front and then behind keywords? This sounds like SOOOO much work, is it even worth doing?
I think that covers it all so far....but I'm sure I'll have more questions soon. Again, so sorry for long post. Thanks in advance for reading and answering. If you need to contact me directly for more info., I can be reached via e-mail at: tclcorp@comcast.net My name is Mark.
[edited by: eWhisper at 9:02 pm (utc) on April 10, 2005]
[edit reason] Please Don't Drop URLs Tos [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
just my 2 cents.
Campaign 1: Local
Adgroup:
#1).House Cleaning -
A).14 Ads geared to House Cleaning
#2).Office Cleaning -
B).14 Ads geared to Office Cleaning
Campaign 2: Regional
Adgroup:
#1).House Cleaning -
A).14 Ads geared to House Cleaning
#2).Office Cleaning -
B).14 Ads geared to Office Cleaning
Each Adgroup has it's own Ads about it's own topic (house cleaning OR office cleaning). And, since BOTH campaigns have the exact same target market (except for location specifics, 1 local and 1 regional), the ads in each "alike" adgroup are pretty much the same (with slight differences to experiment with results)....i.e., house cleaning ad text in Local house cleaning adgroup are the same or similar as those in Regional house cleaning adgroup....likewise with the office cleaning adgroups in local and regional campaigns. In other words, the ads in house cleaning are different than those in office cleaning. I guess that's all I needed to say from the get go.... Anyway, any further advice is certainly encouraged and appreciated! Thanks again, Mark :)
you have a bunch of keywords in an adgroup targeting local people looking for house cleaning (14 ads to be specific) but this is a problem if your keywords within the adgroup are not very similar in nature, let me give you an example. ok, imagine you have a pizza pie cut into 14 pieces, and the pie is spinning around, now you have people lineing up to get some pizza. so im looking for a peperoni and bacon slice, but when the pie stops spinning, i get jalpenos and bacon, sorta what i was looking for, but not exactly, and the process keeps occuring, now it might just happen that someone comes up looking for peperoni and bacon, and the pizza pie stops and you happen to come upon a pepperoni and bacon slice, but the odds arent that great.
i hope you get my analogy.
so let me suggest you further group your keywords into smaller ad groups, each running no more than 3 ads, that are specifically written towards that particular keyword.
so for example, inside your masive ad group for hosue cleaning, i assume you have keywords with:
houe cleaning
maids and butlers
house keepers
janitor service (tho this might be closer to your other office group, but for arguments sake, lets leave it here)
and concurrently some of your 14 ads deal with these individual types of words.
it would be better to further break down the campaign into 4 seperate ad groups JUST FOR LOCAL HOUSE CLEANING with each of these groups only having ads specifically written towards each of these types of keywords.
im trying not to give away the farm here because i am still a firm believe that it is a worthwhile investment to hire an adwords professional to do this because of the sheer amount of work that can be involved, especially for the business owners who are always required to be in the field.
also let me say i really enjoy your website, however the load time may be an issue for people with old computers, and slow connections.
i hope this helps :)
Also, any ideas from you, or anyone else, about the National campaign stuff? Worth trying for a small, local service co.? If so, how should I go about chosing keywords since other posts seem to be conflicting about adding zip codes and cities to keywords?
And, in regards to our website, Inferno, you're so right about the "flashy" stuff.....from my research in this forum and other areas, it's gotta go! I will be cut-n-pasting my content into a nice, seamless, quickly loading template using text based links instead of image buttons, etc...But, thanks for the vote of confidence and positive compliments where earned, and the advice and recommendations where changes are called for! Glad you, and others like you, are around to help us "newbies" out!
Looking forward to hearing more ideas on this topic or the national campaign question from you experts out there! Thanks, Mark
this is just one way to set it up, and is my personal preference:
Campaign 1: local marketing
Campaign 1, adgroup1 house keeping (local) (2ads)
c1a2:maids and butlers (local) (2ads)
c1a3:house cleaners (local) (2ads)
c1a4:etc etc
campaign 1 adroup 7: office cleaners (local, 2ads)
campaign 1 adgroup8: janitorial companies (local, 2ads)
c1a9: etc etc etc
then, campaign 2 wll have a smiliar breakdown, except it will be regional rather than local.
and of course you should have similar keywords grouped together in the ad groups, for example
house cleaners
house cleaning service
someone to clean my house etc etc should go under the house cleaning ad group.
i hope you understand now :)
As for National campaign question in previous post, I might just need to slow down a bit and get the local one up and running properly first.....although I'll take any suggestions/ideas anyone has.
Thanks again folks - :)
