Do you sometimes click around your AdWords account just to see if anything funny is going on?  A few months ago Google introduced custom alerts designed to notify you when your budget reaches a certain point or your CTR is tanking or any other area of concern.  To access this feature, navigate to the Keywords tab, on the bar below the graph click More actions, click Create a custom alert, then set the parameters of your alert.  To see your alerts, check the Messages section at the top of your account, or set up e-mail notification.  Unfortunately right now the custom alerts are not an option for MCC accounts, but they’ll really be a time saver for those managing individual accounts. For more info you can check out the Inside AdWords blog here: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/08/new-interface-thursdays-keep-tabs-on.html

I spent years in customer service, so many aspects of managing client relations come naturally to me.  I’m writing this today because of a conversation I had with a fellow small business owner who doesn’t share my background in serving clients.  A client of hers sent an e-mail expressing displeasure at the rate her project was moving.  Immediately my mind started racing with thoughts of what the bigger picture may be.  Typically there’s more to the story than is revealed in an e-mail.

My first piece of advise was to not respond to the client via e-mail.  This complaint warranted a phone call.  Additionally, I advised her to take the tone of the e-mail with a grain of salt. One can’t hear voice inflection or tonality in an e-mail and frequently people aren’t gifted at expressing their emotions in writing.

Next I told her that no matter whose fault it is, she is to take responsibility for it.  If it was the client’s fault and the client is a reasonable, she will realize she’s partly responsible as the conversation unfolds.  If it was my friend’s fault, then she is to own up to it and find out what the client needs in order to keep the relationship and project on track.

Customer service isn’t always easy.  I think many small business owners find it challenging when they not only have to manage business development, marketing, production, administrative duties, etc., but they also have to manage dissatisfied clients.  It is time consuming, it is distracting, but it is worth it.  Frequently small business owners can turn a difficult situation around and wind up with a very loyal customer.

A common mistake business owners make when creating their profile on LinkedIn is to call themselves “Owner”.  This does not describe what you actually do, so it’s best, for the purposes of being found in a search, to use a description with industry keywords as your title.  For example, I am an Internet Marketing Specialist at Search Ad Marketing. A friend who owns a travel business is a ‘Travel Expert”.  These terms are more likely to be used as keywords in a search than “Owner”.

If you change your title, be mindful of any recommendations you have that were tied to the old title.  These may be moved to the unassigned state.  If this happens to you, please follow these steps:

• Go to the left-hand navigation menu. Click ‘Recommendations’ under the ‘Profile’ sub-menu.
• Scroll down to the ‘Unassigned recommendations’ part of the page. Click ‘Show ‘Recommendations’.
• You can now assign each recommendation to a specific experience listing.

Good luck with your search and find objectives!

Pay Per Click is becoming more and more well known as a cost effective and efficient way of advertising. A lot of companies that are just starting to venture into the pay per click space are experience great results, but could experience even more return on investment if they would use the proper analytics to “close the loop.”

Let me explain by outlining a common scenario:

• Company does research and keywords, and bids on them
• They see some traffic come in, and sales go up
• Happy to get more sales they increase their budget and bid on more keywords

At face value this seems like a great situation (and don’t get me wrong, it is.) After all, this is how advertising has worked since it’s conception. You have a general idea of how many people saw your message, hopefully sales go up and everyone is happy. However their are some key metrics missing that could help close the loop between advertising and return on investment.

What You Should Do

Rather than upping budgets and keywords it would be more effective to spend the time to figure out how to measure the success of the campaign beyond just click through rates and traffic. This is done by defining what your “conversion points” are and how much those conversions are worth.

What is a Conversion?

A conversion put simply is when a user completes an action that you would like them too. This could be purchasing a product, filling out a contact form, or signing up for a newsletter.

Once you have assigned a value to those actions (for example, I a lead from a contact form is worth $100) you can then use that data in your adwords campaign to see which keywords/campaigns/advertisements are actually successfuly developing leads for less than $100.

A Closed Loop Lets You Optimize

This information gives you real time measurement on how well your advertising is performing. Based on this data you can optimize your campaigns in several ways, including:

• Lowering the bids of keywords that are not converting in a profitable manor
• Removing keywords that are not converting at all
• Altering/removing advertisements that bring a lot of traffic (expensive) but don’t convert
• Find what keywords do convert, and use them to find similar keywords to bid on

Difficult, but Important

Sometimes this is harder than it sounds. For example, developing a value for actions that may not have a direct monetary amount tied to them. This is actually one of the more common problems that companies are faced with. However if you apply this same theory to these actions you can get a better idea of what each action is worth.

For example for every 10 people who sign up to our newsletter we get 1 client. Each client on average provides $500 worth of profit over 5 years. This would mean that the break even point of a newsletter signup would be $50. The lower you can make your cost per conversion beyond this point, the more profit you will make.