People tend to become very myopic about their Google accounts, and often fail to see the broader picture.
Google doesn’t work the way it does just to benefit Google. They’ve developed a very granular “peel and stick” reward system because that’s the way marketing works in the real world. In fact, it worked this way long before we all so easily exchanged electrons at almost-better-than-light speed. (Listen to the SHORT MP3 at the bottom of this post)
Because most people don’t get this, they don’t fully leverage the REAL conversion power of peel and stick. Instead they thoroughly master the technical aspects of working within Adwords, but leave their Adwords copy, landing page copy, salesletters, and follow up sequences entirely too broad to take advantage of the targeted, cheaper traffic the Google machine makes possible.
Why?
Their reasoning has to do with market volume. They want to ensure they can sell to high volume keywords in the market. But as a result there’s no real specificity in their follow through, so the system as a whole remains dramatically less focused and effective than it really should be.
Here’s the one liner to write inside your eyelids:
“Great things happen when you CONTRACT your message, NOT when you expand it”
To make the concept more palatable, I recorded this short interview with Sharon about marketing success OFFLINE, in the real world.
I thought it might help you to see how big brands (not the big dumb ones Perry always talks about, but the SUCCESSFUL big brands who have launched effective and massively profitable campaigns via well researched and well thought out market positioning) utilize this principle when they’ve got literally BILLIONS of dollars at stake.
Because you’d think of all companies, they’d be the ones concerned about market volume, and would look to target a very broad spectrum of the market with their positioning.
But it turns out the opposite is true, at least for those really well run and successful brands.
This one really fascinated me personally…
And I have to say, after 22 years, my wife still entertains me!
I really hope you’ll listen. And I don’t just mean I hope you’ll play the interview. I hope you’ll get the message and consider how it might apply to your market positioning, especially if you think you’ve already got this one covered. (It’s only 17 minutes, so you can listen right now)
Enjoy,
Dr. Glenn
PS – The central goal of the first month in my Bulls Eye Marketing Club is to achieve this type of focused messaging by developing 100% confidence in a drastically reduced keyword archery target. (We use a spreadsheet which combines considerations of search volume, bid price, relevancy, and your ideal client definition into ONE number so you can confidently compare candidates).
When you can do that, you leave the “keyword candy store” and zero in on the exact keyword conversation you need to understand better than everyone else in your market so you can begin to achieve dominance. Click here to join now.
PPS – Don’t really write my one liner on the inside of your eyelids please. That would just be gross, and I was just saying it for effect. But I won’t object if you pain it on your bedroom ceiling or your front door.
PPPS – I’d also like people who’ve already joined my Bulls Eye Marketing Club to listen to this interview, especially if you have any lingering doubts about whether you’ve chosen the right target, or if your automated-competitive-intelligence-machine from month #2 is feeding back market requests you’re not sure you can deliver on.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download


{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Peel and stick should be much easier, jeez.
It should be easy, right?
right click on a keyword, create new adgroup, Done.
But Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo…
1. highlight keyword 2. copy keyword 3. delete keyword 4. create new adgroup 5. set default bid for new adgroup 6. paste new adgroup name 7. past keyword 8,9,10. copy paste keyword 1-3 times (exact, phrase maybe broad) 11. copy an ad from somewhere 12. paste the ad into the new adgroup 13. modify the ad so it resonates with this new adgroup 14. copy/paste ad 15. modify second ad
I know how important it is, but with all these dang steps… i just get lazy sometime ;(
Glenn, you hearing a pain point?
I got three very great messages from this:
1) don’t try to conquer the world, conquer yourself.
2) Don’t try to corner the market, focus on a very narrow segment of the market and conquer that niche.
3) Get in the door and all sorts of other opportunities open up.
As always, useful, concise, well-written, and new enough to keep me coming back for every post.
I sympathize with Dan, to a point. Sometimes I wish I \"had a guy\" that I could throw a few hundred bucks to, and have him look over all my campaigns and either make or suggest changes and additions to my ads, groups, negatives, keywords, content-vs-search separations etc.
But still, this is where the money is, and this is simply the work we need to do. Period. We now have the world\’s marketplaces at our fingertips, on demand, with priceless competitive intelligence within seconds. Our marketing reality is science fiction to most people.
Keep up the great work, and I can\’t wait for the Emotional Eating product.
Scott … thanks so much for your kind words
BTW, our Rocket Clicks team has periodic availability to do PPC coaching at $300/hr. Just submit one of the paid consult forms at http://www.PayPerClickMuscle.com and copy and paste this message so they know I sent you directly for the PPC coaching service. If we have bandwidth, we can provide you a couple of hours. (You don’t have to hire us for management)
Actually peel-and-stick is drop dead easy, even with huge accounts.
But you need ability in several areas:
1. AdWords Editor (I\’ve been using it at least 3 years now)
2. Excel (or other spreadsheet)
3. If your ad groups get to a high number you need to be able to contact Google direct (I can) to relax your account constraints. 1 account I\’m looking at now has 749 ad groups and 1,494 ads, and 5,018 keywords.
I build all new campaigns with single keyword per ad group even if it means hundreds of ad groups. They all have the keyword either in the headline or the description line. I multivariate test several ads at the same time.
If I\’m rebuilding a campaign to split up, I either use the Editor and its keyword grouper option, or use excel to copy, paste and upload.
A key realisation I had this year was that an adwords account is nothing other than rows and columns in a spreadsheet, so if you\’re proficient with excel and editor, you can do pretty much anything you need with relative ease and speed.
BTW these ad groups often get CTR performance of 50% – 100%
I am impressed with such a lovely and knowledgeable topic.
My problem is that your advice seems contradictory.
1) When you go through the H-F adwords process you keep rejecting (to me, seemingly valid) keywords, in several waves, based on numerical rankings. Yet the key to keeping a word “in” is this highly subjective “percent applicable” column. I can sometimes double the keeper adwords in my list by changing this percentage by 20 points.
2) Now you seem to imply leaving these marginal words in, but getting your butt in gear and creating more and more test machines from word-ad-landing page to see what happens.
It’s difficult to understand how you strike the proper balance.
Hi Ron – I think you’re referencing the hyper-responsive bulls-eye process from the hyper-responsive club, which is intended to select your single most important keyword.
This selection process needs to be quite stringent and exclusive … when in doubt, leave it out. If you’re having difficulty determining how relevant a given keyword might be to your ideal prospects (what percentage of searchers would be ideal for your offering) and are uncomfortable making subjective judgments for these numbers, you can either (a) do a google search and see what percent of the first page results are approximately targeting YOUR ideal audience or (b) survey that keyword and ask what they’re looking for, then tally the percentages with tremendous accuracy.
In terms of the trade offs for your time, however, it’s almost never worth the effort to do (b)
Truly finger licking good!
I am very grateful for this valuable information and delicious interview with your also delicious wife (lucky you!).
I will share this priceless mp3 with every business person I know and I will be a hero again.
Thank so much Glenn!
Glenn,
I’m an avid follower of your work and love your more considered and longer term approach to customers and market segmentation. I’m sure that it is the way to go fro my website, but …..
What does ‘peel and stick’ mean ?
BWs
James
@ James Gunn
‘Peel and stick’ is covered in the audio.