Which 50%

My blog subject this week is my team’s work on the Google Online Marketing Challenge. We’re working hard to figure out which 50% of our paid search budget is meaningful, and which 50% is wasted. What I’m finding out through the project is that we’re learning what does *not* work more than what is working.

We know that our click through rates are low. Working for a web company, I know that these rates are low for most advertising, which softens some of the sting. We are seeing good impressions data, so we know we’re getting “looks”. The problem is that we were hoping for much more in the way of clicks. For the purpose of the assignment, clicks are our conversion measure. Given the constraints of time and web development money, this will work as a proxy for this project; if it were our business & these constraints were removed, we’d measure conversion differently.

Most of our keywords have a quality score of 7 or 8; we’ve wracked our brains to come up with additional variety. Is a 9 or a 10 attainable? As I alluded to above, if we could customize our landing pages and make a few other changes, we might earn a higher score. We’ve also pushed out as many different versions of ad copy that we can think of. We know which keywords get the most looks, and which ads have generated clicks. That leaves most of our initial list of keywords sitting “inactive” because they generated neither looks nor clicks. That is the easy part: these don’t work.

What we don’t know is how much we’re missing: what are our potential customers searching for before they find us. This is what everyone struggles with, and it means *at least* that we don’t know our customers as well as we should. Sure, we’ve interviewed some of them, and we know which search terms they use when they are on our site. But we cannot say which things our potential customers are looking for. Yet.

We’re working to read the things our customers read online, to get an idea of what other content and/or search terms they might see. We hope that will provide us with some new keywords and/or ad text in the last week & a half. We might also determine that some of the sites we think prospects view are not showing Google AdWords. If that is the case, it’ll be great information to pass along to our business partner.

We don’t want to tell our business partner about the 50% that doesn’t work. The way things are going, that might be as far as we get. The saving grace is that the money here was Google’s, and they have plenty of that.