Tag Archives: keywords

Keyword Funnel is now FREE

Adwords Keyword Funnel I launched Keyword Funnel last year. It was only my second software product launch in 10 years. Keyword Funnel is a utility to help AdWords advertisers efficiently add hundreds or thousands keywords to their campaigns. It was based on some tools I wrote for running my own AdWords campaigns.

It was a commercial flop. I sold a few licences, but not many. Most telling was the lack of any engagement. There were very few emails from website visitors and not many people who visited the website downloaded the free trial. There wasn’t even much interaction from the people that did buy licences. This was very much in contrast to my PerfectTablePlan product, where there was much more engagement straight away.

I could have tried to pivot or push on through using some of the stuff I have learnt over the last 10 years, but it felt like kicking a dead horse up a hill. Better to focus my finite energy and resources on more fruitful areas. I also decided that I just didn’t like AdWords enough that I wanted to spend all day thinking about it (and that was before my recent falling out with Google). I didn’t want to take money from people for a product that had no real future and for which I had lost enthusiasm. So I pulled the plug within a few months of launch. But it seems a shame to waste the work that went into it, so I am re-releasing it as a free product in the hope that someone will find it useful and to increase my luck surface area. You’re welcome.

As far as I can determine, the reasons it failed are:

It didn’t solve a real problem for enough people. This is the reason most products fail. I like to run my AdWords campaigns with hundreds or thousands of ‘long tail’ keywords. I assumed that plenty of other people did to. And, if they didn’t, they would once they had a tool that made it practical to do so, especially in the face or ever increasing competition and bid prices. But not many other people seem interested in long tail campaigns. I should have researched this more.

The AdWords market seems to be sharply divided into amateurs (people running small campaigns for their own products) and professionals (people running multiple large campaigns for other people). The amateurs have a million other things to do and want to spend as little time as possible on AdWords. In fact most of them seem to set up a campaign and then completely ignore it (bad idea). The professionals are happy to spend hundreds of dollars per month on a tool, but they want it to do everything, including creating ads and setting bids. There doesn’t seem to be much of a market in between for low cost utilities, such as Keyword Funnel. I’m not sure how I could have found this out without trying to sell into this market.

I found it hard to get any traffic. I am not an ‘Internet famous’ authority on AdWords. I wrote to various AdWords bloggers offering them free licences. But most of them seemed to be associated with other AdWords tools and weren’t going to promote a competing tool. I also tried an AdWords campaign, but unsurprisingly the competition was very strong. It was hard to get clicks at a price I could afford as competitors with more expensive products could afford to spend a lot more per click. Also conversion rates on the clicks I did get were poor.

The user interface wasn’t perhaps as intuitive as it could have been. I didn’t really think enough about workflow.

Failing is never fun, but I knew it was a very real risk when I started and I did learn some useful lessons.

Before I wrote any code, I tried to do some validation of the product by talking to friends and people at conferences who used AdWords, including some AdWords professionals. There seemed to be some interest and I managed to get 60 people signed up to the beta mailing list. But I found it hard to get people to understand my vision of the product. That should have been the first warning signal. But, being a developer at heart, I used that as an excuse to build a beta.

I did the validation back-to-front. I mostly pitched them my idea for Keyword Funnel and then tried to gauge their interest. That doesn’t really work very well. What I should have done was ask people what problems they were having with AdWords and then waited to see if any of them mentioned ‘adding lots of keywords’, ‘grouping keywords into ad groups’ etc.

As I released new beta versions of the product, the initial interest seemed to peter out. I probably should have killed it at this point. But I persuaded myself that, having come this far, I might was well release it (paying customers being the only true validation). This was more down the the ambiguous nature of the feedback than sunk cost fallacy.

I followed my own advice and cut some corners in the development, but not enough. The planned 2 months part-time, ended up being 6 months part-time. I wasted time on activities such as: having a logo designed, writing licensing code, writing detailed documentation and setting up payment processing. In retrospect I should have waited until I was sure there was a market for Keyword Funnel before I bothered with any of that. When I launched my new Hyper Plan product I released a public beta within 5 weeks of starting work on it (part-time). I offered it free for several months (it just died on a certain date). I only added licensing code and set up payment processing when I felt there was sufficient interest to justify the effort. Hyper Plan just has a 1 page quick-start guide and the logo was designed in 10 minutes by me (both still on the ‘to do’ list to improve soon).

It is hard to get noticed in a new market. I knew this already, but perhaps I had forgotten how much hard work it was in the early days of PerfectTablePlan. As I already have an audience of thousands of event planners with PerfectTablePlan, it is much easier to cross-sell them Hyper Plan than it would be to create that audience from scratch.

Having had one successful (in my terms) product, I was perhaps a bit arrogant and didn’t spend as much time researching the market as I should have done. But validating a software product is hard, especially when it’s a bit different to everything else out there (I’m not interested in copying existing products). I had no real idea how successful any of my products would be before I launched them. PerfectTablePlan was much more successful than I expected. Keyword Funnel much less successful than I expected.

While the opportunity cost of Keyword Funnel was quite high, in terms of cash, I only spent a couple of thousands dollars. This was mostly on the website design and I reused a lot of that for Hyper Plan.

You can download Keyword Funnel here. Despite its lack of commercial success, it does (I think) do some pretty cool things:

Cleans up lists of keywords which you can import from various sources (e.g. removes foreign characters, capitalization and duplicates).
It has a nice keyword multiplier (much better than the Google equivalent IHMO).
Removes an unwanted keyword from all phrases in a single click.
Allows you to analyze all the phrases a keyword appears in.
Groups keywords into related ad groups.
Produces output in a form you can read straight into AdWords via AdWords Editor.

It’s completely free, you don’t even have to give me your email address. Maybe I will find a way to make some money off it at some point in the future (NB/ I am not interested in taking on AdWords consulting work at present).

Thankfully my new Hyper Plan product is doing much better than Keyword Funnel did. I wrote a bit about my approach to launching Hyper Plan here. It is too early to tell if it well do as well as PerfectTablePlan, but I am very happy with how it is doing so far.

5 things you can do to improve your AdWords profitability in the next 30 minutes

Lots of people set up AdWords campaigns and then leave them to run unattended for months at a time. Bad. Idea. I know, I know, you’ve got a million other things to. So I am going to give you a very short and very specific list of things you can do to improve your AdWords account. Right now. No excuses.

1. Check your ‘Geographic’ report for under performing countries

Different countries can perform wildly differently for the same keywords, ads and bid prices. This is particularly the case if you compare rich industrialised countries with developing countries.

Choose a campaign and date range.
Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Geographic.
Remove any geographic columns apart from Country/Region.

Are some countries performing considerably worse in terms of click-through rate, cost per click or cost per conversion? If so, depending on how differently the countries are performing:

Stop targeting the under-performing countries; or
Make a duplicate of that campaign for the under-performing counties, but bid less ( It is easy to duplicate a campaign in the free Google Adwords Editor); or
Use a negative bid adjustment for the under-performing countries:

2. Check your ‘Time>Day of the week’ report

Some products sell much better on certain days of the week. For example, B2B products probably sell better during the week than they do at the weekend. The opposite might be true for some B2C products. You can easily check this.

Choose a campaign and date range.
Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Time>Day of the week.

Are some days of the week performing significantly better or worse than others? If so, you can schedule your bids to be more or less on different days of the week.

3. Get rid of the dead wood

Keywords with low quality score and low click-through rates can drag your whole campaign down. You can easily set up filters to find the culprits.

And then pause or delete these keywords.

4. Add sitelink extensions

If your ad appears at the top of the page, you can optionally show sitelink extensions that hyperlink to particular pages. These increase the amount of screen real estate and text available to you and they don’t cost any extra. What’s not to like?

To add sitelink extensions:

Select the appropriate campaign.
Click on the Ad extensions tab and select Sitelinks extensions.
Click the +EXTENSION button.

5. Check your ‘Search terms’ report for negative keywords

Unless you are only bidding on exact match, the queries that result in your ads being shown are not the same as the keywords you supply to Google. You need to use negative keywords to further control which search queries your ads appear for.

For example, if you are selling Windows backup software and bidding on backup software (as broad or phrase match) your ad may appear every time someone searches on mac backup software. This hurts you twice: wasted clicks (which costs you money directly) and reduced click-through rates (which reduces your quality scores and costs you money indirectly). You can avoid these issues, just by adding mac as a negative keyword.

To look for negative keywords:

Choose a campaign and date range.
Click on the AdWords Dimensions tab then select Search terms.

You will see a list of the searches that actually triggered your ads. Are there any searches there that shouldn’t be? If so, add the offending words as negative keywords, (either at campaign or ad group level).

Plug: My Keyword Funnel AdWords tool can be very useful for sifting through large amounts of search queries to find negative keywords. Just paste in thousands of keywords from your search terms report and look at each keyword by frequency and context.

(This article was first published on www.keywordfunnel.com)

Exploit the long tail of Adwords PPC with Keyword Funnel

Adwords Keyword Funnel I released my new product Keyword Funnel today. It is a tool to help Adwords advertisers improve the profitability of their Adwords campaigns.

I have found the best way to get a decent volume of affordable conversions from Google Adwords is to use a ‘long tail’ strategy. For my Perfect Table Plan product there are a few ‘head’ keyword phrases that have high search volumes, such as “table plan” and “seating arrangement”. But these aren’t very well targeted (“table plan” might have been typed in by someone who wants drawing plans to make their own dining room table). Also lots of other people are bidding on these head phrases, pushing the bid prices up. This combination of poor targeting and high click prices makes it hard to make a profit on head keywords.

So I prefer to concentrate on ‘tail’ terms such as “table plan software mac” and “wedding seating arrangements program”. These are much better targeted, so convert a lot better. The clicks are also cheaper because less people are bidding on them. However the search volumes are much lower, so you need a lot of these tail terms to get a reasonable amount of traffic. At least hundreds, and preferably thousands. Hence ‘long tail’.

The good news is that you can mine lots of different sources of data for these long tail keywords. For example you can extract keywords from your web logs, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools accounts. Even though many searches are now listed with the keywords ‘not provided’ by Google, it still isn’t hard to come up with thousands of candidate keyword phrases. The bad news is that they aren’t in a usable form. Before you can import them into Adwords you need to:

Sort out duplicate phrases, foreign characters, capitalization and other noise.
Remove unwanted and negative keywords.
Group keyword phrases into tightly focussed adgroups.
Put the results in a form Adwords understands.

I tried to use Excel for this. But, marvellous tool though it is, it really wasn’t up to the job. So I wrote my own tool. This worked very well, but it wasn’t a commercial quality product. So I started again, from scratch 6 months ago. Keyword Funnel is the result.

Keyword Funnel allows you to add hundreds of keywords to new or existing Adwords campaigns in minutes, rather than hours. This makes long tail Adwords campaigns with hundreds or thousands of keywords a much more realistic proposition. It also allows you to set up new campaigns in a fraction of the time.

Keyword Funnel is available for Windows and Mac. It is priced at a one-time fee of just $49 (up to 2 Adwords accounts) or $99 (unlimited Adwords accounts). You can download a free trial from the website and it comes with a 60-day money back guarantee. The website is currently a little unpolished, but the software is well tested and robust. Any feedback is welcome.