Getting The Adwords Edge

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14 Written by a2e Thursday, 19 March 2009 03:14

One of the biggest problems a new Auction site owner faces is getting established. The are many steps you can try but today we will look at just one, Google AdWords and try to give you a little edge to how you can save money while getting better exposure then if you simply stubble along the best you can on basic settings.

Any primer in marketing will tell you that the place to start is looking at who are your customers. On a general auction site you can normally rule out under-age people but then it gets a bit more tricky so common sense would be to go to the other end of the line and look who would be interested in auctions. I’ll give you a moment to think about that ………………………………..OK, so we all agree it’s EBay user :-) but how do you get at them ? Well on EBay.com you use Yahoo advertising and on EBay.co.uk you use Google. I’ll be looking  at Google here because it covers the search opportunities too that are most used in the world and I don’t use Yahoo myself.

Luckily EBay.co.uk gives us a neat way to target their customers by the way of Google AdWords. The problem with Google AdWords is that unless you really understand your target and the way the system works it’s likely to cost more then the average start-up auction owner can or afford or should be thinking about paying perhaps on a leap of faith. Google AdWords should be only one of many streams you look at to see what works for you. Another specific problem for general auctions is the are a limited number of keywords relating to auction, eBay alternatives etc. In a bidding market this mean a high price is paid to just get on the ride and the ones in the front seats are paying big bucks to be the first placing.  So you need an edge and here’s one idea on that theme.  Why not target specific high traffic categories on you auction site.  Using a spread of adverts based on your category setting. As an example we’ll select Woman’s Clothing and an example auction site is called www.myauctionsite.com.

The first thing to do is to select a number of keywords relating to our category Woman’s Clothing. Using the tools within Google AdWords you can search for the best performing keywords pertaining to Woman’s Clothing. Also make a note of the ones which have less competition then you might have thought they would have. A product I like to use for this type of research is one call Web CEO. This software does far more then the scope of this blog can do justice but it’s very good for this kind of work. The free edition is well worth having around (I’ve provided a link to this software in the sidebar). Our research found ten or more keywords we could use but we’ll use the keyword phase “low heeled”.

The are plenty more and these should be added to the general keyword list. Probably like me you thought the phase “high heeled” would be more popular but not according to this link -  ttp://shoes.about.com/od/menwomenchildren/tp/10_womens_shoes.htm. I always do background research, from this I suspect the term “high heeled” would lead our adverts into other areas we may not be interested in ;-) I suspect even worse problem if we had chosen the phase “stockings” or “garters” for example.

So now we have one of our keywords what do we do next ?  Well it may be a suprise but we don’t rush over to Google AdWords just yet. We head over to our web site hosting account first, I’ll assume you understand how to use cpanel or whatever admin software your host has given you. If you don’t understand have a fish around because what we are about to do is very easy and the more you know about Back-end Work the better. It will save you both time and money in the future.

When logged-in to Cpanel look for the domain and sub-domains settings. Here you choose add sub-domain and the words we use are “lowheels” or “low-heels”. It should look like this – lowheels.myauctionsite.comand point this at the root of the auction site, in our example that’s myauctionsite.com. Now we are ready to start our Google advertising and we’ll use this URL in our advert.  Not in the URL where you send the visitor to ! this goes in the box above that one. The site title box – This is not a tutorial in using Google AdWords so we’ll skip ahead and people can ask question if they have a problem.  This is just to show how to use that sub-domain and further sub-domains to get more value out of google. So here’ an example of what the ad might look like;

Our exercise has given us the following benefits.

1. Firstly the sub-domain gets us an higher quality score with Google AdWords because our keyword is in the URL – benefit gained ? Costs less to get higher.

2. In google search keywords searched always show in bold. – Benefit gained? We added an extra bold word to our listing and that makes it stand out more.

3. The URL contains the item the searcher is looking for – Benefit gained? People click on sites they think have what they are looking for. 

Notice the URL shown is not the URL you send people to, that is best pointing to the page on your site that contains the word High Heels most often. In most cases that would be a category page wouldn’t it. And that’s about it for this exercise, I hope you like it and if you do like me know, I have more to offer later.