Search is getting the dominant way to navigate trough the web.  The first web generation started out with a web-directory (the good old Yahoo, Altavista times), nowadays the start of every web-visit is search.  Websites changed a lot because of this. menu’s, sitemaps and breadcrumbs (the whole web experience) changed because the homepage of every website is not the usual landing page. A search-box is almost essential on every website.

Positioning of the search box

More websites are using a search-box the give users fast access to their information. Not only because websites are getting bigger, also because search is an automatic process. The “Google-Generation” does not care about menu’s they directly use the search-box to find the information they need, even if a website has just 5 pages.  To make the  search box accessible it needs to be on ‘the right spot’.
eye-tracking heatmaps tell us that most visitors are scanning a page in a ‘F’ figure. Two horizontal lines (mostly the horizontal menu and the first header) and a vertical line (a vertical menu). search-boxes are mostly places in the right-upper corner within this ‘F’.

Design of the search-box

Most search-boxes are just a text input field with a button to start search. Sometimes they got a ‘advanced’ search possibility. After examining loads of boxes I came to some general conclusions:

• There seems to be a trend to filter a search-result after searching instead of offering an advanced search option.
• Most searches give results with the search-term emphasized and placed in their context.
• Wildcards like % and * are not used anymore.
• Websites with a lots of content place a search-box in the center, and do not offer a classic menu anymore.

Examples of search boxes

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Since I’m not an expert in Adwords (and never will be) I was a bit anxious of not getting any results. The tools and information on the web really helped me getting started and improving my campaign.

First results

After 3 days of mediocre results I found out that some of the adds / words where not accepted because of their quality. After reading alot about Adword quality and how to improve I got 300% increase of clicks.  After installing the conversion optimizer I can keep track of real conversions. Clicks do not mean anything without conversions.  We found that the cost per conversion is 30% lower.

Getting better

Since Google is changing their Adwords interface almost every week I noticed the new “possibilities tab”. Here I got almost 16.000 new suggestions and valuable tips. This helps me getting better results every day.Some general tips (by Google) are:

Organize your campaign by theme

In each campaign, create separate ad groups for each of your products, brands, or types of services you offer. Each ad group can then have a highly related set of keywords and ads that match the specific theme. By doing this, your ads can highlight exactly what a customer is searching for.

Choose your keywords carefully

Use specific keywords that directly relate to the theme of your ad group and landing page. Keywords that are too broad can lower your performance by generating many ad impressions but few clicks. One-word keywords are likely to be too generic, so try using two- or three-word phrases. Use the Keyword Tool to generate keyword ideas.

Include keywords in your ad text

Include your keywords in your ad text (especially the title) to show users that your ad relates to their search. If your ad shows when a user searches on a keyword in your ad group, the keyword will appear in bold in your ad text.

Use the right destination URL

Make sure that the destination URL (landing page) you use for each ad is the most relevant page within your website — ideally, a page dedicated to the specific product or service that’s highlighted in your ad.

Track your success

To make informed decisions about how to optimize your campaigns, review your campaign statistics. To measure your success, use conversion tracking to see which ads and keywords bring the most to your business.

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The next three months I will run a Adwords campaign for a customer. Normally we won’t do this kind of task, but this time is different.

The customer has a web-portal we’ve build from the  ground up. One year ago they where convinced that the only way to attract customers is to give them goodies, prices and games. They have put so much effort in this kind of advertising that they lost their focus.

Visitor increase

Now finally we got them to share their content and offer complete and valuable content to their visitors. They are finally found by Google on relevant searches and they got a visitor increase over 1000% (yes, 3 zero’s). All without giving away prices and Goodies.

Advertising

Most of the visitors now come from their normal Google results. By spending time on meaningful content they got great search results and visitors for free. This meant that there  was money left for advertising. Once again (some people within their organization still do not get is)  they proposed a banner on a flash-games site and a flash-game on their website. I proposed a Adwords campaigns on relevant searches for the content they provide. Now we’ve split  the budget and try both of the solutions. In December,  we’lll see who’s the winner.

Setting up Adwords

So I’m busy with a huge Adwords campaign (100+ landing pages, 30000+ search-terms, 500+ adds) and since it’s not my specialty I can use all advise I  can get.  I’m really happy with Google’s new Adwords Editor (downloadable) and their new web interface for adwords. It really helps to manage the campaign and increase the relevancy. I’m reading all relevant articles and the Google Help. I’m really happy with all the information I got, since my last Adwords campaign was 2 years ago.

First day

The campaign just had a first testing day. It still needs a bit of improvement and not all adds are approved yet. But the  results are promising. A CTR of almost 1% is more then I expected. Let’s see what the web statistics do.

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